CHAPTER VII
WARWICK AND KENILWORTH
All the way from London to Warwick it rained; not heavily, but with a gentle fall. The gray clouds hung low over the landscape and softly darkened it; so that meadows of scarlet and emerald, the shining foliage of elms, gray turret, nestled cottage and limpid river were as mysterious and evanescent as pictures seen in dreams. At Warwick the rain had fallen and ceased, and the walk from the station to the inn was on a road—or on a footpath by the roadside—still hard and damp with the water it had absorbed. A fresh wind blew from the fields, sweet with the rain and fragrant with the odour of leaves and flowers. The streets of the ancient town—entered through an old Norman arch—were deserted and silent. It was Sunday when I first came to the country of Shakespeare; and over all the region there brooded a sacred stillness peculiar to the time and harmonious beyond utterance with the sanctity of the place. As I strive, after many days, to call back and to fix in words the impressions of that sublime experience, the same awe falls upon me now that fell upon me then. Nothing else upon earth—no natural scene, no relic of the past, no pageantry of the present—can vie with the shrine of Shakespeare, in power to impress, to humble, and to exalt the devout spirit that has been nurtured at the fountain of his transcendent genius.
A fortunate way to approach Stratford-on-Avon is by Warwick and Kenilworth. Those places are not on a direct line of travel; but the scenes and associations that they successively present are such as assume a symmetrical order, increase in interest, and grow to a delightful culmination. Objects that Shakespeare himself must have seen are still visible there; and little by little, in contact with these, the pilgrim through this haunted region is mentally saturated with that atmosphere of serenity and romance in which the youth of Shakespeare was passed, and by which his works and his memory are embalmed. No one should come abruptly upon the poet's home. The mind needs to be prepared for the impression that awaits it; and in this gradual approach it finds preparation, both suitable and delicious. The luxuriance of the country, its fertile fields, its brilliant foliage, its myriads of wild-flowers, its pomp of colour and of physical vigour and bloom, do not fail to announce, to every mind, howsoever heedless, that this is a fit place for the birth and nurture of a great man. But this is not all. As you stroll in the quaint streets of Warwick, as you drive to Kenilworth, as you muse in that poetic ruin, as you pause in the old graveyard in the valley below, as you meditate over the crumbling fragments of the ancient abbey, at every step of the way you are haunted by a vague sense of an impending grandeur; you are aware of a presence that fills and sanctifies the scene. The emotion that is thus inspired is very glorious; never to be elsewhere felt; and never to be forgotten.
The cyclopædias and the guide-books dilate, with much particularity and characteristic eloquence, upon Warwick Castle and other great features of Warwickshire, but the attribute that all such records omit is the atmosphere; and this, perhaps, is rather to be indicated than described. The prevailing quality of it is a certain high and sweet solemnity—a feeling kindred with the placid, happy melancholy that steals over the mind, when, on a sombre afternoon in autumn, you stand in the churchyard, and listen, amid rustling branches and sighing grass, to the low music of distant organ and chanting choir. Peace, haunted by romance, dwells here, in reverie. The great tower of Warwick, based in silver Avon and pictured in its slumbering waters, seems musing upon the centuries over which it has watched, and full of unspeakable knowledge and thought. The dark and massive gateways of the town and the timber-crossed fronts of its antique houses live on in the same strange dream and perfect repose; and all along the drive to Kenilworth are equal images of rest—of a rest in which there is nothing supine or sluggish, no element of death or decay, but in which passion, imagination, beauty, and sorrow, seized at their topmost poise, seem crystallised in eternal calm. What opulence of splendid life is vital for ever in Kenilworth's crumbling ruin there are no words to say. What pomp of royal banners! what dignity of radiant cavaliers! what loveliness of stately and exquisite ladies! what magnificence of banquets! what wealth of pageantry! what lustre of illumination! The same festal music that the poet Gascoigne heard there, three hundred years ago, is still sounding on, to-day. The proud and cruel Leicester still walks in his vaulted hall. The imperious face of the Virgin Queen still from her dais looks down on plumed courtiers and jewelled dames; and still the moonlight, streaming through the turret-window, falls on the white bosom and the great, startled, black eyes of Amy Robsart, waiting for her lover. The gaze of the pilgrim, indeed, rests only upon old, gray, broken walls, overgrown with green moss and ivy, and pierced by irregular casements through which the sun shines, and the winds blow, and the rains drive, and the birds fly, amid utter desolation. But silence and ruin are here alike eloquent and awful; and, much as the place impresses you by what remains, it impresses you far more by what has vanished. Ambition, love, pleasure, power, misery, tragedy—these are gone; and being gone they are immortal. I plucked, in the garden of Kenilworth, one of the most brilliant red roses that ever grew; and as I pressed it to my lips I seemed to touch the lips of that superb, bewildering beauty who outweighed England's crown (at least in story), and whose spirit is the everlasting genius of the place.
There is a row of cottages opposite to the ruins of the castle, in which contentment seems to have made her home. The ivy embowers them. The roses cluster around their little windows. The greensward slopes away, in front, from big, flat stones that are embedded in the mossy sod before their doors. Down in the valley, hard by, your steps stray through an ancient graveyard—in which stands the parish church, a carefully restored building of the eleventh century, with tower, and clock, and bell—and past a few fragments of the Abbey and Monastery of St. Mary, destroyed in 1538. At many another point, on the roads betwixt Warwick and Kenilworth and Stratford, I came upon such nests of cosy, rustic quiet and seeming happiness. They build their country houses low, in England, so that the trees overhang them, and the cool, friendly, flower-gemmed earth—parent, and stay, and bourne of mortal life—is tenderly taken into their companionship. Here, at Kenilworth, as elsewhere, at such places as Marlowe, Henley, Richmond, Maidenhead, Cookham, and the region round about Windsor, I saw many a sweet nook where tired life might be content to lay down its burden and enter into its rest. In all true love of country—a passion that seems to be more deeply felt in England than anywhere else upon the globe—there is love for the literal soil itself: and surely that sentiment in the human heart is equally natural and pious which inspires and perpetuates man's desire that where he found his cradle he may also find his grave.
