We had only a week to spare, but we were not long in choosing where to spend our holiday. At that time the Lake Country was accessible, but not yet crossed through and through, by railroads. The cars took us from London almost through to Windermere, but, that being the gate of the sanctuary, they went no further. We had to cross the “Black Country,” a weird region of coal-mines and furnaces, where scarcely a blade of grass meets the eye; interminable plains, strewn with gaunt machinery and bristling with tall brick chimneys or low, wide, oven-like buildings, stretch from the track of the railroad as far as the horizon; a muffled noise, rumbling and crackling, is the only sound besides the shrill whistle of the engine; the sky is black as with the promise of ten thousand thunder-storms, the murky air hangs like a pall over the earth, and tongues of flame shoot up now and then from the mouths of the furnaces. At night the scene is gloomily splendid; everywhere lurid flashes leap up from these openings, for the work is incessant here; half-naked forms stalk from chimney to pit, wheeling giant barrows or pushing forward heavy trucks on tramways; no sound but the never-ceasing rumble of wheels and crackle of flames—apparently a silent Pandemonium or Dantesque city of Dis; at any rate, a sight that one does not easily forget.
Windermere is the largest, the most fashionable, and the best known of the English lakes. It was Saturday night when we reached it and went to an inn overlooking the calm sheet of water. The moon was up, and streaked the shadows of the great mountains that lay across the lake with her shimmering silver pathway; the little boats moored by the various landings rocked to and fro in the gentle breeze, and the wavelets came with a “swish” against the pebbly shore. Next morning, on inquiring for the Catholic church, we were told that there was a private chapel in the house of a Catholic gentleman who lived on an island in the lake, and allowed any respectable tourist to come on Sunday. We rowed over to the island, and found it all a garden: smooth lawns to the water's edge, broad gravel-paths through groves of elm and chestnut, a glowing parterre, rustic seats, fountains and marble balustrades, and by the boat-house a little group of gay skiffs dancing up and down on the blue water. The chapel was up-stairs, and there was an outside stair-case leading to it, down which we saw a familiar figure coming slowly towards us. It was that of a London priest whom we knew, and who, like us, was spending a brief holiday among the lakes. He had come over to say an early Mass; the master of the house was not at home, he said, but the chaplain would be glad to welcome all Catholics, many of whom came during the touring season. After Mass we strolled for an hour about the garden, admiring the vistas contrived [pg 796] between the trees, at the end of which glimpses of the blue sky and sparkling water, with some gray or purple peak cleaving the line of the horizon, could be seen. From every point of the lake itself these mountains strike the eye; for the most part bare of trees, their lower ledges covered with green pasture-land, and seamed here and there with the foamy streak of a beck or stream; their summits sheer rock. Their names all have a grand, free sound that suits their craggy, majestic beauty—Helm Crag, Hammar Scar, Silver How, Skiddaw. This one is the monarch of the lake country. Great How is a single, conspicuous peak rising at the foot of Lake Thirlmere, to the west of the lovely vale of Legberthwaite, near the high-road between Ambleside and Keswick. Ambleside is a favorite resort of students; young men from the two universities often come to spend the long vacation here, where reading, walking, and boating can be combined. The scenery is very beautiful; the valleys are broken up into a thousand nooks where fern and heather grow, and some tiny rivulet trickles beneath the broad-arched fronds of the bracken; every old wall wears a golden crown of celandine, or, in native dialect, pilewort; the “ghyll”—i.e., a short, steep, narrow gorge, a miniature cañon—is traversed by the foamy brook, leaping to the waterfall called in Cumberland a “force”; the birch, the rowan, the oak, cling to the rocky ledges that jut out over the little cataract, and everywhere above the greenery lies the shadow of the great lonely hills. Black Comb in Cumberland Wordsworth calls a spot fit for a “ministering angel” to choose, for from its summit, on a tolerably clear day, England, Scotland, and Ireland are all three visible. Many of the mountains, both in Cumberland and Westmoreland, have traces of inscriptions on the native rock which have by some learned men been supposed to be Runic, but which it is now generally agreed to call Roman. They are very rude, and much effaced by time and the action of the weather; hence the uncertainty.
It was by the shores of Windermere that a party of young men, all enthusiastic Tractarians, spent a vacation in one of the first years of that movement now called Puseyite and ritualistic, but then known as the Young England movement. In those days ladies washed and ironed the church linen, and wore their dainty fingers to the bone sewing surplices and embroidering altar-cloths; while others would take it by turn to sweep the churches and dust the pews; and others again, intent on doing penance, would kneel for hours on stone floors, and even use the discipline unsparingly, until the doctor's verdict put an end to their misguided zeal. Blindly they were beating about for the truth, and thought they had found it in practices of self-denial. It was a touching blindness—one that God often and often enlightened during those fruitful years. Young men made a point of exercising bodily mortification, even in vacation time, and, when thrown by circumstances amid unsympathizing companions, would carry their zeal into the commonest actions, and make a silent boast of their new-found faith. One Friday, for instance, a few young members of Parliament, assembled in the lobby of the House of Commons, called for “tea and toast” instead of the unfailing mutton-chop [pg 797] of tradition, and the mild protest created quite a sensation. On going home they were received by their several households as champions of a holy cause who, from humble beginnings, were going to bring about a mighty revolution, a national awakening. It was very beautiful, this child-like faith in their own ideal—so beautiful that God rewarded many of those who held it by leading them into the everlasting reality of the great universal, apostolic church. The athletic young hermits of Ambleside were not left out of the reckoning. One day one of them strayed out alone over the hills, with some old volume of the fathers under his arm, and his questioning young soul eager for the knowledge which the wonderful serenity of this mountain region seemed at the time to typify so well. He was out a long time, and, when he came home to his companions, he seemed to them transfigured. A new peace and yet a more ardent enthusiasm had come to him, and he spoke in words almost incomprehensible to them:
“I have found the man who has the idea!”
What had happened to him was this: In his walk he had met a young stranger, and spoken to him. Kindred thoughts and aspirations had led them into a long and eager conversation, wherein it soon appeared that the stranger, with his fair, girlish face and dreamy blue eyes, was the master, and his new friend only the humble disciple. They had talked on into the twilight, and the latter, entranced, at last asked the name of him who in a few short hours had taught him to see things in a clearer, diviner light than all the patristic reading had been able to do during his college course. The young man opened the book he had with him, and showed him his name written on the fly-leaf. It was Frederick William Faber.
From Windermere we started on our real tour. The native conveyances are called “cars,” and hold four people sitting opposite each other, but sideways and parallel with the horses. From a rough, square box, painted dark blue or green, up to a real town-made carriage in the same shape, this conveyance is universally in use over the north. Everywhere the same beautiful scenery—moist nooks, a natural fernery, tumbling waterfalls, walls covered with wild flowers; here and there an old-fashioned inn with an old-fashioned landlord, waiting himself on his customers, and sitting down to tell them at his ease all the gossip and the guide-book lore of the neighborhood, the best time to go up the mountain, when it was safe to take a boat out on the mere, the accident in the lead-mine last year, etc., etc. At such an inn, “The Swan,” we passed one night, and had an excellent and abundant rustic supper, not a hundred yards from the brand-new tourist hotel, “The Prince of Wales,” gas-lighted and high-priced, with saucy waiters and London upholstery, and each floor exactly the counterpart of the other, like a penitentiary.
Ullswater is a stormy lake, a sort of caldron enclosed in steep, forbidding rocks rising perpendicularly from the water. Above them is a wooded table-land, with old houses hidden up the slopes beyond, one a ruined monastery, with a modern home fashioned out of a few available fragments of strong mediæval masonry, and a sort of museum or armory [pg 798] contrived among the standing arches of a less useful portion of the building. It was a steep climb to get to it, and for miles on either side of the pathway, that was half a natural staircase, there was no other road to it. The view over the dark lake was impressive; the waters, calm enough now, lay beneath us like a floor of black marble, with a fringe of heavy shadows along the edge where the cliffs overhung it.
Now and then we would pass detached hamlets with their sturdy, grave population all astir, the women fine specimens of their sex, with that frank expression and grand physical development which are bred of mountain training and open-air life. Together with all the people of the north, they have many peculiar customs, and altogether form a race apart from the inhabitants of other English counties. The accents of their nervous, expressive dialect, the names of their mountains and lakes, the flavor of quaintness and individuality that hangs about their life, somehow suggest the old times of early Christianity when S. Wilfrid ruled in York, or struggled inch by inch for his invaded territory and ignored rights. Stopping to water your horses in one of these hamlets, you may see a knot of men standing silently and expectantly round the door of a clean, home-like cottage, and just outside, laid on the porch seat, a basin filled with sprigs of box-wood. The men are waiting for a coffin to be borne out, and, when it comes, they will all fall into line behind it, and each, taking a sprig from the basin, will throw it into the grave after the prayers have been said. Of course this is a Catholic reminiscence of the days when the box sprigs were used to sprinkle the coffin with holy water, as they are now in most countries on the Continent; but, besides this, box-wood is an evergreen, and therefore a symbol of the immortality of the soul.
Sometimes we would come to a little mountain tarn, across which we were ferried, car, horses, and all. The regular travelling in these regions is done by stage-coaches, of which we availed ourselves for sending forward our slender baggage, so as to be quite independent and unencumbered in our movements. The mountain lakelets, that are never mentioned in guide-books, are very beautiful with their fringe of rushes and boggy earth starred with white and golden flowers, and their flocks of teal and wild duck dwelling in peace in these undisturbed wildernesses.
Grasmere, a village on one of the larger lakes bearing the same name, was Wordsworth's home for eight years, the first eight of this century. He was born in Cumberland, and the home-passion that has gained him his title of Lake Poet never left him. Fortunate in his worldly circumstances, he went to Cambridge, and, though a desultory reader, took a fairly creditable degree after four years' study. He made tours on foot through Wales and Germany, and published his poetical reminiscences, though with little success; but through their medium he gained the friendship of Coleridge, his fellow-poet and life-long companion. He settled at Grasmere in 1799 with his sister, who was throughout his life, even after his marriage, his guiding star—the kindred spirit whose approval and sympathy were the secret sources of his intellectual life. Of her he says, speaking of a peak which they could see from their “orchard-seat”:
[pg 799]Of his wife he wrote, after three years of marriage, words contrasting his first impressions as a lover with the sweet, solemn experience of a husband. Then “a phantom of delight, ... a lovely apparition, ... a dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay,” but now
Song seemed to gush from Wordsworth's soul as naturally and copiously as water from a mountain spring. Some of his verses were written with a slate-pencil on stones in lonely places; for instance, in a deserted quarry on one of the islands at Rydal, on a stone half way up the grim mountain of Black Comb, in Cumberland, or with a common pencil on a stone in an outhouse on the island at Grasmere. He lived poetry. Everything with him was a pretext for verse; neither the commonest household occurrence nor the sublimest spectacle of nature up there among those rocky fells and green valleys lying under awful shadows of coming storms, was a stranger to his ready pen. He says of himself that
There are few places so thoroughly fitted for a poet's home as the lake country of Cumberland and Westmoreland, yet more so then than now, when it has become the fashion to make a tour among the lakes, even as one does down the Rhine. England has wakened to the consciousness of her own beauty within the last forty years, and a home-tour often takes the place of a foreign one; yet to those who first visited these Eden-spots the rare charm is gone, for sight-seers have taken the place of the “wanderer,” and regular guides usurp the simple escort of a stray shepherd whom in old times you might have happened to meet by some force, on the cool banks of which he would have told you, in his racy dialect, the old traditions and legends of the neighborhood—the legend of the horn of Egremont Castle, for instance, a Cumberland tale, telling how Sir Eustace Lucie and his brother Hubert rode away to the Holy Land, and the former, pointing to the “horn of the inheritance” that hung by the gate-way, and which none could sound,
said to his brother: “If I fall, and Christ our Saviour demand my sinful soul, do thou come back straight-way, and sound the horn, that we may have a living house in thee.” And Hubert promised. But out in Palestine Sir Eustace disappeared, and, when the news was brought to Hubert that his elder brother lay “deep in Jordan flood,” he said darkly to the messengers: “Take your earnings. Oh! that I could have seen my brother die.” He went home, and whether he sounded the horn or not none knew; it was never heard, but Sir Hubert lived in glee for years, with wife [pg 800] and sons and daughters, until one day
and Sir Eustace came back safe and unsuspecting. Hubert rose up and fled in silence, and it was years before he was again heard of; then he came and asked forgiveness, and obtained it, and ended his penitent life in the cloister; so that Eustace's “heirs of heirs, through a long posterity, sounded the horn which they alone could sound.” The same legend is told of the Hall of Hutton John, an old house of the Huddlestones in a lonely valley on the river Dacor, also in these parts.
Or it might be the tradition of Henry, Lord Clifford, the shepherd-boy, whose father lost his title and estates during the wars of the Roses. Henry was restored, after twenty-four years of shepherd life, in the first year of the reign of Henry VII., and it is recorded that, when called to Parliament, he behaved nobly and wisely, but otherwise came seldom to London or the court, and rather delighted to live in the country, where he repaired several of his castles, which had gone to decay during the late troubles. “There is a tradition,” says Wordsworth himself, “current in the village of Threlkeld (in Cumberland, where lay the estate of his father-in-law, Sir Lancelot Threlkeld), that in the course of his shepherd life he had acquired great astronomical knowledge.” The poet clothed this incident (as he did every other that struck his fancy in that poetic land of the north) in verse, singing a lay of the Red Rose, revived at last, the flower of Lancaster, and weaving in the tale of the boy's wanderings on “Carrock's side,” in “Rosedale's groves,” and “Blencathara's rugged coves.” The common name of this last-mentioned mountain is Saddle-Back. Near Threlkeld, hidden in the gorges of the purple hills, lies Bowscale Tarn, where the people of the country still believe two immortal fish to dwell. Tarn signifies, in north-country dialect, a small mountain mere, or lake. Wordsworth's descriptions of scenery are exquisite; everywhere you find the traces of that personal love of the places he paints, that patient, detailed minuteness of touch which only comes of long gazing on a favorite scene, and of familiarity with its every aspect, in winter and summer, in storm and sunshine, in mist and rainbow. Every place has some tender associations in his memory; the stately fir-grove whither he was wont
reminds him of a dear friend, “a silent poet” but a sailor by profession, after whom he called the pathway to the grove, whence
could be distinctly seen. That friend never returned, but perished by shipwreck in the discharge of his duty. Here, too, in this beautiful lake country, both at Grasmere and at his later and more celebrated home, Rydal Mount, in Westmoreland, Wordsworth lost others dearer yet—two of his children, who died young, and Dora, his favorite daughter, who died six years after her marriage. When on his own death-bed, three years later, his wife, brave and self-forgetting to the last, comforted him by whispering: “William, you are going to Dora.” His poems are so complete a guide-book [pg 801] to the lake country, as well as a series of living sketches of the people of the north, that it is almost unavoidable to treat them as tourists in Scotland do The Lady of the Lake, or tourists at Rome Childe Harold. In his day, however, many popular traits were in full vigor which now have almost disappeared. For instance, he says himself that “the class of beggars to which the old man here described belongs will probably soon be extinct. It consisted of poor and mostly old and infirm persons, who confined themselves to a stated round in their neighborhood, and had certain fixed days, on which, at different houses, they regularly received alms, sometimes in money, but mostly in provisions.” In his verse he describes the “Old Cumberland Beggar” thus:
The passing horseman does not throw him a careless alms, but stops, lingers, and drops a coin safely into the old man's hat; the toll-bar keeper sees him from a distance, and leaves her work to lift the latch for him; the post-boy slackens his horse's speed, and turns with less noisy wheels out of his path; the very dogs do not bark at him.
No; he is “a record binding together past deeds and offices of charity”; “a silent monitor” to those who sit sheltered “in a little grove of their own kindred”; an object to call forth that blessed feeling that you have, though “poorest poor,” been “the fathers and dealers-out of some small blessings”; a prompter to “tender offices and pensive thoughts.” See this picture:
And the poet, the lover of nature, the child of the mountain, ends by a warning and a prayer:
Though we have quoted Wordsworth's poetry, it is not as a poet but as a man that we speak of him here, not desiring to criticise his verse or to enter into discussions concerning the judgment given of it by critics of his own time. In the Lake Country his personality strikes you with the same sense of reality and continued presence as do the everlasting hills and the changeless lakes themselves. He died only a quarter of a century ago, though his principal poems all belonged to the first and second decades of this century. In 1814 The Excursion was published, and the poem which has made his chief fame was so severely criticised at the time that one of the reviewers boasted that he had crushed it. A brother poet, Southey, exclaimed: “He crush The Excursion! He might as well fancy he could crush Skiddaw!” If his verse was coldly received at first, it was chiefly because emotional, passionate poetry, such as Byron's, Moore's, Scott's, and Campbell's, was the fashion then. [pg 802] Wordsworth's was calm as nature herself, and concerned itself little with man's history, past or present. When he did mingle the deeds of men with the loving touches of his scenery descriptions, he would choose pure, white lives, such as would not jar with the calmness of lake and fell, of opal sky and shimmering water. Here is what the legend of the ruined hermitage on S. Herbert's Island, on Lake Derwentwater, suggested to him. The story of the holy friends is told also in Montalembert's Monks of the West.
Derwentwater is the most picturesque of all the lakes in point of smiling landscape. It has several little wooded islands dotting its surface; its waters are clear and more blue than those of the other lakes, and the mountains round the shore are less abrupt and naked. Lodore Force tumbles almost perpendicularly into it from the steep, shelving rocks that jut out from the dense forest growth, like the backbone of a huge black snake wriggling through the underbrush. These are the same waters whose sound swept over the lake and smote the ears of the hermit-saint twelve centuries ago. It is, except one, the most romantic waterfall in the Lake Country. Below this wooded hill, and on the very margin of Derwentwater, stands a little old-time inn, as clean as a Dutch house, with a rustic porch and a little lawn before it, ringed in with chains hung in festoons from four or five low posts. In the middle is a miniature gun, which is fired off every now and then for the amusement of the tourists. The echoes thus awakened among the surrounding hills are almost endless.
This beautiful North Country has another interest not so romantic—that of its mines, which are mostly of lead. Just across Derwentwater there is a fine mine, which, from its convenient position, is often visited. We rowed across the lake to see it; but if you have seen one mine, you will scarcely care to see a second—at least if you have no better motive than curiosity. To us on that first expedition it was simply fun. Luckily, there was no proposition made to don male attire for the only woman of the party; a huge oilskin coat with an ample hood quite wrapped her up and protected her for the downward journey. We got into a rough box or “basket,” preferring this quicker and more adventurous mode of descent to the species of chair contrived for the visitors to the mine, and were shot down in an incredibly short space of time to the second “level” of what we saw there is really very little to tell. The lodes or veins of metal looked like irregular lines of shining moisture drawn on the rocky walls; there was a tramway occupying the whole of the narrow gallery that formed the level, and up and down this tramway, at a tremendous rate, and with a noise like thunder, came the trucks loaded [pg 803] with ore. We had to squeeze up against the wall as they passed. The path was more than half submerged; we splashed into pools and puddles at every third or fourth step, and the moisture dropped persistently from the glistening roof. We should have gone to the third and lowest “level” had it not been so thoroughly under water that the miners had to wear long waterproof boots mid-way up their thighs when they worked there. On going up again we stopped at the first level, which looked exactly like the other. We did not gain much information by our excursion, but it was a rare frolic, and we were greatly excited. Our clothes came out of the “basket” in a soaked and streaky condition; but nobody cared, the achievement was enough to make up for anything. Some years later we tried the same sort of experiment, and did not find it nearly so exciting. It was at an iron-mine in Monmouthshire, near the river Wye, famed in the legends of the Round Table; we were let down the shaft in a kind of iron cage (the miners' regular conveyance), which swung unpleasantly to and fro, grinding against the sides of the narrow opening, and bumping us roughly down at the bottom, where, as their time was nearly out, the men were gathering, ready to go up. Here there was literally nothing to see. The work was done a long way off, and there was no time to go there; besides, the place was several inches under water. The interest of this expedition consisted simply in going down and coming up again, and in the feeling that we could “say we had done it.” What was really interesting on this same occasion was the sight of the iron-works and furnaces at nightfall. The metal was put into the furnaces at one end, and came out at the other in a continuous stream of intensest light; blindingly white it poured out, running slowly and spreading itself into a network of grooves all parallel with each other, ready fitted for its reception, where it was left to cool. Few things so truly realize one's idea of light as molten metal. There seemed no color in this beautiful stream, and one could fancy just such an intense glow as that to be the very radiance round the throne of God. It was impossible to stand near it for more than a second, the heat was so fierce, and we had to watch the calm, uninterrupted lustre from a respectful distance. This work was going on in a kind of open shed, sheltered above to protect the furnaces and machinery, but open at the sides, where in the darkness all kinds of strange groups and forms succeeded one another. The commonest circumstances took on solemnity and mystery in this half-light, the red flashes from inside darting like tongues into the fading light, and making of it all a wonderful, living Rembrandt.
To return to our lakes. We had seen all the great ones, and driven across the country in all directions—through mountain passes where the bare crags and bowlders lay heaped together, as if the Titans had flung them there to bar the passage to their fastnesses; through smiling pastoral valleys where the summer stream bubbled peacefully enough, hiding its secrets of roads washed away and trees uprooted by its anger in early spring; by Esthwaite Lake with its solitary yew-tree celebrated by Wordsworth; out into a bleak region of gray stone walls and hungry-looking pastures to Westdale [pg 804] (valley) and Wastwater. Lonely and silent lies the black mere under its frowning cliffs; no house, no inn, near it; tourists seldom pass it, and tradition says that its depths have never been plumbed. We got a boat at a fisherman's hut; it was not often he used it for anything but the necessities of his craft. And yet, in spite—or rather because—of this desolation, Wastwater has made a more lasting impression on us than the show-lakes with their pretty activity and cheerful bustle of tourist-life. Westdale would be just the place to live in if the mind needed bracing and restoring; few places within the pale of civilization can so truly boast of being absolute solitudes. We trust it is not changed even yet. Quite close, but you would not suspect it from the grim, rocky aspect of the scenery, is a little waterfall. It is in a narrow gully, a mere cleft in the rock, but alive with a thousand varying shades of green—ferns in abundance and in every stage of development, broad, dark, glossy leaves of water-plants, and waxy spikes of rockwort. The incline of the waterfall is so gentle, and so many bowlders jut out from the stream, that you could almost climb up this natural staircase; the snow-white spray dashes all over the banks, turning to diamonds in the hearts of the tiny flowers, and to rainbows on the broad surface of leaves; and the noise of the waters—their plash, their gurgle, or their trickle, as they strike moss, pebble, or little hollows round the big bowlders—seems like a living voice.
Our week was nearly up, and we were to meet the noonday train at a station several miles beyond Wastwater. The road lay through rocky passes, and was reckoned a bad one. Our car-driver was doubtful as to whether we could make the distance in the time that remained; for we had been tempted, by the rugged beauty of the lovely vale, to overstay our appointed time for exploration and natural-history collections. The drive was sufficiently exciting, a last bit of “fun” to end our holiday, and we jolted over the rough road, crossing the worn channels of mountain streams, and noticing on the steep sides of the hills what looked like moving bowlders, but what were in reality small, sure-footed sheep, white, brown, and black. The country grew bleaker as we went on, till at last we reached the primitive railway station just in time. We were very sorry to part with our North-Country driver and his car, and return to the civilized mode of rapid locomotion; the more so as the scenery through which we flew for two or three hours was as barren and as desolate as the shores of the Dead Sea. Gray stone walls made a sort of magnified chess-board of the level country, enclosing small fields of forlorn-looking stubble or bits of dark-red ploughed land. It was inexpressibly dreary, and a marvellous contrast to the beautiful region, bold and rocky, or wooded and smiling, which we had left behind us.
At last we reached Furness, our last halting-place. Here there was a coquettish little station, gay with ornamental wood and wire-work, and with autumn flowers and late climbing roses, while beyond the trim lawn stood an inviting hotel—modern, it is true, but decked out in villa style, full of bay-windows and gables, with green Venetian blinds and long French windows opening into a garden. There was no trace of a village near, or of any human dwelling but these two [pg 805] buildings. The reason was that both of these were subservient to the ruins of S. Mary's Abbey, which stood, as it were, within the hotel-garden. S. Mary's, Furness, is one of the three most stately and most perfect ruined abbeys in England; the others are Fountain's Abbey in Yorkshire, and Tintern on the Wye, Monmouthshire. It is built of red sandstone, the warm hue contrasting beautifully with the luxurious growth of evergreens all round and inside its arches and cloisters. The tracery of the great pointed windows is almost intact, but here and there the tracery of delicate climbing plants is so interwoven with it that the marvel of carving is lost in the wealth of each summer's renewed growth. The church is built in the shape of a cross. The walls and windows of the nave are untouched, and down the centre are the two rows of columns that divided it from the aisles—round Saxon pillars, alternating with clustered Gothic shafts, a sheaf of colonnettes forming one support. The bases of all of them remain, though every one is broken more or less near the base, none being more than two or three feet high. Of course the roof is gone, and everywhere around shaft and pillar grow tall flowering grasses, shrubs with bright berries and spear-like leaves, while a carpet of grass as green as an emerald covers the stone floor. There were seven altars in the church, and the steps to the smaller ones are even now marked by the gradual ascent of the turf. Poking into the earth with a walking-stick, we soon came to the stone steps, not more than three inches under ground. The chancel and sedilia are very perfect, and everywhere the piscinæ are visible in the walls. The chapter-room preserved its stone groined roof up to twenty or thirty years ago, when it fell in. On the walls are the remains of lovely, intricate diaper-work. The refectory is a long hall with a row of columns (only the bases exist now) down the centre, and the principal dormitory is said to have been exactly above this. The whole is now open to the sky. The quiet cloister, with some of the old graves of dead and gone Cistercian monks, is still traceable, and beyond is a little enclosed and railed-in stone chamber, contrived out of the ruined walls, but carefully roofed in, and used to stow away such fragments of sculpture as have been found within the precincts of the abbey. They are thus preserved from the rapacity of tourists. There are bones and skulls among them, too. The North of England was once called the garden-land of the Cistercians; their abbeys abounded in that region, and their power, temporal and spiritual, was paramount. The abbots at the head of those religious corporations of early days had episcopal jurisdiction and claimed episcopal privileges, and were far more powerful than the wandering bishops who had no abbey to back their authority. They had tracts of land and many serfs. In many respects the “villeins” of the church were a happy and a privileged set of people. They were not obliged to serve in the king's armies, as were the serfs of secular lords, and they could not be sued for debt or trespass, or any other local offence. They were immediately and solely under the jurisdiction of the abbot, which superseded, in their case, that of the common law. In return for their service, agricultural and otherwise, [pg 806] the abbot gave them shelter, food, clothing, and protection—not an unequal bargain, even for our days; but when we transport ourselves into the conditions of life in the middle ages, it will be easily seen how desirable a fate it was to be “made over to the church.” In those days protection was a greater boon than even food, lodging, or clothing; it was then what “habeas corpus” and the right of inviolability of domicile are now; and so long as the substance existed, it is idle to quarrel with the garb in which it was clothed.
The ruins were thronged all day; that was the only drawback to our enjoyment, but we remedied that at night. Every train came laden with tourists to see Furness Abbey; they walked about with guide-books and luncheon-baskets, and popped champagne-corks in the cloisters, and strewed chicken-bones among the bases of the great Saxon pillars, chatting, laughing, and joking, and evidently enjoying themselves as they would at a country fair or a cattle-show. This went on all day long; but towards night, after a late dinner at the hotel, they subsided, and scarcely a soul was to be seen in the garden. The men were in the billiard-room, and the women probably packing their things for the morrow's journey; so we slipped out, two of us, and went over to the deserted ruins. The moon was up, not quite at her full, but bright enough to make the scene very beautiful, and there were many stars as well. It is not easy to describe the impression this night-view of the old Catholic abbey made on us; one might as well try to catch a moonbeam, and examine it and find out what it is made of. Every one can sketch the picture for himself; every one with a love of the beautiful, the spiritualized, will understand what was its solemn charm. We roamed about in silence from nave to cloisters, from refectory to chapel-room, and then, hand-in-hand, went with something of awe in our hearts into the old chancel, where in the days of the monks none ever went but the cowled, white-robed Cistercians themselves—an angel and virgin choir meet to sing the praises of the Lamb. By the sedilia, in the beautiful carved recesses of which scarcely a stone is out of place or an ornament broken off, we knelt down and said the rosary together for the conversion of England.
Presently a strange green light flashed before our eyes, right above the place where the high altar had stood of old; it was gone in a minute, and the calm radiance of the moon was still undisturbed. Seen, as it was, in this dim, silent place of song and worship, it was very impressive; and had it been nothing but what we first took it for—i.e., a railway signal—even then it would have remained in our imagination, idealized into something symbolic. Green is the color of hope, and where is there more room for hope than under the arches of a ruined abbey, once the pride of a Catholic country, the home of learning and charity, the representative of a nation's civilization? We stayed a long while yet, lingering about the dusky arches, catching sight of the starry sky through the Gothic tracery of the windows, repeopling the place in fancy with its silent, prayerful denizens in their white robes and hoods, and wondering what that fitful flash might have been. Next morning we saw in the newspaper that just at that very hour a meteor of greenish hue had appeared and been observed in many [pg 807] places all over England. You may imagine how glad we were to find that it had been no railway signal that had cleft the white moonlight while we were praying in the chancel. It was a beautiful remembrance to carry away from the Abbey of S. Mary at Furness. God does not forget the places where his feet have rested, and there are heavenly, undying flowers yet in the gardens of Paradise which the angels fling down on those consecrated spots which princes once endowed, because they humbly acknowledged that “the roses and flowers of kings, emperors, and dukes, and the crowns and palms of all the great, wither and decay, and that all things, with an uninterrupted course, tend to dissolution and death.”175
So we took leave of the beautiful North Country, its lakes, its solemn mountains, its abbeys, and its hardy, independent people, whose character has in it yet all the elements out of which God, infusing into them his grace, moulded the great Northumbrian saint, Wilfrid of York, the Thomas à Becket of the VIth century.