Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  After having examined all the upper stories, we went down into the vaults underneath — vaults once grim and hoary, terrible to captives and feudal enemies, now devoted to no purpose more grim than that of coal cellars and wine vaults. In Oliver’s time, a regiment was quartered there: they are extensive enough, apparently, for an army.

  The kitchen and its adjuncts are of magnificent dimensions, and indicate an amplitude in the way of provision for good cheer worthy an ancient house; and what struck me as a still better feature was a library of sound, sensible, historical, and religious works for the servants.

  We went into the beer vaults, where a man drew beer into a long black jack, such as Scott describes. It is a tankard, made of black leather, I should think half a yard deep. He drew the beer from a large hogshead, and offered us some in a glass. It looked very clear, but, on tasting, I found it so exceedingly bitter that it struck me there would be small virtue for me in abstinence.

  In passing up to go out of the house, we met in the entry two pleasant-looking young women, dressed in white muslin. As they passed us, a door opened where a table was handsomely set out, at which quite a number of well-dressed people were seating themselves. I withdrew my eyes immediately, fearing lest I had violated some privacy. Our conductor said to us, “That is the upper servants’ dining room.”

  Once in the yard again, we went to see some of the older parts of the building. The oldest of these, Caesar’s Tower, which is said to go back to the time of the Romans, is not now shown to visitors. Beneath it is a dark, damp dungeon, where prisoners used to be confined, the walls of which are traced all over with inscriptions and rude drawings.

  Then you are conducted to Guy’s Tower, named, I suppose, after the hero of the green dragon and dun cow. Here are five tiers of guard rooms, and by the ascent of a hundred and thirty-three steps you reach the battlements, where you gain a view of the whole court and grounds, as well as of the beautiful surrounding landscape.

  In coming down from this tower, we somehow or other got upon the ramparts, which connect it with the great gate. We walked on the wall four abreast, and played that we were knights and ladies of the olden time, walking on the ramparts. And I picked a bough from an old pine tree that grew over our heads; it much resembled our American yellow pitch pine.

  Then we went down and crossed the grounds to the greenhouse, to see the famous Warwick vase. The greenhouse is built with a Gothic stone front, situated on a fine point in the landscape. And there, on a pedestal, surrounded by all manner of flowering shrubs, stands this celebrated antique. It is of white marble, and was found at the bottom of a lake near Adrian’s villa, in Italy. They say that it holds a hundred and thirty-six gallons; constructed, I suppose, in the roistering old drinking times of the Roman emperors, when men seem to have discovered that the grand object for which they were sent into existence was to perform the functions of wine skins. It is beautifully sculptured with grape leaves, and the skin and claws of the panther — these latter certainly not an inappropriate emblem of the god of wine, beautiful, but dangerous.

  Well, now it was all done. Merodach Baladan had not a more perfect exposé of the riches of Hezekiah than we had of the glories of Warwick. One always likes to see the most perfect thing of its kind; and probably this is the most perfect specimen of the feudal ages yet remaining in England.

  As I stood with Joseph Sturge under the old cedars of Lebanon, and watched the multitude of tourists, and parties of pleasure, who were thronging the walks, I said to him, “After all, this establishment amounts to a public museum and pleasure grounds for the use of the people.” He assented. “And,” said I, “you English people like these things; you like these old magnificent seats, kept up by old families.” “That is what I tell them,” said Joseph Sturge. “I tell them there is no danger in enlarging the suffrage, for the people would not break up these old establishments if they could.” On that point, of course, I had no means of forming an opinion.

  One cannot view an institution so unlike any thing we have in our own country without having many reflections excited, for one of these estates may justly be called an institution; it includes within itself all the influence on a community of a great model farm, of model housekeeping, of a general museum of historic remains, and of a gallery of fine arts.

  It is a fact that all these establishments through England are, at certain fixed hours, thrown open for the inspection of whoever may choose to visit them, with no other expense than the gratuity which custom requires to be given to the servant who shows them. I noticed, as we passed from one part of the ground to another, that our guides changed — one part apparently being the perquisite of one servant, and one of another. Many of the servants who showed them appeared to be superannuated men, who probably had this post as one of the dignities and perquisites of their old age.

  The influence of these estates on the community cannot but be in many respects beneficial, and should go some way to qualify the prejudice with which republicans are apt to contemplate any thing aristocratic; for although the legal title to these things inheres in but one man, yet in a very important sense they belong to the whole community, indeed, to universal humanity. It may be very undesirable and unwise to wish to imitate these institutions in America, and yet it may be illiberal to undervalue them as they stand in England. A man would not build a house, in this nineteenth century, on the pattern of a feudal castle; and yet where the feudal castle is built, surely its antique grace might plead somewhat in its favor, and it may be better to accommodate it to modern uses, than to level it, and erect a modern mansion in its place.

  Nor, since the world is wide, and now being rapidly united by steam into one country, does the objection to these things, on account of the room they take up, seem so great as formerly. In the million of square miles of the globe there is room enough for all sorts of things.

  With such reflections the lover of the picturesque may comfort himself, hoping that he is not sinning against the useful in his admiration of the beautiful.

  One great achievement of the millennium, I trust, will be in uniting these two elements, which have ever been contending. There was great significance in the old Greek fable which represented Venus as the divinely-appointed helpmeet of Vulcan, and yet always quarrelling with him.

  We can scarce look at the struggling, earth-bound condition of useful labor through the world without joining in the beautiful aspiration of our American poet, —

  “Surely, the wiser time shall come

  When this fine overplus of might,

  No longer sullen, slow, and dumb,

  Shall leap to music and to light.

  In that new childhood of the world

  Life of itself shall dance and play,

  Fresh blood through Time’s shrunk veins be hurled,

  And labor meet delight half way.”13

  In the new state of society which we are trying to found in America, it must be our effort to hasten the consummation. These great estates of old countries may keep it for their share of the matter to work out perfect models, while we will seize the ideas thus elaborated, and make them the property of the million.

  As we were going out, we stopped a little while at the porter’s lodge to look at some relics.

  Now, I dare say that you have been thinking, all the while, that these stories about the wonderful Guy are a sheer fabrication, or, to use a convenient modern term, a myth. Know, then, that the identical armor belonging to him is still preserved here; to wit, the sword, about seven feet long, a shield, helmet, breastplate, and tilting pole, together with his porridge pot, which holds one hundred and twenty gallons, and a large fork, as they call it, about three feet long; I am inclined to think this must have been his toothpick! His sword weighs twenty pounds.

  There is, moreover, a rib of the mastodon cow which he killed, hung up for the terror of all refractory beasts of that name in modern days.

  Furthermore, know, then, that there are authentic documents in the Ashm
olean Museum, at Oxford, showing that the family run back to within four years after the birth of Christ, so that there is abundance of time for them to have done a little of almost every thing. It appears that they have been always addicted to exploits, since we read of one of them, soon after the Christian era, encountering a giant, who ran upon him with a tree which he had snapped off for the purpose, for it seems giants were not nice in the choice of weapons; but the chronicler says, “The Lord had grace with him, and overcame the giant,” and in commemoration of this event the family introduced into their arms the ragged staff.

  It is recorded of another of the race, that he was one of seven children born at a birth, and that all the rest of his brothers and sisters were, by enchantment, turned into swans with gold collars. This remarkable case occurred in the time of the grandfather of Sir Guy, and of course, if we believe this, we shall find no difficulty in the case of the cow, or any thing else.

  There is a very scarce book in the possession of a gentleman of Warwick, written by one Dr. John Kay, or caius, in which he gives an account of the rare and peculiar animals of England in 1552. In this he mentioned seeing the bones of the head and the vertebrae of the neck of an enormous animal at Warwick Castle. He states that the shoulder blade was hung up by chains from the north gate of Coventry, and that a rib of the same animal was hanging up in the chapel of Guy, Earl of Warwick, and that the people fancied it to be the rib of a cow which haunted a ditch near Coventry, and did injury to many persons; and he goes on to imagine that this may be the bone of a bonasus or a urus. He says, “It is probable many animals of this kind formerly lived in our England, being of old an island full of woods and forests, because even in our boyhood the horns of these animals were in common use at the table.” The story of Sir Guy is furthermore quite romantic, and contains some circumstances very instructive to all ladies. For the chronicler asserts, “that Dame Felye, daughter and heire to Erle Rohand, for her beauty called Fely le Belle, or Felys the Fayre, by true enheritance, was Countesse of Warwyke, and lady and wyfe to the most victoriouse Knight, Sir Guy, to whom in his woing tyme she made greate straungeres, and caused him, for her sake, to put himself in meny greate distresses, dangers, and perills; but when they were wedded, and b’en but a little season together, he departed from her, to her greate hevynes, and never was conversant with her after, to her understandinge.” That this may not appear to be the result of any revengeful spirit on the part of Sir Guy, the chronicler goes on further to state his motives — that, after his marriage, considering what he had done for a woman’s sake, he thought to spend the other part of his life for God’s sake, and so departed from his lady in pilgrim weeds, which raiment he kept to his life’s end. After wandering about a good many years he settled in a hermitage, in a place not far from the castle, called Guy’s Cliff, and when his lady distributed food to beggars at the castle gate, was in the habit of coming among them to receive alms, without making himself known to her. It states, moreover, that two days before his death an angel informed him of the time of his departure, and that his lady would die a fortnight after him, which happening accordingly, they were both buried in the grave together. A romantic cavern, at the place called Guy’s Cliff, is shown as the dwelling of the recluse. The story is a curious relic of the religious ideas of the times.

  On our way from the castle we passed by Guy’s Cliff, which is at present the seat of the Hon. C.B. Percy. The establishment looked beautifully from the road, as we saw it up a long avenue of trees; it is one of the places travellers generally examine, but as we were bound for Kenilworth we were content to take it on trust. It is but a short drive from there to Kenilworth. We got there about the middle of the afternoon. Kenilworth has been quite as extensive as Warwick, though now entirely gone to ruins. I believe Oliver Cromwell’s army have the credit of finally dismantling it. Cromwell seems literally to have left his mark on his generation, for I never saw a ruin in England when I did not hear that he had something to do with it. Every broken arch and ruined battlement seemed always to find a sufficient account of itself by simply enunciating the word Cromwell. And when we see how much the Puritans arrayed against themselves all the æsthetic principles of our nature, we can somewhat pardon those who did not look deeper than the surface, for the prejudice with which they regarded the whole movement; a movement, however, of which we, and all which is most precious to us, are the lineal descendants and heirs.

  We wandered over the ruins, which are very extensive, and which Scott, with his usual vivacity and accuracy, has restored and repeopled. We climbed up into Amy Robsart’s chamber; we scrambled into one of the arched windows of what was formerly the great dining hall, where Elizabeth feasted in the midst of her lords and ladies, and where every stone had rung to the sound of merriment and revelry. The windows are broken out; it is roofless and floorless, waving and rustling with pendent ivy, and vocal with the song of hundreds of little birds.

  We wandered from room to room, looking up and seeing in the walls the desolate fireplaces, tier over tier, the places where the beams of the floors had gone into the walls, and still the birds continued their singing every where.

  Nothing affected me more than this ceaseless singing and rejoicing of birds in these old gray ruins. They seemed so perfectly joyous and happy amid the desolations, so airy and fanciful in their bursts of song, so ignorant and careless of the deep meaning of the gray desolation around them, that I could not but be moved. It was nothing to them how these stately, sculptured walls became lonely and ruinous, and all the weight of a thousand thoughts and questionings which arise to us is never even dreamed by them. They sow not, neither do they reap, but their heavenly Father feeds them; and so the wilderness and the desolate place is glad in them, and they are glad in the wilderness and desolate place.

  It was a beautiful conception, this making of birds. Shelley calls them “imbodied joys;” and Christ says, that amid the vaster ruins of man’s desolation, ruins more dreadfully suggestive than those of sculptured frieze and architrave, we can yet live a bird’s life of unanxious joy; or, as Martin Luther beautifully paraphrases it, “We can be like a bird, that sits singing on his twig and lets God think for him.”

  The deep consciousness that we are ourselves ruined, and that this world is a desolation more awful, and of more sublime material, and wrought from stuff of higher temper than ever was sculptured in hall or cathedral, this it must be that touches such deep springs of sympathy in the presence of ruins. We, too, are desolate, shattered, and scathed; there are traceries and columns of celestial workmanship; there are heaven-aspiring arches, splendid colonnades and halls, but fragmentary all. Yet above us bends an all-pitying Heaven, and spiritual voices and callings in our hearts, like these little singing birds, speak of a time when almighty power shall take pleasure in these stones, and favor the dust thereof.

  We sat on the top of the strong tower, and looked off into the country, and talked a good while. Some of the ivy that mantles this building has a trunk as large as a man’s body, and throws out numberless strong arms, which, interweaving, embrace and interlace half-falling towers, and hold them up in a living, growing mass of green.

  The walls of one of the oldest towers are sixteen feet thick. The lake, which Scott speaks of, is dried up and grown over with rushes. The former moat presents only a grassy hollow. What was formerly a gate house is still inhabited by the family who have the care of the building. The land around the gate house is choicely and carefully laid out, and has high, clipped hedges of a species of variegated holly.

  Thus much of old castles and ivy. Farewell to Kenilworth.

  LETTER XII

  My Dear H.: —

  After leaving Kenilworth we drove to Coventry, where we took the cars again. This whole ride from Stratford to Warwick, and on to Coventry, answers more to my ideas of old England than any thing I have seen; it is considered one of the most beautiful parts of the kingdom. It has quaint old houses, and a certain air of rural, picturesque quiet, which i
s very charming.

  Coventry is old and queer, with narrow streets and curious houses, famed for the ancient legend of Godiva, one of those beautiful myths that grow, like the mistletoe, on the bare branches of history, and which, if they never were true in the letter, have been a thousand times true in the spirit.

  The evening came on raw and chilly, so that we rejoiced to find ourselves once more in the curtained parlor by the bright, sociable fire.

  As we were drinking tea Elihu Burritt came in. It was the first time I had ever seen him, though I had heard a great deal of him from our friends in Edinburgh. He is a man in middle life, tall and slender, with fair complexion, blue eyes, an air of delicacy and refinement, and manners of great gentleness. My ideas of the “Learned Blacksmith” had been of something altogether more ponderous and peremptory. Elihu has been, for some years, operating in England and on the continent in a movement which many, in our half-Christianized times, regard with as much incredulity as the grim, old, warlike barons did the suspicious imbecilities of reading and writing. The sword now, as then, seems so much more direct a way to terminate controversies, that many Christian men, even, cannot conceive how the world is to get along without it.

  Burritt’s mode of operation has been by the silent organization of circles of ladies in all the different towns of the United Kingdom, who raise a certain sum for the diffusion of the principles of peace on earth and good will to men. Articles, setting forth the evils of war, moral, political, and social, being prepared, these circles pay for their insertion in all the principal newspapers of the continent. They have secured to themselves in this way a continual utterance in France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany; so that from week to week, and month to month, they can insert articles upon these subjects. Many times the editors insert the articles as editorial, which still further favors their design. In addition to this, the ladies of these circles in England correspond with the ladies of similar circles existing in other countries; and in this way there is a mutual kindliness of feeling established through these countries.