That is St. Paul's, the Boston State-House of London. There is a resemblance in effect, but there is a difference in dimensions,—to the disadvantage of the native edifice, as the reader may see in the plate prefixed to Dr. Bigelow's "Technology." The dome itself looks light and airy compared to St. Peter's or the Duomo of Florence, not only absolutely, but comparatively. The colonnade on which it rests divides the honors with it. It does not brood over the city, as those two others over their subject towns. Michel Angelo's forehead repeats itself in the dome of St. Peter's. Sir Christopher had doubtless a less ample frontal development; indeed, the towers he added to Westminster Abbey would almost lead us to doubt if he had not a vacancy somewhere in his brain. But the dome of the London "State-House" is very graceful,—so light that it looks as if Its lineage had been crossed by a spire. Wait until we have gilded the dome of our Boston St. Paul's before drawing any comparisons.
We have seen the outside of London. What do we care for the Crescent, and the Horseguards, and Nelson's Monument, and the statue of Achilles, and the new Houses of Parliament? The Abbey, the Tower, the Bridge, Temple Bar, the Monument, St. Paul's: these make up the great features of the London we dream about. Let us go into the Abbey for a few moments. The "dim religious light" is pretty good, after all. We can read every letter on that mural tablet to the memory of "the most illustrious and most benevolent John Paul Howard, Earl of Stafford," "a Lover of his Country, A Relation to Relations" (what a eulogy and satire in that expression!) and in many ways virtuous and honorable, as "The Countess Dowager, in Testimony of her great Affection and Respect to her Lord's Memory," has commemorated on his monument. We can see all the folds of the Duchess of Suffolk's dress, and the meshes of the net that confines her hair, as she lies in marble effigy on her sculptured sarcophagus. It looks old to our eyes,—for she was the mother of Lady Jane Grey, and died three hundred years ago,—but see those two little stone heads lying on their stone pillow, just beyond the marble Duchess. They are children of Edward III.,—the Black Prince's baby-brothers. They died five hundred years ago,—but what are centuries in Westminster Abbey? Under this pillared canopy, her head raised on two stone cushions, her fair, still features bordered with the spreading cap we know so well in her portraits, lies Mary of Scotland. These fresh monuments, protected from the wear of the elements, seem to make twenty generations our contemporaries. Look at this husband warding off the dart which the grim, draped skeleton is aiming at the breast of his fainting wife. Most famous, perhaps, of all the statues in the Abbey is this of Joseph Gascoigne Nightingale and his Lady, by Roubilliac. You need not cross the ocean to see it. It is here, literally to every dimple in the back of the falling hand, and every crinkle of the vermiculated stone-work. What a curious pleasure it is to puzzle out the inscriptions on the monuments in the background!—for the beauty of your photograph is, that you may work out minute derails with the microscope, just as you can with the telescope in a distant landscape in Nature. There is a lady, for instance, leaning upon an urn,—suggestive, a little, of Morgiana and the forty thieves. Above is a medallion of one wearing a full periwig. Now for a half-inch lens to make out the specks that seem to be letters. "Erected to the Memory of William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, by his Brother"—That will do,—the inscription operates as a cold bath to enthusiasm. But here is our own personal namesake, the once famous Rear Admiral of the White, whose biography we can find nowhere except in the "Gentleman's Magazine," where he divides the glory of the capture of Quebec with General Wolfe. A handsome young man with hyacinthine locks, his arms bare and one hand resting on a cannon. We remember thinking our namesake's statue one of the most graceful in the Abbey, and have always fallen back on the memory of that and of Dryden's Achates of the "Annus Mirabilis," as trophies of the family.
Enough of these marbles; there is no end to them; the walls and floor of the great, many-arched, thousand-pillared, sky-lifted cavern are crusted all over with them, like stalactites and stalagmites. The vast temple is alive with the images of the dead. Kings and queens, nobles, statesmen, soldiers, admirals, the great men whose deeds we all know, the great writers whose words are in all our memories, the brave and the beautiful whose fame has shrunk into their epitaphs, are all around us. What is the cry for alms that meets us at the door of the church to the mute petition of these marble beggars, who ask to warm their cold memories for a moment in our living hearts? Look up at the mighty arches overhead, borne up on tall clustered columns,—as if that avenue of Royal Palms we remember in the West India Islands (photograph) had been spirited over seas and turned into stone. Make your obeisance to the august shape of Sir Isaac Newton, reclining like a weary swain in the niche at the side of the gorgeous screen. Pass through Henry VII.'s Chapel, a temple cut like a cameo. Look at the shining oaken stalls of the knights. See the banners overhead. There is no such speaking record of the lapse of time as these banners,—there is one of them beginning to drop to pieces; the long day of a century has decay for its dial-shadow.
We have had a glimpse of London,—let us make an excursion to
Stratford-on-Avon.
Here you see the Shakspeare House as it was,—wedged in between, and joined to, the "Swan and Maidenhead" Tavern and a mean and dilapidated brick building, not much worse than itself, however. The first improvement (as you see in No. 2) was to pull down this brick building. The next (as you see in No. 3)—was to take away the sign and the bay-window of the "Swan and Maidenhead" and raise two gables out of its roof, so as to restore something like its ancient aspect. Then a rustic fence was put up and the outside arrangements were completed. The cracked and faded sign projects as we remember it of old. In No. 1 you may read "THE IMMORTAL SHAKES_peare … Born in This House_" about as well as if you had been at the trouble and expense of going there.
But here is the back of the house. Did little Will use to look out at this window with the bull's-eye panes? Did he use to drink from this old pump, or the well in which it stands? Did his shoulders rub against this angle of the old house, built with rounded bricks? It a strange picture, and sets us dreaming. Let us go in and up-stairs. In this room he was born. They say so, and we will believe it. Rough walls, rudely boarded floor, wide window with small panes, small bust of him between two cactuses in bloom on window-seat. An old table covered with prints and stereographs, a framed picture, and under it a notice "Copies of this Portrait" … the rest, in fine print, can only be conjectured.
Here is the Church of the Holy Trinity, in which he lies buried. The trees are bare that surround it; see the rooks' nests in their tops. The Avon is hard by, dammed just here, with flood-gates, like a canal. Change the season, if you like,—here are the trees in leaf, and in their shadow the tombs and graves of the mute, inglorious citizens of Stratford.
Ah, how natural this interior, with its great stained window, its mural monuments, and its slab in the pavement with the awful inscription! That we cannot see here, but there is the tablet with the bust we know so well. But this, after all, is Christ's temple, not Shakspeare's. Here are the worshippers' seats,—mark how the polished wood glistens,—there is the altar, and there the open prayer-book,—you can almost read the service from it. Of the many striking things that Henry Ward Beecher has said, nothing, perhaps, is more impressive than his account of his partaking of the communion at that altar in the church where Shakspeare rests. A memory more divine than his overshadowed the place, and he thought of Shakspeare, "as he thought of ten thousand things, without the least disturbance of his devotion," though he was kneeling directly over the poet's dust.
If you will stroll over to Shottery now with me, we can see the Ann Hathaway cottage from four different points, which will leave nothing outside of it to be seen. Better to look at than to live in. A fearful old place, full of small vertebrates that squeak and smaller articulates that bite, if its outward promise can be trusted. A thick thatch covers it like a coarse-haired hide. It is patched together with bricks and timber, and partly crusted with scaling plaster. One window has the diamond panes framed in lead, such as we remember seeing of old in one or two ancient dwellings in the town of Cambridge, hard by. In this view a young man is sitting, pensive, on the steps which Master William, too ardent lover, used to climb with hot haste and descend with lingering delay. Young men die, but youth lives. Life goes on in the cottage just as it used to three hundred years ago. On the rail before the door sits the puss of the household, of the fiftieth generation, perhaps, from that "harmless, necessary cat" which purred round the poet's legs as he sat talking love with Ann Hathaway. At the foot of the steps is a huge basin, and over the rail hangs—a dishcloth, drying. In these homely accidents of the very instant, that cut across our romantic ideals with the sharp edge of reality, lies one of the ineffable charms of the sun-picture. It is a little thing that gives life to a scene or a face; portraits are never absolutely alive, because they do not wink.
Come, we are full of Shakspeare; let us go up among the hills and see where another poet lived and lies. Here is Rydal Mount, the home of Wordsworth. Two-storied, ivy-clad, hedge-girdled, dropped into a crease among the hills that look down dimly from above, as if they were hunting after it as ancient dames hunt after a dropped thimble. In these walks he used to go "booing about," as his rustic neighbor had it,—reciting his own verses. Here is his grave in Grasmere. A plain slab, with nothing but his name. Next him lies Dora, his daughter, beneath a taller stone bordered with a tracery of ivy, and bearing in relief a lamb and a cross. Her husband lies next in the range. The three graves have just been shorn of their tall grass,—in this other view you may see them half-hidden by it. A few flowering stems have escaped the scythe in the first picture, and nestle close against the poet's headstone. Hard by sleeps poor Hartley Coleridge, with a slab of freestone graven with a cross and a crown of thorns, and the legend, "By thy Cross and Passion, Good Lord, deliver us."[A] All around are the graves of those whose names the world has not known. This view, (302,) from above Rydal Mount, is so Claude-like, especially in its trees, that one wants the solemn testimony of the double-picture to believe it an actual transcript of Nature. Of the other English landscapes we have seen, one of the most pleasing on the whole is that marked 43,—Sweden Bridge, near Ambleside. But do not fail to notice St. Mary's Church (101) in the same mountain-village. It grows out of the ground like a crystal, with spur-like gables budding out all the way up its spire, as if they were ready to flower into pinnacles, like such as have sprung up all over the marble multiflora of Milan.