The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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