[Original]
Hark! hark! the lark at heav’n’s gate sings,
And Phoebus ‘gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs,
On chaliced flowers that lies.
And winking mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes;
With every thing that pretty bin,
My lady sweet arise!
Indeed, the whole country about here is poetic ground: everything is associated with the idea of Shakespeare. Every old cottage that I saw I fancied into some resort of his boyhood, where he had acquired his intimate knowledge of rustic life and manners, and heard those legendary tales and wild superstitions which he has woven like witchcraft into his dramas. For in his time, we are told, it was a popular amusement in winter evenings “to sit round the fire, and tell merry tales of errant knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, thieves, cheaters, witches, fairies, goblins, and friars.” *
[Original]
* Scot, in his “Discoverie of Witchcraft,” enumerates a of
these fireside fancies: “And they have so fraid us with host
bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags,
fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, syrens, kit with the can
sticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giantes, imps, calcars,
conjurors, nymphes, changelings, incubus, Robin-goodfellow,
the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell-waine,
the fier drake, the puckle, Tom Thombe, hobgoblins, Tom
Tumbler, boneless, and such other bugs, that we were afraid
of our own shadowes.”
My route for a part of the way lay in sight of the Avon, which made a variety of the most fancy doublings and windings through a wide and fertile valley—sometimes glittering from among willows which fringed its borders; sometimes disappearing among groves or beneath green banks; and sometimes rambling out into full view and making an azure sweep round a slope of meadow-land. This beautiful bosom of country is called the Vale of the Red Horse. A distant line of undulating blue hills seems to be its boundary, whilst all the soft intervening landscape lies in a manner enchained in the silver links of the Avon.
After pursuing the road for about three miles, I turned off into a footpath, which led along the borders of fields and under hedgerows to a private gate of the park; there was a stile, however, for the benefit of the pedestrian, there being a public right of way through the grounds. I delight in these hospitable estates, in which every one has a kind of property—at least as far as the footpath is concerned. It in some measure reconciles a poor man to his lot, and, what is more, to the better lot of his neighbor, thus to have parks and pleasure-grounds thrown open for his recreation. He breathes the pure air as freely and lolls as luxuriously under the shade as the lord of the soil; and if he has not the privilege of calling all that he sees his own, he has not, at the same time, the trouble of paying for it and keeping it in order.
I now found myself among noble avenues of oaks and elms, whose vast size bespoke the growth of centuries. The wind sounded solemnly among their branches, and the rooks cawed from their hereditary nests in the tree-tops. The eye ranged through a long lessening vista, with nothing to interrupt the view but a distant statue and a vagrant deer stalking like a shadow across the opening.