Famous Persons and Places

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

“And where are you going?”

“Li! al castello.”

Come from Florence and bound to Kenilworth! Who would not grind an organ and sleep under a hedge, to answer the hail of the passing traveller in terms like these? I have seen many a beggar in Italy, whose inheritance of sunshine and leisure in that delicious clime I could have found it in my heart to envy, even with all its concomitants of uncertainty and want; but here was a bright-faced and inky-eyed child of the sun, with his wardrobe and means upon his back, travelling from one land to another, and loitering wherever there was a resort for pleasure, without a friend or a care; and, upon my life, I could have donned his velveteen jacket, and with his cheerful heart to button it over, have shouldered his organ, put my trust in i forestieri, and kept on for Kenilworth. There really is, I thought, as I left him behind, no profit or reward consequent upon a life of confinement and toil; no moss ever gathered by the unturned stone, that repays, by a thousandth part, the loss of even this poor boy’s share of the pleasures of change. What would not the tardy winner of fortune give to exchange his worn-out frame, his unloveable and furrowed features, his dulled senses, and his vain regrets, for the elastic frame, the unbroken spirits, and the redeemable yet not oppressive poverty of this Florentine regazzo! The irrecoverable gem of youth is too often dissolved, like the pearl of Cleopatra, in a cup which thins the blood and leaves disgust upon the lip.

The magnificent ruins of Kenilworth broke in upon my moralities, and a crowd of halt and crippled ciceroni beset the carriage-door as we alighted at the outer tower. The neighborhood of the Spa of Leamington makes Kenilworth a place of easy resort; and the beggars of Warwickshire have discovered that your traveller is more liberal of his coin than your sitter-at-home. Some dozens of pony-chaises, and small, crop saddle-horses, clustered around the gate, assured us that we should not muse alone amid the ruins of Elizabeth’s princely gift to her favorite. We passed into the tilt-yard, leaving on our left the tower in which Edward was confined, now the only habitable part of Kenilworth. It gives a comfortable shelter to an old seneschal, who stands where the giant probably stood, with Flibbertigibbet under his doublet for a prompter; but it is not the tail of a rhyme that serves now for a passport.

Kenilworth, as it now stands, would probably disenchant almost any one of the gorgeous dreams conjured up by reading Scott’s romance. Yet it is one of the most superb ruins in the world. It would scarce be complete to a novel-reader, naturally, without a warder at the gate, and the flashing of a spear-point and helmet through the embrasures of the tower. A horseman in armor should pace over the drawbridge, and a squire be seen polishing his cuirass through the opening gate; while on the airy bartizan should be observed a lady in hoop and farthingdale, philandering with my lord of Leicester in silk doublet and rapier. In the place of this, the visiter enters Kenilworth as I have already described, and stepping out into the tilt-yard, he sees, on an elevation before him, a fretted and ivy-covered ruin, relieved like a cloud-castle on the sky; the bright blue plane of the western heavens shining through window and broken wall, flecked with waving and luxuriant leaves, and the crusted and ornamental pinnacles of tottering masonry and sculpture just leaning to their fall, though the foundations upon which they were laid, one would still think, might sustain the firmament. The swelling root of a creeper has lifted that arch from its base, and the protruding branch of a chance-sprung tree, (sown perhaps by a field-sparrow) has unseated the keystone of the next; and so perish castles and reputations, the masonry of the human hand, and the fabrics of human forethought; not by the strength which they feared, but by the weakness they despised! Little thought old John of Gaunt, when these rudely-hewn blocks were heaved into their seat by his herculean workmen, that, after resisting fire and foe, they would be sapped and overthrown at last by a vine-tendril and a sparrow!

Clinging against the outer wall, on that side of the castle overlooking the meadow, which was overflowed for the aquatic sports of Kenilworth, stands an antique and highly ornamental fireplace, which belonged, doubtless, to the principal hall. The windows on either side looking forth upon the fields below, must have been those from which Elizabeth and her train observed the feats of Arion and his dolphin; and at all times, the large and spacious chimney-place, from the castle’s first occupation to its last, must have been the centre of the evening revelry, and conversation of its guests. It was a hook whereon to hang a revery, and between the roars of vulgar laughter which assailed my ears from a party lolling on the grass below, I contrived to figure to myself, with some distinctness, the personages who had stood about it. A visit to Kenilworth, without the deceptions of fancy, would be as disconnected from our previous enthusiasm on the subject as from any other scene with which it had no relation. The general effect at first, in any such spot, is only to dispossess us, by a powerful violence, of the cherished picture we had drawn of it in imagination; and it is only after the real recollection has taken root and ripened—after months, it may be—that we can fully bring the visionary characters we have drawn to inhabit it. If I read Kenilworth now, I see Mike Lambourne stealing out, not from the ruined postern which I clambered through, over heaps of rubbish, but from a little gate that turned noiselessly on its hinges, in the unreal castle built ten years ago in my brain.

I had wandered away from my companion, Miss Jane Porter, to climb up a secret staircase in the wall, rather too difficult of ascent for a female foot, and from my elevated position I caught an accidental view of that distinguished lady through the arch of a Gothic window, with a background of broken architecture and foliage—presenting, by chance, perhaps the most fitting and admirable picture of the authoress of the Scottish Chiefs, that a painter in his brightest hour could have fancied. Miss Porter, with her tall and striking figure, her noble face (said by Sir Martin Shee to have approached nearer in its youth to his beau idéal of the female features than any other, and still possessing the remains of uncommon beauty,) is at all times a person whom it would be difficult to see without a feeling of involuntary admiration. But standing, as I saw her at that moment, motionless and erect, in the mourning dress, with dark feathers, which she has worn since the death of her beloved and gifted sister, her wrists folded across, her large and still beautiful eyes fixed on a distant object in the view, and her nobly-cast lineaments reposing in their usual calm and benevolent tranquillity, while, around and above her, lay the material and breathed the spirit over which she had held the first great mastery—it was a tableau vivant which I was sorry to be alone to see.

Was she thinking of the great mind that had evoked the spirits of the ruins she stood among—a mind in which (by Sir Walter’s own confession) she had first bared the vein of romance which breathed so freely for the world’s delight? Were the visions which sweep with such supernatural distinctness and rapidity through the imagination of genius—visions of which the millionth portion is probably scarce communicated to the world in a literary lifetime—were Elizabeth’s courtiers, Elizabeth’s passions, secret hours, interviews with Leicester—were the imprisoned king’s nights of loneliness and dread, his hopes, his indignant, but unheeded thoughts—were all the possible circumstances, real or imaginary, of which that proud castle might have been the scene, thronging in those few moments of revery through her fancy? Or was her heart busy with its kindly affections, and had the beauty and interest of the scene but awakened a thought of one who was most wont to number with her the sands of those brighter hours?

Who shall say? The very question would perhaps startle the thoughts beyond recall—so elusive are even the most angelic of the mind’s unseen visitants.

I have recorded here the speculations of a moment while I leaned over the wall of Kenilworth, but as I descended by the giddy staircase, a peal of rude laughter broke from the party in the fosse below, and I could not but speculate on the difference between the various classes whom curiosity draws to the spot. The distinguished mind that conceives a romance that enchants the world, comes in the same guise and is treated with but the same respect as theirs. The old porter makes no distinction in his charge of half-a-crown, and the grocer’s wife who sucks an orange on the grass, looks at the dark crape hat and plain exterior—her only standards—and thinks herself as well-dressed, and therefore equal or superior to the tall lady, whom she presumes is out like herself on a day’s pleasuring. One comes and goes like the other, and is forgotten alike by the beggars at the gate and the seneschal within, and thus invisibly and unsuspected, before our very eyes, does genius gather its golden fruit, and while we walk in a plain and commonplace world, with commonplace and sordid thoughts and feelings, the gifted walk side by side with us in a world of their own—a world of which we see distant glimpses in their after-creations, and marvel in what unsunned mine its gems of thought were gathered!