The next morning our hostess of The Swan placed in our hands the much-sought-for pass to Newstead Abbey, and to while the time until the hour set for admittance, we went by the way of Hucknall, to visit Byron’s grave in the church whose square-topped tower dominates the town. Recent restoration gives an air of newness, for Hucknall Church, when Byron’s remains were laid before its altar, was little better than a ruin. The old man working over the graves in the churchyard knew full well our mission and leaving his task accosted us in unmistakable Irish brogue. He led us directly to the poet’s tomb, and it was with deep feeling not unmixed with awe that we advanced toward the high altar of Hucknall Church and stood silent and uncovered before the grave of Byron. On the wall over the tomb were graven two of those passages whose lofty sentiments glitter like gems—though betimes in inharmonious setting—throughout the poet’s writings, which breathe the high hopes he felt in his better moments. Well may the tablet over his last resting-place bear the inspired lines:
“If that high world, which lies beyond
Our own, surviving Love endears;
If there the cherish’d heart be fond,
The eye the same, except in tears—
How welcome those untrodden spheres!
How sweet this very hour to die!
To soar from earth and find all fears
Lost in thy light—Eternity!”
“It must be so; ’tis not for self
That we so tremble on the brink;
And, striving to o’erleap the gulf,
Yet cling to Being’s severing link.
Oh! in that future let us think
To hold each heart the heart that shares;
With them the immortal waters drink,
And soul in soul grow deathless theirs!”
The second quotation is from “Childe Harold,” more positive in its tone, though less scintillating in its verbiage. In the wall near by, the gift of a Scotch admirer, is a marble profile medallion of the poet’s face, with Shelley’s characterization, “The Pilgrim of Eternity.” In the adjoining vestry the walls are covered with the graven words of many of the greatest men of the century—tributes to the genius of Byron. Verily the church at Hucknall has become as a mausoleum to one denied burial in the nation’s Valhalla, and who was, in truth, almost grudged sepulture in his native soil by a large number of the Englishmen of his day. And there came to us a faint conception of the intense bitterness of the times—when the body of England’s greatest genius, dead in a forlorn but glorious cause, was brought to his native land to be greeted with a storm of hatred and a fierce protest against interment in Westminster Abbey. With little ceremony he was laid away in the church of Hucknall and pilgrims now come daily to that otherwise uninteresting and rather ugly town to do honor to the memory of Byron—certainly one of the brightest and most fascinating, if not the greatest, of English poets.
For me there was none other of the historic places which we visited more deeply tinged by its romantic associations or possessing a greater fascination than Newstead Abbey. Perhaps this feeling was intensified by our previous unsuccessful attempts to gain admission and by the recollection of the passion of my boyhood days for the verse of Byron—though indeed I have hardly read him latterly. But we were to visit Newstead at last. If we found a little difficulty—possibly the result of our ignorance—in getting permission, we could not complain of the opportunities afforded us as visitors.
From the Mansfield road we entered the gateway and drove through the stretches of forest and meadow in the great park, halting the car at the very doorway of the ancient place. We paused to view the fine facade, with its square battlemented tower at one end and the ruins of the abbey church at the other. There is little left of this latter save the east wall, once pierced by three great windows, two of which have at some time been filled in. We were conducted by the rather aristocratic housekeeper to every part of the house save the private apartments of the family, and there was no effort to hurry us along—so often the fate of the tourist in such cases.
One who is accustomed to think of Newstead Abbey as it lives, lonely and half ruinous, in the verse of Byron, who had such an intense affection for the home of his ancestors; or even one who reads Washington Irving’s interesting account of his visit to the place when owned by Col. Wildman a few years later, is hardly prepared for the modern palace into which the abbey has been transformed. The paneled halls, with their rich furnishings and rare curios from all parts of the world, and the trim, beautifully kept gardens that greet one everywhere from the windows, have little in common with the Newstead of which Byron wrote in “Hours of Idleness:”
“Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle,
Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay;
In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle
Have choked up the rose which once bloomed in the way.”
Still, much is unaltered and there are many relics to bring memories of the one-time noble, though unfortunate, owner, whose recklessness quite as much as his necessities compelled the sale of his ancestral estate.