The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

[25] Slip quietly away. A word often found in the old Border Ballads, as “Then hooly, hooly up she rose,” etc.

Ah! cottage life! There is much more hidden under that name than ever inspired the wish to build cottages ornées, or to inhabit them. There is a vast mass of human interests within its circle, of which the world takes little note. The loves and hopes; the trials and struggles; the sufferings, deaths, and burials; the festivities and religious confraternities; the indignities that fret, and the necessities that compel, to action and union our simple brethren and sisters. How little is truly known; how much is consequently misjudged; how great is the indifference concerning them in those who have the power to work miracles of love and happiness amongst them, and must one day stand with them at the footstool of our common Father, who will demand of his children how each has loved his brethren.

Let us turn our eyes, however, a moment from the dark side to the light one. There is not a more beautiful sight in the world than that of our English cottages, in those parts of the country where the violent changes of the times have not been so sensibly felt. Where manufactures have not introduced their red, staring, bald brick-houses, and what is worse, their beershops and demoralization: where, in fact, a more primitive simplicity remains. There, on the edges of the forests, in quiet hamlets and sweet woody valleys, the little grey-thatched cottages, with their gardens and old orchards, their rows of beehives, and their porches clustered with jasmines and roses, stand:—

Hundreds of huts
All hidden in a sylvan gloom,—some perched
On verdant slopes from the low coppice cleared;
Some in deep dingles, secret as the nest
Of Robin Redbreast, built amongst the roots
Of pine, on whose tall top the throstle sings.
Hundreds of huts, yet all apart, and felt
Far from each other; ’mid the multitude
Of intervening stems; each glen or glade
By its own self a perfect solitude,
Hushed, but not mute.

John Wilson.

There they stand, and give one a poetical idea of peace and happiness which is inexpressible. Well may they be the admiration of foreigners. In many of the southern counties, but I think nowhere more than in Hampshire, do the cottages realize, in my view, every conception that our poets have given us of them. One does, no doubt, when looking on their quiet beauty, endow them with a repose and exemption from mortal sufferings that can belong to no human dwelling; and Professor Wilson, in his poem called “An Evening in Furness Abbey,” which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, September, 1829,—a poem flushed all over with the violet hues of poetry, and overflowing with tenderness and grace, gives one this very delightful expression of a thought which has occurred to many of us—

The day goes by
On which our soul’s beloved dies! The day
On which the body of the dead is stretched
By hands that decked it when alive; the day
On which the dead is shrouded; and the day
Of burial—one and all go by! The grave
Grows green ere long; the churchyard seems a place
Of pleasant rest, and all the cottages,
That keep for ever sending funerals
Within its gates, look cheerful every one,
As if the dwellers therein never died,
And this earth slumbered in perpetual peace.

But sobering down by such sad, yet sweet thoughts as these, our poetical fancies of cottage life, and bringing them within the range of human trouble and suffering, still these rustic abodes must inspire us with ideas of a peace and purity of life, in most soothing contrast with the hurry and immorality of cities. Blessings be on them wherever they stand, in woodland valleys, or on open heaths, throughout fair England; and may growing knowledge bring growth of happiness, widening the capacity of enjoyment without touching the simplicity of feeling and the strength of principle. Well may the weary wayfarer—

Lean on such humble gate and think the while,
O! that for me some home like this would smile;
Some cottage home to yield my aged form,
Health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm.

There are thousands of them inhabited by woodmen, labourers, or keepers, that are fit dwellings for the truest poet that ever lived; and it is the ideal of these picturesque and peace-breathing English cottages that has given origin to some of the sweetest paradises in the world—the cottages of the wealthy and the tasteful. What most lovely creations of this description now abound in the finest parts of England, with their delicious shrubberies, velvet lawns, hidden walks, and rustic garden-huts; their little paddocks lying amid woods, and skirted with waters; spots breathing the odour of dewy flowers, and containing in small space all the elegance and the country enjoyments of life.