Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets Part 28

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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.s 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 ma.s.ses of fine trees, speak of wealth, and a pride in it. On the top of the hill stands the house, commanding n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sage. 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, n.o.blemen 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 a.s.sured 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 rec.u.mbent figure, laid on a granite altar-shaped bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 cla.s.sical 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 s.e.xton. 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 s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.ses. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"Where is the youth for deeds immortal born, Who loved to whisper to the embattled corn, And cl.u.s.tered woodbines, breathing o'er the stream, Endymion's beauteous pa.s.sion for a dream!

Why did he drop the harp from fingers cold, And sleep so soon with demiG.o.ds 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 a.s.sumed for the occasion, and as a mist, as a shadow, is ready to dissolve the instant that occasion is served.

They speak and pa.s.s 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 p.r.o.ne, And eyes intent upon the scanty herb It yields them; or, rec.u.mbent 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 G.o.d and of eternity. "Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of G.o.d," 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 const.i.tution 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 G.o.d's benedictions falls on us; the suns.h.i.+ne 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 o.r.g.a.s.m 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 G.o.d'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 a.s.saults. 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 "d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.sailed, and shot at, and cruelly wounded by the archers, he not only turned and manfully defended himself, but spread the s.h.i.+eld 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 cla.s.sical 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 G.o.dwin, 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.

"Much have I traveled in the land of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen, Round many western islands have I been, Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold; Oft of one wide expanse have I been told, That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet I did never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.