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Anna McClure Sholl - "The Faery Tales of Weir"

Gilbert Parker - "The Lane That Had No Turning, Volume 2."

George Barr McCutcheon - "A Fool and His Money"

Lida Brown McMurry - "Fifty Famous Fables"

Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete




We now returned to the hotel, and took a car for the valley of St. John.
The sky seemed to portend rain in no long time, and Skiddaw had put on
his cap; but the people of the hotel and the driver said that there would
be no rain this afternoon, and their opinion proved correct. After
driving a few miles, we again cane within sight of the Enchanted Castle.
It stands rather more than midway adown the declivity of one of the
ridges that form the valley to the left, as you go southward, and its
site would have been a good one for a fortress, intended to defend the
lower entrance of this mountain defile. At a proper distance, it looks
not unlike the gray dilapidation of a Gothic castle, which has been
crumbling and crumbling away for ages, until Time might be supposed to
have imperceptibly stolen its massive pile from man, and given it back to
Nature; its towers and battlements and arched entrances being so much
defaced and decayed that all the marks of human labor had nearly been
obliterated, and the angles of the hewn stone rounded away, while mosses
and weeds and bushes grow over it as freely as over a natural ledge of
rocks. It is conceivable that in some lights, and in some states of the
atmosphere, a traveller, at the entrance of the valley, might really
imagine that he beheld a castle here; but, for myself, I must acknowledge
that it required a willing fancy to make me see it. As we drew nearer,
the delusion did not immediately grow less strong; but, at length, we
found ourselves passing at the foot of the declivity, and, behold! it was
nothing but an enormous ledge of rock, coming squarely out of the
hillside, with other parts of the ledge cropping out in its vicinity.
Looking back, after passing, we saw a knoll or hillock, of which the
castled rock is the bare face. There are two or three stone cottages
along the roadside, beneath the magic castle, and within the enchanted
ground. Scott, in the Bridal of Triermain, locates the castle in the
middle of the valley, and makes King Arthur ride around it, which any
mortal would have great difficulty in doing. This vale of St. John has
very striking scenery. Blencathra shuts it in to the northward, lying
right across the entrance; and on either side there are lofty crags and
declivities, those to the west being more broken and better wooded than
the ridge to the eastward, which stretches along for several miles,
steep, high, and bare, producing only grass enough for sheep pasture,
until it rises into the dark brow of Helvellyn. Adown this ridge, seen
afar, like a white ribbon, comes here and there a cascade, sending its
voice before it, which distance robs of all its fury, and makes it the
quietest sound in the world; and while you see the foamy leap of its
upper course a mile or two away, you may see and hear the selfsame little
brook babbling through a field, and passing under the arch of a rustic
bridge beneath your feet. It is a deep seclusion, with mountains and
crags on all sides.

About a mile beyond the castle we stopped at a little wayside inn, the
King's Head, and put up for the night. This, I believe, is the only inn
which I have found in England--the only one where I have eaten and slept
--that does not call itself a hotel. It is very primitive in its
arrangements,--a long, low, whitewashed, unadorned, and ugly cottage of
two stories. At one extremity is a barn and cow-house, and next to these
the part devoted to the better class of guests, where we had our parlor
and chambers, contiguous to which is the kitchen and common room, paved
with flagstones,--and, lastly, another barn and stable; all which
departments are not under separate roofs, but under the same long
contiguity, and forming the same building. Our parlor opens immediately
upon the roadside, without any vestibule. The house appears to be of
some antiquity, with beams across the low ceilings; but the people made
us pretty comfortable at bed and board, and fed us with ham and eggs,
veal-steaks, honey, oatcakes, gooseberry-tarts, and such cates and
dainties,--making a moderate charge for all. The parlor was adorned with
rude engravings. I remember only a plate of the Duke of Wellington, at
three stages of his life; and there were minerals, delved, doubtless, out
of the hearts of the mountains, upon the mantel-piece. The chairs were
of an antiquated fashion, and had very capacious seats. We were waited
upon by two women, who looked and acted not unlike the countryfolk of New
England,--say, of New Hampshire,--except that these may have been more
deferential.

While we remained here, I took various walks to get a glimpse of
Helvellyn, and a view of Thirlmere,--which is rather two lakes than one,
being so narrow at one point as to be crossed by a foot-bridge. Its
shores are very picturesque, coming down abruptly upon it, and broken
into crags and prominences, which view their shaggy faces in its mirror;
and Helvellyn slopes steeply upward, from its southern shore, into the
clouds. On its eastern bank, near the foot-bridge, stands Armboth House,
which Miss Martineau says is haunted; and I saw a painted board at the
entrance of the road which leads to it advertising lodgings there. The
ghosts, of course, pay nothing for their accommodations.

At noon, on the day after our arrival, J----- and I went to visit the
Enchanted Castle; and we were so venturesome as to turn aside from the
road, and ascend the declivity towards its walls, which indeed we hoped
to surmount. It proved a very difficult undertaking, the site of the
fortress being much higher and steeper than we had supposed; but we did
clamber upon what we took for the most elevated portion, when lo! we
found that we had only taken one of the outworks, and that there was a
gorge of the hill betwixt us and the main walls; while the citadel rose
high above, at more than twice the elevation which we had climbed.
J----- wished to go on, and I allowed him to climb, till he appeared to
have reached so steep and lofty a height that he looked hardly bigger
than a monkey, and I should not at all have wondered had he come rolling
down to the base of the rock where I sat. But neither did he get
actually within the castle, though he might have done so but for a high
stone fence, too difficult for him to climb, which runs from the rock
along the hillside. The sheep probably go thither much oftener than any
other living thing, and to them we left the castle of St. John, with a
shrub waving from its battlements, instead of a banner.

After dinner we ordered a car for Ambleside, and while it was getting
ready, I went to look at the river of St. John, which, indeed, flows
close beside our inn, only just across the road, though it might well be
overlooked unless you specially sought for it. It is a brook brawling
over the stones, very much as brooks do in New England, only we never
think of calling them rivers there. I could easily have made a leap from
shore to shore, and J----- scrambled across on no better footing than a
rail. I believe I have complained of the want of brooks in other parts
of England, but there is no want of them here, and they are always
interesting, being of what size they may.

We drove down the valley, and gazed at the vast slope of Helvellyn, and
at Thirlmere beneath it, and at Eagle's Crag and Raven's Crag, which
beheld themselves in it, and we cast many a look behind at Blencathra,
and that noble brotherhood of mountains out of the midst of which we
came. But, to say the truth, I was weary of fine scenery, and it seemed
to me that I had eaten a score of mountains, and quaffed as many lakes,
all in the space of two or three days,--and the natural consequence was a
surfeit. There was scarcely a single place in all our tour where I
should not have been glad to spend a month; but, by flitting so quickly
from one point to another, I lost all the more recondite beauties, and
had come away without retaining even the surface of much that I had seen.
I am slow to feel,--slow, I suppose, to comprehend, and, like the
anaconda, I need to lubricate any object a great deal before I can
swallow it and actually make it my own. Yet I shall always enjoy having
made this journey, and shall wonder the more at England, which
comprehends so much, such a rich variety, within its narrow bounds. If
England were all the world, it still would have been worth while for the
Creator to have made it, and mankind would have had no cause to find
fault with their abode; except that there is not room enough for so many
as might be happy here.

We left the great inverted arch of the valley behind us, looking back as
long as we could at Blencathra, and Skiddaw over its shoulder, and the
clouds were gathering over them at our last glimpse. Passing by Dummail
Raise (which is a mound of stones over an old British king), we entered
Westmoreland, and soon had the vale of Grasmere before us, with the
church where Wordsworth lies, and Nab Scaur and Rydal Water farther on.
At Ambleside we took another car for Newby Bridge, whither we drove along
the eastern shore of Windermere. The superb scenery through which we had
been passing made what we now saw look tame, although a week ago we
should have thought it more than commonly interesting. Hawkshead is the
only village on our road,--a small, whitewashed old town, with a
whitewashed old Norman church, low, and with a low tower, on the same
pattern with others that we have seen hereabouts. It was between seven
and eight o'clock when we reached Newby Bridge, and heard U----'s voice
greeting us, and saw her head, crowned with a wreath of flowers, looking
down at us, out of the window of our parlor.

And to-day, July 23d, I have written this most incomplete and
unsatisfactory record of what we have done and seen since Wednesday last.
I am pretty well convinced that all attempts at describing scenery,
especially mountain scenery, are sheer nonsense. For one thing, the
point of view being changed, the whole description, which you made up
from the previous point of view, is immediately falsified. And when you
have done your utmost, such items as those setting forth the scene in a
play,--"a mountainous country, in the distance a cascade tumbling over a
precipice, and in front a lake; on one side an ivy-covered cottage,"--
this dry detail brings the matter before one's mind's eyes more
effectually than all the art of word-painting.


July 27th.--We are still at Newby Bridge, and nothing has occurred of
remarkable interest, nor have we made any excursions, beyond moderate
walks. Two days have been rainy, and to-day there is more rain. We find
such weather as tolerable here as it would probably be anywhere; but it
passes rather heavily with the children,--and for myself, I should prefer
sunshine. Though Mr. White's books afford me some entertainment,
especially an odd volume of Ben Jonson's plays, containing "Volpone,"
"The Alchemist," "Bartholomew Fair," and others. "The Alchemist" is
certainly a great play. We watch all arrivals and other events from our
parlor window,--a stage-coach driving up four times in the twenty-four
hours, with its forlorn outsiders, all saturated with rain; the steamer,
from the head of the lake, landing a crowd of passengers, who stroll up
to the hotel, drink a glass of ale, lean over the parapet of the bridge,
gaze at the flat stones which pave the bottom of the Liver, and then
hurry back to the steamer again; cars, phaetons, horsemen, all damped and
disconsolate. There are a number of young men staying at the hotel, some
of whom go forth in all the rain, fishing, and come back at nightfall,
trudging heavily, but with creels on their backs that do not seem very
heavy. Yesterday was fair, and enlivened us a good deal. Returning from
a walk in the forenoon, I found a troop of yeomanry cavalry in the
stable-yard of the hotel. They were the North Lancashire Regiment, and
were on their way to Liverpool for the purpose of drill. Not being old
campaigners, their uniforms and accoutrements were in so much the finer
order, all bright, and looking span-new, and they themselves were a body
of handsome and stalwart young men; and it was pleasant to look at their
helmets, and red jackets and carbines, and steel scabbarded swords, and
gallant steeds,--all so martial in aspect,--and to know that they were
only play-soldiers, after all, and were never likely to do nor suffer any
warlike mischief. By and by their bugles sounded, and they trotted away,
wheeling over the ivy-grown stone bridge, and disappearing behind the
trees on the Milnethorpe road. Our host comes forth from the bar with a
bill, which he presents to an orderly-sergeant. He, the host, then tells
me that he himself once rode many years, a trooper, in this regiment, and
that all his comrades were larger men than himself. Yet Mr. Thomas White
is a good-sized man, and now, at all events, rather overweight for a
dragoon.

Yesterday came one of those bands of music that seem to itinerate
everywhere about the country. It consisted of a young woman who played
the harp, a bass-viol player, a fiddler, a flutist, and a bugler, besides
a little child, of whom, I suppose, the woman was the mother. They sat
down on a bench by the roadside, opposite the house, and played several
tunes, and by and by the waiter brought them a large pitcher of ale,
which they quaffed with apparent satisfaction; though they seemed to be
foreigners by their mustachios and sallow hue, and would perhaps have
preferred a vinous potation. One would like to follow these people
through their vagrant life, and see them in their social relations, and
overhear their talk with each other. All vagrants are interesting; and
there is a much greater variety of them here than in America,--people who
cast themselves on Fortune, and take whatever she gives without a
certainty of anything. I saw a travelling tinker yesterday,--a man with
a leather apron, and a string of skewers hung at his girdle, and a pack
over his shoulders, in which, no doubt, were his tools and materials of
trade.

It is remarkable what a natural interest everybody feels in fishing. An
angler from the bridge immediately attracts a group to watch his luck.
It is the same with J-----, fishing for minnows, on the platform near
which the steamer lands its passengers. By the by, U---- caught a minnow
last evening, and, immediately after, a good-sized perch,--her first
fish.


July 30th.--We left Newby Bridge, all of us, on Saturday, at twelve
o'clock, and steamed up the lake to Ambleside; a pretty good day as to
weather, but with a little tendency to shower. There was nothing new on
the lake, and no new impressions, as far as I can remember. At
Ambleside, S----- and nurse went shopping, after which we took a carriage
for Grasmere, and established ourselves at Brown's Hotel. I find that my
impressions from our previous sight of all these scenes do not change on
revision. They are very beautiful; but, if I must say it, I am a little
weary of them. We soon tire of things which we visit merely by way of
spectacle, and with which we have no real and permanent connection. In
such cases we very quickly wish the spectacle to be taken away, and
another substituted; at all events I do not care about seeing anything
more of the English lakes for at least a year.

Perhaps a part of my weariness is owing to the hotel-life which we lead.
At an English hotel the traveller feels as if everybody, from the
landlord downward, united in a joint and individual purpose to fleece
him, because all the attendants who come in contact with him are to be
separately considered. So, after paying, in the first instance, a very
heavy bill, for what would seem to cover the whole indebtedness, there
remain divers dues still to be paid, to no trifling amount, to the
landlord's servants,--dues not to be ascertained, and which you never can
know whether you have properly satisfied. You can know, perhaps, when
you have less than satisfied them, by the aspect of the waiter, which I
wish I could describe, not disrespectful in the slightest degree, but a
look of profound surprise, a gaze at the offered coin (which he
nevertheless pockets) as if he either did not see it, or did not know it,
or could not believe his eyesight;--all this, however, with the most
quiet forbearance, a Christian-like non-recognition of an unmerited wrong
and insult; and finally, all in a moment's space indeed, he quits you and
goes about his other business. If you have given him too much, you are
made sensible of your folly by the extra amount of his gratitude, and the
bows with which he salutes you from the doorstep. Generally, you cannot
very decidedly say whether you have been right or wrong; but, in almost
all cases, you decidedly feel that you have been fleeced. Then the
living at the best of English hotels, so far as my travels have brought
me acquainted with them, deserves but moderate praise, and is especially
lacking in variety. Nothing but joints, joints, joints; sometimes,
perhaps, a meat-pie, which, if you eat it, weighs upon your conscience,
with the idea that you have eaten the scraps of other people's dinners.
At the lake hotels, the fare is lamb and mutton and grout,--the latter
not always fresh, and soon tired of. We pay like nabobs, and are
expected to be content with plain mutton.

We spent the day yesterday at Grasmere, in quiet walks about the hotel;
and at a little past six in the afternoon, I took my departure in the
stage-coach for Windermere. The coach was greatly overburdened with
outside passengers,--fifteen in all, besides the four insiders, and one
of the fifteen formed the apex of an immense pile of luggage on the top.
It seems to me miraculous that we did not topple over, the road being so
hilly and uneven, and the driver, I suspect, none the steadier for his
visits to all the tap-rooms along the route from Cockermouth. There was
a tremendous vibration of the coach now and then; and I saw that, in case
of our going over, I should be flung headlong against the high stone
fence that bordered most of the road. In view of this I determined to
muffle my head in the folds of my thick shawl at the moment of overturn,
and as I could do no better for myself, I awaited my fate with
equanimity. As far as apprehension goes, I had rather travel from Maine
to Georgia by rail, than from Grasmere to Windermere by stage-coach.

At Lowwood, the landlady espied me from the window, and sent out a large
packet that had arrived by mail; but as it was addressed to some person
of the Christian name of William, I did not venture to open it. She
said, also, that a gentleman had been there, who very earnestly desired
to see me, and I have since had reason to suppose that this was
Allingham, the poet. We arrived at Windermere at half past seven, and
waited nearly an hour for the train to start. I took a ticket for
Lancaster, and talked there about the war with a gentleman in the
coffee-room, who took me for an Englishman, as most people do nowadays,
and I heard from him--as you may from all his countrymen--an expression
of weariness and dissatisfaction with the whole business. These fickle
islanders! How differently they talked a year ago! John Bull sees now
that he never was in a worse predicament in his life; and yet it would
not take much to make him roar as bellicosely as ever. I went to bed at
eleven, and slept unquietly on feathers.

I had purposed to rise betimes, and see the town of Lancaster before
breakfast. But here I reckoned without my host; for, in the first place,
I had no water for my ablutions, and my boots were not brushed; and so I
could not get down stairs till the hour I named for my coffee and chops;
and, secondly, the breakfast was delayed half an hour, though promised
every minute. In fine, I had but just time to take a hasty walk round
Lancaster Castle, and see what I could of the town on my way,--a not very
remarkable town, built of stone, with taller houses than in the middle
shires of England, narrow streets up and down an eminence on which the
castle is situated, with the town immediately about it. The castle is a
satisfactory edifice, but so renovated that the walls look almost
entirely modern, with the exception of the fine old front, with the
statue of an armed warrior, very likely John of Gaunt himself, in a niche
over the Norman arch of the entrance. Close beside the castle stands an
old church.

The train left Lancaster at half past nine, and reached Liverpool at
twelve, over as flat and uninteresting a country as I ever travelled. I
have betaken myself to the Rock Ferry Hotel, where I am as comfortable as
I could be anywhere but at home; but it is rather comfortless to think of
hone as three years off, and three thousand miles away. With what a
sense of utter weariness, not fully realized till then, we shall sink
down on our own threshold, when we reach it. The moral effect of being
without a settled abode is very wearisome.

Our coachman from Grasmere to Windermere looked like a great beer-barrel,
oozy with his proper liquor. I suppose such solid soakers never get
upset.



THE LAUNCH.


August 2d.--Mr. ------ has urged me very much to go with his father and
family to see the launch of a great ship which has been built for their
house, and afterwards to partake of a picnic; so, on Tuesday morning I
presented myself at the landing-stage, and met the party, to take passage
for Chester. It was a showery morning, and looked wofully like a rainy
day; but nothing better is to be expected in England; and, after all,
there is seldom such a day that you cannot glide about pretty securely
between the drops of rain. This, however, did not turn out one of those
tolerable days, but grew darker and darker, and worse and worse; and was
worst of all when we had passed about six miles beyond Chester, and were
just on the borders of Wales, on the hither side of the river Dee, where
the ship was to be launched. Here the train stopped, and absolutely
deposited our whole party of excursionists, under a heavy shower, in the
midst of a muddy potato-field, whence we were to wade through mud and
mire to the ship-yard, almost half a mile off. Some kind Christian, I
know not whom, gave me half of his umbrella, and half of his cloak, and
thereby I got to a shed near the ship, without being entirely soaked
through.

The ship had been built on the banks of the Dee, at a spot where it is
too narrow for her to be launched directly across, and so she lay
lengthwise of the river, and was so arranged as to take the water
parallel with the stream. She is, for aught I know, the largest ship in
the world; at any rate, longer than the Great Britain,--an iron-screw
steamer,--and looked immense and magnificent, and was gorgeously dressed
out in flags. Had it been a pleasant day, all Chester and half Wales
would have been there to see the launch; and, in spite of the rain, there
were a good many people on the opposite shore, as well as on our side;
and one or two booths, and many of the characteristics of a fair,--that
is to say, men and women getting intoxicated without any great noise and
confusion.

The ship was expected to go off at about twelve o'clock, and at that
juncture all Mr. ------'s friends assembled under the bows of the ship,
where we were a little sheltered from the rain by the projection of that
part of the vessel over our heads. The bottle of port-wine with which
she was to be christened was suspended from the bows to the platform
where we stood by a blue ribbon; and the ceremony was to be performed by
Mrs. ------, who, I could see, was very nervous in anticipation of the
ceremony. Mr. ------ kept giving her instructions in a whisper, and
showing her how to throw the bottle; and as the critical moment
approached, he took hold of it along with her. All this time we were
waiting in momentary expectation of the ship going off, everything being
ready, and only the touch of a spring, as it were, needed to make her
slide into the water. But the chief manager kept delaying a little
longer, and a little longer; though the pilot on board sent to tell him
that it was time she was off. "Yes, yes; but I want as much water as I
can get," answered the manager; and so he held on till, I suppose, the
tide had raised the river Dee to its very acme of height. At last the
word was given; the ship began slowly to move; Mrs. ------ threw the
bottle against the bow with a spasmodic effort that dashed it into a
thousand pieces, and diffused the fragrance of the old port all around,
where it lingered several minutes. I did not think that there could have
been such a breathless moment in an affair of this kind.

The ship moved majestically down toward the river; and unless it were
Niagara, I never saw anything grander and more impressive than the motion
of this mighty mass as she departed from us. We on the platform, and
everybody along both shores of the Dee, took off our hats in the rain,
waved handkerchiefs, cheered, shouted,--"Beautiful!" "What a noble
launch!" "Never was so fair a sight!"--and, really, it was so grand,
that calm, majestic movement, that I felt the tears come into my eyes.
The wooden pathway adown which she was gliding began to smoke with the
friction; when all at once, when we expected to see her plunge into the
Dee, she came to a full stop. Mr. ------, the father of my friend, a
gentleman with white hair, a dark, expressive face, bright eyes, and an
Oriental cast of features, immediately took the alarm. A moment before
his countenance had been kindled with triumph; but now he turned pale as
death, and seemed to grow ten years older while I was looking at him.
Well he might, for his noble ship was stuck fast in the land of the Dee,
and without deepening the bed of the river, I do not see how her vast
iron hulk is ever to be got out.

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