“It would be an unfeeling person who could stand today before this leafy cottage, so snugly tucked away by a shady Wiltshire lane, without some stirring of the pulse, if only for the sake of the melodies. If they are not great, they are the most felicitous and feeling English verse, taken as a whole, ever set to music, and are certainly world-famous and probably immortal. No one would wish to submit “Dear Harp of My Country” or “Oft in the Stilly Night” to the cold light of poetic criticism. But when the conscientious expert has finished with “Lalla Rookh” and the “Loves of the Angels” and consigned them to oblivion, he goes into another chamber, so to speak, and relaxes into unrestrained praise of the melodies.”
Moore must have written much of the “melodies” at Sloperton Cottage, but before he came here his fame had been made by his oriental poems, whose music and glitter caused them to be greatly over-estimated at the time. As we take our leave and thank the ladies for the courtesy, we are told that the cottage is to let and that we may so inform any of our friends. We do so herewith and can add our unqualified personal indorsement of Sloperton Cottage.
Bromham Church, one of the most graceful of the country churches we have seen, is near at hand. It stands against a background of fine trees with a hedge-surmounted stone wall in front. It is mainly in the Perpendicular style and a slender spire rises from its square battlemented tower. The stained windows are very large, each with many tall upright stone mullions; one is a memorial to the poet and another to his wife, whose memory still lingers as one of the best-loved women of the countryside. She survived the poet, who died in 1852, by fourteen years. They lie buried just outside the north wall of the church. The grave is marked by a tall Celtic cross, only recently erected, and the occasion was observed by a gathering of distinguished Irishmen in honor of the memory of their poet. On the pedestal of the cross is graven a verse which truly gives Moore’s best claim to remembrance:
“Dear Harp of my Country, in darkness I found thee,
The cold chain of silence had hung o’er thee long;
When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee,
And gave all thy chords to light, freedom and song.”
And indeed it is the harp of his country that is now heard, and not his labored oriental poems.
BROMHAM CHURCH, BURIAL PLACE OF THOMAS MOORE.
It is a very quiet, retired country lane that we followed to Corsham, famous for the stately seat of Lord Metheun. Corsham Court is an Elizabethan mansion of vast extent which has many noted pictures in its galleries, among them “Charles I. on Horseback,” which is counted the masterpiece of Van Dyck. Near the park entrance is the almshouse, with its timeworn gables of yellow stone against the dull red of the tile roofing. Just inside is the chapel, always present in early English buildings, a fine Jacobean room with a double-deck pulpit and a gallery behind an intricately carved oaken screen. One finds these almshouses in many of the older English towns. They were founded some centuries ago by charitably inclined persons who left legacies for the purpose, and are maintained for a limited number of old people—women at Corsham—who are admitted under certain carefully specified conditions. Each inmate has a small, fairly comfortable room and usually a little garden plot. We saw such houses at Coventry, Campden and Corsham—all substantially built and unique in their architecture. St. Cross at Winchester and Leicester’s Hospital at Warwick are similar institutions. There is always a long waiting-list of applicants for the charity.
At the queer little village of Yatton Keynell, as odd and uncouth as its name, we found another of the melancholy instances so common in England of the degeneration of a fine manor into a slovenly farm tenement. We drove into the ill-kept farmyard and picked our way carefully through the debris to the front entrance, a solid oaken door under a curious little porch. The house is a good example of the substantial mansion of the old-time English squire, and though still quite extensive, is of only half its original size. It has a solid oak staircase and many touches of its old-time beauty remain. While it has no history or tradition, it is worthy a visit from anyone interested in English domestic architecture and in a rather melancholy phase of social conditions.