Chapter XVIII: Part 18

We should not omit to notice that behind us, over Olney, shows itself the church tower and hall of Clifton, the attempt to walk to which forms the subject of Cowper's very humorous poem, The Distressed Travelers. Before us, as we advance--the Ouse meadows below on our left, and plain, naked farm-lands on our right--the park of Weston displays its lawns, and slopes, and fine masses of trees. It will be recollected by all lovers of Cowper that here lived Sir John and Lady Throckmorton, Cowper's kind and cordial friends, who, even before they knew him, threw open their park and all their domains to him; and who, when they did know him, did all that generous people of wealth and intelligence could do to contribute to his happiness. The village and estate here wholly belonged to them, and the hall was a second home to Cowper, always open to him with a warm welcome, and an easy, unassuming spirit of genuine friendship, Lady Throckmorton herself voluntarily becoming the transcriber of his Homer when his young friend Rose left him. In the whole of our literature there is no more beautiful instance of the intercourse of the literary man and his wealthy neighbors than that of Cowper and the Throckmortons. Their reward was the pleasure they conferred; and still more, the fame they have thus won.

The Throckmortons having other and extensive estates, the successors of Cowper's friends have deserted this. The house is pulled down, a wall is built across the bottom of the court-yard, which cuts off from view what was the garden. Grass grows thickly in the court, the entrance to which is still marked by the pillars of a gateway bearing vases. Across the court are erected a priest's house and Catholic chapel--the Throckmortons were and are Catholic--and beyond these still stand the stables, coach-house, &c., bearing a clock-tower, and showing that this was once a gentleman's residence. At the end of the old thatched out-building you see the word SCHOOL painted; it is the village school, Catholic, of course, as are all, or nearly all, the inhabitants. A pair of gateway pillars, like those which led to the house, mark the entrance to the village a little beyond the house. On the opposite side of the road to the house is the park, and directly opposite to the house, being taken out of the park, is the woodland wilderness in which Cowper so much delighted to ramble.

The village of Weston is a pretty village. The house of Cowper, Weston Lodge, stands on the right hand, about the center of it, forming a picturesque old orchard. The trees, which in his time stood in the street opposite, however, have been felled. A few doors on this side of the lodge is a public house, with the Yardley Oak upon its sign, and bearing the name of Cowper's Oak. The lodge, now inhabited by Mr. Swanwell, the steward, who very courteously allows the public to see it, is a good and pleasant, but not large house. It is well known by engravings. The vignette at the head of this article represents the tree opposite as still standing, which is not the fact, and the house wants shrubbery round it, by which its present aspect is much improved. The room on the right hand was Cowper's study. In his bed-room, which is at the back of the house overlooking the garden, there still remain two lines which he wrote when about to leave Weston for Norfolk, where he died. As his farewell to this place, the happiest of his life, when his own health, and that of his dear and venerable friend, Mrs. Unwin, were both failing, and gloomy feelings haunted him, these lines possess a deep interest. They are written on the bevel of a panel of one of the window-shutters, near the top right-hand corner, and when the shutter has been repainted, this part has been carefully excepted.

"Farewell, dear scenes, forever closed to me!
Oh for what sorrow must I now exchange you?
July 22.
-- -- even here 28 } 1795
July 22 } 1795."

The words and dates stand just as here given, and mark his recurrence to these lines, and his restless state of mind, repeating the date of both month and year.

From this room Cowper used to have a view of his favorite shrubbery, and beyond it, up the hill, pleasant crofts. The shrubbery was generally admired, being a delightful little labyrinth, composed of flowering shrubs, with gravel walks, and seats placed at appropriate distances. He gave a humorous account to Hayley of the erection of one of these arbors: "I said to Sam, 'Sam, build me a shed in the garden with any thing you can find, and make it rude and rough, like one of those at Eartham.' 'Yes, sir,' says Sam; and straightway laying his own noddle and the carpenter's together, has built me a thing fit for Stowe Gardens. Is not this vexatious? I threaten to inscribe it thus:

Beware of building! I intended
Rough logs and thatch, and thus it ended."

All this garden has now been altered. A yard has been made behind, with outbuildings, and the garden cut off with a brick wall.

Not far from this house a narrow lane turns up, inclosed on one side by the park wall. Through this old stone wall, now well crowned with masses of ivy, there used to be a door, of which Cowper had a key, which let him at once into the wilderness. In this wilderness, which is a wood grown full of underwood, through which walks are cut winding in all directions, you come upon what is called the Temple. This is an open Gothic alcove, having in front an open space, scattered with some trees, among them a fine old acacia, and closed in by the thick wood. Here Cowper used to sit much, delighted with the perfect and deep seclusion. The temple is now fast falling to decay. Through a short winding walk to the left you come out to the park, which is separated from the wilderness by a sunk fence. A broad grass walk runs along the head of this fosse, between it and the wilderness, and here you find the two urns under the trees, which mark the grave of two favorite dogs of the Throckmortons', for which Cowper condescended to write epitaphs, which still remain, and may be found in his poems. There is also a figure of a lion, couchant, on a pedestal, bearing this inscription: "Mortuo Leone etiam Lepores insultant, 1815."

From this point also runs out the fine lime avenue, of at least a quarter of a mile long, terminated by the alcove. Every scene, and every spot of ground which presents itself here, is to be found in Cowper's poetry, particularly in the first book of his Task--The Sofa. The Sofa was but a hook to hang his theme upon; his real theme is his walk all through this park and its neighborhood, particularly this fine avenue, closing its boughs above with all the solemn and inspiring grace of a Gothic cathedral aisle. To the right the park descends in a verdant slope, scattered with noble trees. There, in the valley, near the road to Olney, is the Spinny, with its rustic moss-house, haunted by Cowper, and where he wrote those verses, full of the deepest, saddest melancholy which ever oppressed a guiltless heart, beginning,

"Oh, happy shades, to me unblest!
Friendly to peace, but not to me!
How ill the scene that offers rest,
And heart, that can not rest, agree."

There, too, in the valley, but where it has freed itself from the wood, is the Rustic Bridge, equally celebrated by him; and beyond it, in the fields, the Peasant's Nest, now grown from a laborer's cottage, shrouded in trees, to a considerable farm-house, with its ricks and buildings, conspicuous on an open eminence. Still beyond are the woods of Yardley Chase, including those of Kilwick and Dinglebury, well known to the readers of Cowper; and this old chase stretches away for four or five miles toward Castle Ashby. In traversing the park to reach the woods and Yardley Oak, we come into a genuinely agricultural region, where a sort of peopled solitude is enjoyed. Swelling, rounded eminences, with little valleys winding between them; here and there a farm-house of the most rustic description; the plow and its whistling follower turning up the ruddy soil; and the park, displaying from its hills and dells its contrast of nobly umbrageous trees, showed where Cowper had often delighted himself, and whence he had drawn much of his imagery:

"Now roves the eye:
And posted on this speculative height
Exults in its command. The sheepfold here
Pours out its fleecy tenants o'er the glebe.
At first, progressive as a stream, they seek
The middle field; but scattered by degrees,
Each to his choice, soon whitens all the land.
There from the sunburn'd hay-field homeward creeps
The loaded wain; while, lightened of its charge,
The wain that meets it passes swiftly by;
The boorish driver leaning o'er his team,
Vociferous, and impatient of delay.
Nor less attractive is the woodland scene,
Diversified with trees of every growth,
Alike, yet various. How the gray, smooth trunks
Of ash, or lime, or beech, distinctly shine
Within the twilight of their distant shades:
There, lost behind a rising ground, the wood
Seems sunk, and shortened to its topmost boughs."

_The Task_, Book i.

At this point of view you find the poet's praises of the scenery more fully justified than any where else. The park here has a solemn, solitary, splendidly wooded air, and spreads its green slopes, and gives hints of its secluded dells, that are piquant to the imagination. And still the walk, of a mile or more, to the ancient chase, is equally impressive. The vast extent of the forest which stretches before you gives a deep feeling of silence and ancient repose. You descend into a valley, and Kilwick's echoing wood spreads itself before you on the upland. You pass through it, and come out opposite to a lonely farm-house, where, in the opening of the forest, you see the remains of very ancient oaks standing here and there. You feel that you are on a spot that has maintained its connection with the world of a thousand years ago; and amid these venerable trees, you soon see the one which by its bulk, its hollow trunk, and its lopped and dilapidated crown, needs not to be pointed out as the YARDLEY OAK. Here Cowper was fond of coming, and sitting within the hollow boll for hours; around him stretching the old woods, with their solitude and the cries of woodland birds. The fame which he has conferred on this tree has nearly proved its destruction. Whole arms and great pieces of its trunk have been cut away with knife, and ax, and saw, to prepare different articles from. The Marquis of Northampton, to whom the chase belongs, has had multitudes of nails driven in to stop the progress of this destruction, but finding that not sufficient, has affixed a board bearing this inscription: "Out of respect to the memory of the poet Cowper, the Marquis of Northampton is particularly desirous of preserving this oak. Notice is hereby given, that any person defacing, or otherwise injuring it, will be prosecuted according to law." In stepping round the Yardley Oak, it appeared to me to be, at the foot, about thirteen yards in circumference.

Every step here shows you some picture sketched by Cowper:

"I see a column of slow rising smoke
O'ertop the lofty wood that skirts the wild.
A vagabond and useless tribe there eat
Their miserable meal. A kettle slung
Between two poles upon a stick transverse,
Receives the morsel--flesh obscene of dog,
Or vermin, or at best of cock purloined
From his accustomed perch. Hard-faring race!
They pick their fuel out of every hedge,
Which kindled with dry leaves just saves unquenched
The spark of life. The sportive wind blows wide
Their fluttering rags, and shows a tawny skin,
The vellum of the pedigree they claim."

We are now upon

"The grassy sward, close cropped by nibbling sheep,
And skirted thick with intermixture firm
Of thorny boughs."

The old wild chase opens its glades, discovers its heaths, startles us with its abrupt cries of birds, or plunges us into the gloom of thick, overshadowing oaks. It is a fit haunt of the poet. Such are the haunts of Cowper in this neighborhood. Amid these he led a secluded, but an active and most important life. How many of those who bustle along in the front of public life can boast of a ten-thousandth part of the benefit to their fellow-men which was conferred, and for ages will be conferred, by the loiterer of these woods and fields? In no man was his own doctrine ever made more manifest, that

"God gives to every man
The virtue, temper, understanding, taste,
That lifts him into life, and lets him fall
Just in the niche he was ordained to fill."

He says of himself,

"I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since. With many an arrow deep infixed
My panting side was charged, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I joined by one who had himself
Been hurt by the archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and healed, and bade me live.
Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wander, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene,
With few associates, and not wishing more."

Thus he began; but soothed by the sweet freshness of nature, strengthened by her peace, enlightened to the pitch of true wisdom by her daily converse, spite of all his griefs and fears, he ended by describing himself, in one of the noblest passages of modern poetry, as the happy man.

"He is the happy man whose life e'en now
Shows somewhat of that happier life to come;
Who, doomed to an obscure but tranquil state,
Is pleased with it; and, were he free to choose,
Would make his fate his choice; whom peace, the fruit
Of virtue, and whom virtue, fruit of faith,
Prepare for happiness; bespeak him one
Content, indeed, to sojourn while he must
Below the skies, but having there his home.
The world o'erlooks him in her busy search
Of objects, more illustrious in her view;
And, occupied as earnestly as she,
Though more sublimely, he o'erlooks the world.
She scorns his pleasures, for she knows them not;
He seeks not hers, for he has proved them vain.
He can not skim the ground like summer birds
Pursuing golden flies; and such he deems
Her honors, her emoluments, her joys.
Therefore in contemplation is his bliss,
Whose power is such, that whom she lifts from earth
She makes familiar with a heaven unseen,
And shows him glories yet to be revealed.
Not slothful he, though seeming unemployed,
And censured oft as useless. Silent streams
Oft water fairest meadows, and the bird
That flutters least is longest on the wing."

_The Task_, Book vi.

Quitting these scenes in quest of health, both the poet and his dear friend Mary Unwin died at Dereham, in Suffolk, she in 1796, and he in 1800. "They were lovely in their lives, and in death they are not divided."

MRS. TIGHE, THE AUTHOR OF PSYCHE.

Perhaps no writer of merit has been more neglected by her own friends than Mrs. Tighe. With every means of giving to the public a good memoir of her, I believe no such is in existence; at all events, I have not been able to find one. The following brief particulars have been furnished by a private hand: "Mrs. Tighe was born in Dublin in 1774. Her father, the Rev. Wm. Blachford, was librarian of Marsh's library, St. Sepulchre, in that city. Her mother, Theodosia Tighe, was one of a family whose seat has been, and is, Rosanna, county Wicklow. In 1793, Miss Blachford, then but nineteen, married her cousin, Henry Tighe, of Woodstock, M.P. for Kilkenny in the Irish Parliament, and author of a County History of Kilkenny. Consumption was hereditary in Mrs. Tighe's family, and its fatal seeds ripened with her womanhood. She was constantly afflicted with its attendants, languor, depression, and want of appetite. With the profits of Psyche, which ran through four editions previous to her death, she built an addition to the Orphan Asylum in Wicklow, thence called the Psyche Ward. She died on the 24th of March, 1810, and was buried at Woodstock, in Kilkenny, beneath a monument chiseled by Flaxman from the finest marble of Italy. Mrs. Hemans, Banim, and Moore have done homage to her genius, or lamented over its eclipse. North, in the Noctes Ambrosianæ, with the assistance of Mr. Timothy Tickler, has paid her a very high compliment. But her abilities, her beauty, and her virtue have not, as yet, been adequately pictured in any biographical notice of her that I have seen. The 1813 edition of Psyche contains some affecting allusions to her, in the preface written by her husband, who soon after followed her to the grave."

How little is known of Mrs. Tighe, when so short an account is the best that a countryman of hers can furnish! and even in that there are serious errors. So far from her monument being of the finest marble of Italy, it is of a stone not finer than Portland stone, if so fine. So far from her husband soon following her to the grave, Mrs. Tighe died in 1810, and her husband was living at the time of Mrs. Hemans's visit to Woodstock in 1831. He must have survived her above twenty years. In Mrs. Hemans's own account of her visit to Woodstock, she speaks of it as the place where "Mrs. Tighe passed the latest years of her life, and near where she is buried;" yet in the same volume with Psyche (1811 edition, p. 306) there is a "Sonnet, written at Woodstock, in the county of Kilkenny, the seat of William Tighe, June 30, 1809," _i. e._, but nine months before her death. For myself, I confess myself ignorant of the facts which might connect these strangely-clashing accounts of a popular poetess, of a wealthy family, and who died little more than thirty years ago. I hoped to gain the necessary information on the spot, which I made a long journey to visit purposely. Why I did not, remains to tell.

The poem of Psyche was one which charmed me intensely at an early age. There was a tone of deep and tender feeling pervading it, which touched the youthful heart, and took possession of every sensibility. There was a tone of melancholy music in it, which seemed the regretful expression of the consciousness of a not far-off death. It was now well known that the young and beautiful poetess _was_ dead. The life which she lived--crowned with every good and grace that God confers on the bright ones of the earth, on those who are to be living revelations of the heaven to which we are called, and to which they are hastening, youth, beauty, fortune, all glorified by the emanations of a transcendent mind, was snatched away, and there was a sad fascination thrown over both her fate and her work. The delicacy, the pathos, the subdued and purified, yet intense passion of the poem, were all calculated to seize on the kindred spirit of youth, and to make you in love with the writer. She came before the imagination in the combined witchery of brilliant genius and the pure loveliness of a seraph, which had but touched upon the earth on some celestial mission, and was gone forever. Her own Psyche, in the depth of her saddest hour, yearning for the restoration of the lost heaven and the lost heart, was not more tenderly beautiful to the imagination than herself.

Such was the effect of the Psyche on the glowing, sensitive, yet immature mind. How much of this effect has, in many cases, been the result of the quick feelings and magnifying fancy of youth itself! We have returned to our idol in later years, and found it clay. But this is not the case with Psyche. After the lapse of many years, after the disenchanting effects of experience, after the enjoyment of a vast quantity of new poetry of a splendor and power such as no one age of the world ever before witnessed, we return to the poem of Mrs. Tighe, and still find it full of beauty. There is a graceful fluency of diction, a rich and deep harmony, that are the fitting vehicle of a story full of interest, and scenery full of enchantment. Spite of the incongruity of ingrafting on a Grecian fable the knight-errantry of the Middle Ages, and the allegory of still later days, we follow the deeply-tried Psyche through all her ordeals with unabating zest. The radiant Island of Pleasure, the more radiant Divinity of Love, the fatal curiosity, the weeping and outcast Psyche wandering on through the forests and wildernesses of her earthly penance, the mysterious knight, the intrepid squire of the starry brow, are all sketched with the genuine pencil of poetry, and we follow the fortunes of the wanderers with ever-deepening entrancement. None but Spenser himself has excelled Mrs. Tighe in the field of allegory. Passion in the form of the lion subdued by the knight; Psyche betrayed by Vanity and Flattery to Ambition; the Bower of Loose Delight; the Attacks of Slander; the Castle of Suspicion; the Court of Spleen; the drear Island of Indifference; and the final triumph and apotheosis of the gentle soul--all are vigorously conceived, and executed with a living distinctness. The pleasure with which she pursued her task is expressed in the graceful opening stanzas of the fifth canto.

"Delightful visions of my lonely hours!
Charm of my life and solace of my care!
Oh! would the muse but lend proportioned powers,
And give me language equal to declare
The wonders which she bids my fancy share,
When rapt in her to other worlds I fly;
See angel forms unutterably fair,
And hear the inexpressive harmony
That seems to float in air, and warble through the sky.

"Might I the swiftly-glancing scenes recall!
Bright as the roseate clouds of summer eve,
The dreams which hold my soul in willing thrall,
And half my visionary days deceive,
Communicable shape might then receive,
And other hearts be ravished with the strain;
But scarce I seek the airy threads to weave,
When quick confusion mocks the fruitless pain,
And all the airy forms are vanished from my brain.

"Fond dreamer! meditate thine idle song!
But let thine idle song remain unknown;
The verse which cheers thy solitude, prolong;
What though it charm no moments but thy own,
Though thy loved Psyche smile for thee alone,
Still shall it yield thee pleasure, if not fame;
And when, escaped from tumult, thou hast flown
To thy dear silent hearth's enlivening flame,
Then shall the tranquil muse her happy votary claim!"

Moore has recorded his admiration of Psyche in a lyric, of which these stanzas are not the least expressive:

"Tell me the witching tale again,
For never has my heart or ear
Hung on so sweet, so pure a strain,
So pure to feel, so sweet to hear.

"Say, Love! in all thy spring of fame,
When the high Heaven itself was thine.
When piety confessed the flame,
And even thy errors were divine!

"Did ever muse's hand so fair
A glory round thy temple spread?
Did ever life's ambrosial air
Such perfume o'er thine altars shed?"

Mrs. Hemans had always been much struck with the poetry of Mrs. Tighe. She imagined a similarity between the destiny of this pensive poetess and her own. She had her in her imagination when she wrote The Grave of a Poetess; and the concluding stanzas are particularly descriptive of Mrs. Tighe's spirit.

"Thou hast left sorrow in thy song.
A voice not loud, but deep!
The glorious bowers of earth among,
How often didst thou weep!

"Where couldst thou fix on mortal ground,
Thy tender thoughts and high?
Now peace the woman's heart hath found,
And joy the poet's eye!"

It was certainly among earth's glorious bowers that Mrs. Tighe passed her days. Rosanna, in Wicklow, is said to have been her principal residence after her marriage. The whole country round is extremely beautiful, and calculated to call forth the poetic faculty where it exists. All the way from Dublin to Rosanna is through a rich and lovely district. As you approach Rosanna the hills become higher, and your way lies through the most beautifully wooded valleys. At the inn at Ashford Bridge you have the celebrated Devil's Glen on one hand, and Rosanna on the other. This glen lies a mile or more from the inn, and is about a mile and a half through. It is narrow, the hills on either hand are lofty, bold, craggy, and finely wooded; and along the bottom runs, deep and dark over its rocky bed, the River Vartree. This river runs down and crosses the road near the inn, and then takes its way by Rosanna. Rosanna is perhaps a mile down the valley from the inn. The house is a plain old brick house, fit for a country squire. It lies low in the meadow near the river, and around it, on both sides of the water, the slopes are dotted with the most beautiful and luxuriant trees. The park at Rosanna is indeed eminently beautiful with its wood. The trees are thickly scattered, and a great proportion of them are lime, the soft, delicate foliage of which gives a peculiar character to the scenery. The highway, for the whole length of the park as you proceed toward Rathdrum, is completely arched over with magnificent beeches, presenting a fine natural arcade. On the right the ground ascends for a mile or more, covered with rich masses of wood. In fact, whichever way you turn, toward the distant hill, or pursuing your way down the valley, all is one fairy land of beauty and richness. It is a region worthy of the author of Psyche, worthy to inspire her beautiful mind; and we rejoice that so fair, and gentle, and good a spirit had there her lot cast. In her poems she addresses one to the Vartree:

"Sweet are thy banks, O Vartree! when at morn
Their velvet verdure glistens with the dew;
When fragrant gales, by softest zephyrs borne,
Unfold the flowers, and ope their petals new.

"And sweet thy shade, at noon's more fervid hours,
When faint we quit the upland gayer lawn,
To seek the freshness of thy sheltering bowers,
Thy chestnut glooms, where day can scarcely dawn.

"Beneath the fragrant lime, or spreading beech,
The bleating flocks in panting crowds repose;
Their voice alone my dark retreat can reach,
While peace and silence all my soul compose."

In her sonnets, too, she alludes to her favorite Rosanna, and to her "chestnut bower," which, I believe, still remains. Indeed, Rosanna will always be interesting to the lovers of gentle female virtue and pure genius, because here Psyche was written; here the author of Psyche lived, loved, and suffered.

Woodstock, where she died, lies, I suppose, forty or fifty miles distant, in Kilkenny. It is equally beautiful, though in a different style. It lies on a high, round, swelling hill--a good modern mansion. You see it afar off as you drive over a country less beautiful than that about Rosanna. There is a fine valley, along which the River Nore runs, amid splendid masses of wood, two miles in length, and meadows of the deepest green; and beyond swells up the steep round hill, covered also with fine timber to the top, eight hundred feet in elevation. The whole is bold, ample, and impressive. To reach the house you pass through the village of Innerstiogue, at the foot of the hill, and then begin the long and steep ascent. A considerable way up you are arrested by smart lodge gates, and there enter a fine and well-kept park, in which the neatness of the carriage roads, which are daily swept, and the skillfully dispersed masses of fine trees, speak of wealth, and a pride in it. On the top of the hill stands the house, commanding noble views down into the superb vale below, and over a wide extent of country.

In traveling between these two estates, a mind like that of Mrs. Tighe would find scenery not inferior to that immediately lying around both of them. In one direction she might traverse the celebrated district of Glendalough, or the Vale of the Seven Churches; in another, she might descend the Vale of Avoca, and cross some of the finest parts of Carlow to Kilkenny. I took this latter route. No part of England is more beautiful or more richly cultivated than much of this: thick woods, fertile fields, well-to-do villages, and gentlemen's houses abounded. From the little town of Rathdrum we began to descend rapidly into the Vale of Avoca, and passed the Meeting of the Waters just before dark. The vale, so far, had a very different character to what I expected. I expected it to be a mile or two long, or so, soft, flowing, and verdant. On the contrary, it is eight miles in length, and has to me a character of greatness and extensiveness about it. It is what the Germans call "_grossartig_"--we want the word. You descend down and down, and feel that a deeper country is still below you. To me it had a feeling as if descending from the Alps into a champaign country. Long ranges of hills on either hand ever and anon terminated, as if to admit of a way into the country beyond, and then began again, with the river wandering on still far below us; and here and there stupendous masses of lofty rock, open meadows, and bold, high woods. These were the features of this striking and great valley.

At the bridge, where the first meeting of the waters takes place, that is, the meeting of the two streams, Avonbeg and Avonmore, which thence become the Avoca, the driver of the car said, "Perhaps your honor knows that this is the Meeting of the Waters. It was here that Moore made his speech!"

But the most striking meeting to us was a meeting with a great number of one-horse carts, those of miners, with whom this vale abounds. They were coming up from a market at Avoca, just below, and they took no more notice of being just all in our way than if we were not there. The driver shouted, but in vain; and it was only by using his whip over them till he broke off the lash that he could get a passage. When they did draw out of the way, it was always purposely to the wrong side. The fact is, they were all drunk, and seemed to have a very animal doggedness of disposition about them. The Wooden Bridge Inn, at the bottom of the vale, and at the commencement of the Vale of Arklow, and the place of the second meeting of the waters, is the great resort of travelers. The scene here has great softness. A bend of the valley, an opening of rich meadow, surrounded by hills thickly clothed with foliage, and the rivers running on to their meeting, give a feeling of great and quiet seclusion. Here I posted, as I have said, across Carlow to Kilkenny, and to Woodstock.

But at Rosanna and at Woodstock, my hope of obtaining some information regarding Mrs. Tighe--of seeing some painting or other object connected with her, was, with one exception, thoroughly frustrated. Mrs. Tighe was an angel; of her successors I have somewhat more to say. In all my visits to remarkable places in England, I have received the utmost courtesy from the proprietors of those houses and scenes which it was my object to see. In those where I was anxious to obtain sight of relics of celebrated persons of antiquity not ordinarily shown to the public, I have written to the owner to request opportunity of examining them. In such cases, noblemen of the highest rank have not, in a single instance, shown the slightest reluctance to contribute to that information which was for the public. In some cases, they have themselves gone down into the country to give me the meeting, and thrown open private cabinets, and the like depositories of rare objects, with the most active liberality. In every other case, so invariably have I found the most obliging facilities given for the prosecution of my inquiries, that I have long ceased to carry a letter of introduction; my name, of twenty-three years' standing before the public, being considered warranty enough. I found it equally so in Ireland, except with the Tighes.

At Rosanna, Mr. Dan Tighe, as the people familiarly call him, certainly not Dante, was pointed out to me by a workman, walking in the meadow before his house, handling his bullocks which grazed there. On asking the servant who came to the door whether Mr. Tighe was at home, he first, as a perfect tactician, requested my name, and he would see. I gave him my card; and though he could see his master as well as I could in the meadow, to whom I directed his attention, he very solemnly marched into the house, and returned, saying he was not in. A self-evident truth. I inquired if Mrs. Tighe was at home, explaining that I had come from England, and for what object. He said "yes, but she was _lying in_, and could see no one." I then inquired when Mr. Tighe might be expected in, as I should much regret losing the opportunity of learning from him any particulars connected with my present inquiry. "He could not say; most likely at six o'clock, his dinner hour." I promised to call on my way toward Avoca, about half an hour before that time, that I might not interfere with Mr. Tighe's dinner hour. I did so. Mr. Tighe was now standing in his field, not a hundred yards from his house. As soon as the servant appeared, he assured me Mr. Tighe was not at home; he could not tell where he was. I immediately directed his attention to where he stood looking at some men at work. The man did not choose to see him; and, under the circumstances, it was not for me to advance and address him. It was evident that the man had his cue; the master did not choose to be seen. I therefore mounted my car, and ordered the driver to drive off. The spirit of the place was palpable. A willing master makes a willing man; but on this man's nose sat perched that solemn lie that is unmistakable. Well, as Mr. Tighe was _walking out_, and Mrs. Tighe was _lying in_, I bade adieu to Rosanna not much wiser for my visit; but then there was Woodstock.

I drove fifty miles across the country, and found myself at the door of Woodstock. Woodstock is a show-house; and here, therefore, I anticipated no difficulty of at least obtaining a sight of portrait or statue of the late charming poetess. But, unfortunately--what in England would have been most fortunate--Mr. Tighe was at home, and the servant, on opening the door, at once informed me that the house was never shown when the family was there. Having written on my card what was my object, that I had made the journey from England for it, and added the name of a gentleman well known to Mr. Tighe, who had wished me to do so, I requested the servant to present that to Mr. Tighe. He did so; and returned, saying, "Mr. Tighe said I was at liberty to see the grounds, but not the house; and he had nothing further to say!"

My astonishment may be imagined. The servant seemed a very decent, modest sort of fellow, and I said, "Good heavens! does Mr. Tighe think I am come all the way from England to see his grounds, when ten thousand country squires could show much finer? Was there no picture of Mrs. Tighe, the poetess, that I might be allowed to see?" "He thought not; he did not know." "Was there no statue?" "He thought not; he never heard of any." "How long had he been there?" "Five years." "And never heard of a statue or a monument to Mrs. Tighe, the poetess?" "No, never! He had never heard Mrs. Tighe, the poetess, spoken of in the family! But if there were any monument, it must be at the church at Innerstiogue!" I thanked him for his intelligence, the only glimpse of information I had got at Rosanna or Woodstock, and drove off.

The matter was now clear. The very servants who had lived years in the family had never heard the name of Mrs. Tighe, the poetess, mentioned! These present Tighes had been marrying the daughters of lords--this a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, and Dan Tighe, a daughter of Lord Crofton. They were ashamed, probably, that any of their name should have degraded herself by writing poetry, which a man or woman without an acre may do. When I reached the church at Innerstiogue, the matter received a most striking confirmation. There, sure enough, was the monument, in a small mausoleum in the church-yard. It is a recumbent figure, laid on a granite altar-shaped basement. The figure is of a freestone resembling Portland stone, and is lying on its side, as on a sofa, being said, by the person who showed it, to be the position in which she died, on coming in from a walk. The execution of the whole is very ordinary, and if really by Flaxman, displays none of his genius. I have seen much better things by a common stone-mason. There is a little angel sitting at the head, but this has never been fastened down by cement. The monument was, no doubt, erected by the widower of the poetess, who was a man of classical taste, and, I believe, much attached to her. There is no inscription yet put upon the tomb, though one, said to be written by her husband, has long been cut in stone for the purpose. In the wall at the back of the monument, aloft, there is an oblong-square hole left for this inscription, which I understood was lying about at the house, but no single effort had been made to put it up, though it would not require an hour's work, and though Mrs. Tighe has been dead six-and-thirty years!

This was decisive! If these two gentlemen, nephews of the poetess, who are enjoying the two splendid estates of the family, Woodstock and Rosanna, show thus little respect to the only one of their name that ever lifted it above the mob, it is not to be expected that they will show much courtesy to strangers. Well is it that Mrs. Tighe raised her own monument, that of immortal verse, and wrote her own epitaph in the hearts of all the pure and loving, not on a stone which sordid relatives, still fonder of earth than stone, may consign to the oblivion of a lumber-room.

* * * * *

That these nephews of the poetess do look after the earth which her husband left behind him, though not after the stone, I learned while waiting in the village for the sexton. I fell into conversation with the woman at the cottage by which I stood. It was as follows:

_Self._ "Well, your landlord has a fine estate here. I hope he is good to you."

_Woman._ "Well, your honor, very good, very good."

_Self._ "Very good? What do you call very good? I find English and Irish notions of goodness don't always agree."

_Woman._ "Well, your honor, we may say he is mixed; mixed, your honor."

_Self._ "How mixed?"

_Woman._ "Why, your honor, you see I can't say that he was very good to me."

_Self._ "How was that?"

_Woman._ "Why, your honor, we were backward in our rent, and the squire sent for my husband, and told him that if he did not pay all next quarter, he would sell us up. My husband begged he would give him a little more time, as a neighbor said he had some money left him, and would take part of our land at a good rent, and then we should be able to pay; but now we got little, and the children were many, and it was hard to meet and tie. 'Oh!' said the squire, 'if you are going to get all that money, you will be able to pay more rent. I must have two pounds a year more.'"

_Self._ "Gracious Heaven! But, surely, he did not do such a thing?"

_Woman._ "But he did it, your honor. The neighbor _had_ no money: it was a hum; he never took the field of us at all; we never were able to get a penny more from any one than we gave; but when my husband went to pay the rent at the next rent-day, the steward would not take it. He said he had orders to have two pounds a year more; and from that day we have had it regularly to pay."

What a fall out of the poetry of Psyche to the iron realities of Ireland! This screwing system on the poor, which you find almost every where, soon makes us cease to wonder at the wretchedness and the wild outrages of the people there. At one splendid place where I was, the lord of the estate and the gentry were all bowling away on the Sunday morning to a church three miles distant. When I asked why they did not stay at their own, this was the reply: "The clergyman had given great offense by saying in one of his sermons that their dogs were better lodged and fed than their neighbors!" Poor Ireland! where such is the distortion of circumstances that the poor are too poor to have the truth told about them to ears polite even from the pulpit, and where the squirearchy live in splendid houses, and in state emulating the peerage, surrounded by hovels and wretchedness, such as the world besides can not parallel. The condition of Ireland is fatal in its effects on all classes. The poor are reduced to a misery that is the amazement of the whole world; and the squirearchy, who live in daily contemplation of this misery, are rendered utterly callous to it. They go on putting on the screw of high rental to the utmost limit, and surrounded, as it were, only by serfs, naturally grow selfish beyond our conceptions in England, haughty, and ungracious. I believe that no country, except Russia, can furnish such revolting examples of ignorant and churlish insolence as Ireland can from the ranks of its solitary squirearchy--so utterly opposed to the generally generous, courteous, and hospitable character of its people.

JOHN KEATS.

"Where is the youth for deeds immortal born,
Who loved to whisper to the embattled corn,
And clustered woodbines, breathing o'er the stream,
Endymion's beauteous passion for a dream!
Why did he drop the harp from fingers cold,
And sleep so soon with demigods of old!
Oh, who so well could sing Love's joys and pains?
He lived in melody, as if his veins
Poured music; from his lips came words of fire,
The voice of Greece, the tones of Homer's lyre."

_Ebenezer Elliott._

We come now to one whose home and haunts on the earth were brief;

"Who sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven."

John Keats was one of those sweet and glorious spirits who descend, like the angel messengers of old, to discharge some divine command, not to dwell here. Pure, ethereal, glowing with the fervency of inward life, the bodily vehicle appears but assumed for the occasion, and as a mist, as a shadow, is ready to dissolve the instant that occasion is served. They speak and pass away into the higher light from whence they came; but their words remain--themselves life, and spirit, and power--like the electric element in the veins of the earth, quickening and vitalizing the souls of men to the end of time. They become part and parcel of our nature; they are as essential to the aliment and the progress of our intellectual being, as the light, the morning dew of summer, the morning and the evening star, or any of those great components of nature, the sky, the sea, or the mountain, from which we draw the daily spirit of beauty; and live!--live, not as mere material machines; not as animal existences--as brutes,

"Which graze the mountain top with faces prone,
And eyes intent upon the scanty herb
It yields them; or, recumbent on its brow,
Ruminate heedless of the scene outspread
Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away
From inland regions to the distant main"--_Cowper._

not mere men of the world, money-getting, house-building, land-purchasing creatures, but souls of God and of eternity. "Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God," and which descends to earth by his prophets, whether of prose or of poetry. It is by the mediation of such pure and seraphic intelligences that our true psychological frame and constitution are built up. For, created to take our places in the great future of the universe, amid the spiritual revelation of all things spiritual, we must be raised substantially from the mere germ of immortality within us into "spirits of just men made perfect." We must be composed of the spiritual elements of beauty, thought, sensation, and seizure of all intellectual things, growing by the daily absorption of divine essences into spiritual bodies, incorporate of love, of light, of lofty aspirations and tenderest desires; of thoughts that comprehend the world, and hearts that embrace it with a divine capacity of affection. As we walk on our daily way, and along the muddiest paths of life, amid our own cares and loneliness, we do not and can not walk unblessed. The shower of God's benedictions falls on us; the sunshine of his ceaseless gifts surrounds us. From his own appointed men, whether living or dead, "the refreshments from his presence" reach us, melt into us, and sustain us. Words spoken thousands of years ago steal, like the whisper of a breeze, into our bosoms, and become bright guests there; music, full of deep movings, heard but yesterday from the lips of the inspired, touches the spring of happiness within us. The thoughts and sentiments of poets and philosophers, "beautiful exceedingly," stand around us like the trees and the flowers of our wayside; and from every point of heaven and earth are reflected upon us the flowing waters, the cool forest shades, the bright and glittering stars of that mind, which has been poured through a myriad of vehicles and a host of ages down upon us here. The light, and color, and warmth which mature our very corn and fruits, come from the sun. They are no more inherent in this nether earth than our own life is. All that we have and enjoy must come from other worlds to us. Our material aliments are sustained by the strength and life issuing from the infinite heavens; and thence too descend, in still more ethereal actuality, all that our souls are made of.

Of the class of swift but resplendent messengers by whom these ministrations are performed, neither ours nor any other history can furnish a specimen more beautiful than John Keats. He was of feeling and "imagination all compact." His nature was one pure mass of the living light of poetry. On this world and its concerns he could take no hold, and they could take none on him. The worldly and the worldly wise could not comprehend him, could not sympathize with. To them his vivid orgasm of the intellect was madness; his exuberance of celestial gifts was extravagance; his unworldliness was effeminacy; his love of the universal man, and not of gross distinctions of pride and party, was treason. As of the highest and divinest of God's messengers to earth, they cried, "Away with him; he is not fit to live;" and the body, that mere mist-like, that mere shadow-like body, already failing before the fervency of his spiritual functions, fell, "faded away, dissolved," and disappeared before the bitter frost-wind of base criticism.

It was a dark and wretched time when Keats made his appearance among us. War, and party, and peculation on the one side, and resentment and discontent on the other; the necessity for the gainer maintaining his craft at all costs, and the equal necessity for the loser dragging this ruinous craft to the ground, had infused into literature an atrocious spirit. From this foul spirit, genius, in every fresh incarnation, suffered the most ruthless and inhuman assaults. The stronger possessor of it stood; the weaker or more sensitive fell. Keats was one of the latter. He had soul enough for any thing, but his _physique_ was feeble, and sunk. It will be one of the "damned spots" which will forever cling, not to the country, but to the age. But it is to the everlasting honor of Leigh Hunt, that, himself a critic as well as a poet, he never dipped his hand in the blood of the innocents. He never slew one of those martyrs whose glorious tombs we now build with adamantine stones of admiration, tempering the cement with the tears of our love. Himself assailed, and shot at, and cruelly wounded by the archers, he not only turned and manfully defended himself, but spread the shield of his heart to protect those who were rising up to become formidable rivals in the public regard. Will the country ever show to this generous man, and in time, that warm-heartedness which he always showed to its sons of genius in their unfolding hours? It is a glory that is peculiar, and peculiarly beautiful, that amid that iron age of a murderous criticism, he was forever found in close union and communion with the morning stars of poetry. They truly "sang together." They seemed by an instinct of life to flock to him, and by an instinct equally sure and unselfish, he felt at once their claims, and with open hand and heart maintained them. It was in the pages of the Examiner that, amid specimens of young poets, I first made acquaintance with the magnificent sonnet of Keats on reading Chapman's Homer, and with Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. From that hour there could be no moment's question but that great men were come among us; those men who, in fact, "turn the world upside down," and by which turning upside down, the only process, the asps and scorpions of malice are shook out of it, and all its strong-rooted fabrics of prejudice and pride are toppled into the dust. Till death, the souls of these men, who

"Learned in suffering what they taught in song,"

never ceased to maintain that brave union thus begun, but amid abuse, misrepresentation, and the vilest onslaughts from the army of the aliens, went on blessing the world with those emanations of splendid and unshackled thought, which are now recognized as among the most precious of the national property. Who in future days will not pray that he might have been as one of these?

It is to the account by Leigh Hunt, in his "Byron and some of his Cotemporaries," that we owe almost all that we know of the life and haunts of Keats. From this we learn that "Mr. Keats's origin was of the humblest description. He was born October 29, 1796, at a livery-stable in Moorfields, of which his grandfather was proprietor. He never spoke of it, perhaps out of a personal soreness which the world had exasperated. After receiving the rudiments of a classical education at Mr. Clarke's school at Enfield, he was bound apprentice to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon, in Church-street, Edmonton; and his enemies having made a jest even of this, he did not like to be reminded of it; at once disdaining them for their meanness, and himself for being weak enough to be moved by them. Mr. Clarke, Jun., his schoolmaster's son, a reader of genuine discernment, had encouraged with great warmth the genius that he saw in the young poet; and it was to Mr. Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him."

Mr. Hunt, in his warm-hearted way, lost no time in introducing his poetry to the best judges of poetry, among them to Godwin, Hazlitt, Basil Montagu, Charles Lamb, and others. He read to them, among others, that fine sonnet already mentioned, which, as it is printed in a volume now not much seen, can not too often be quoted:

"ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.