Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/358

 toward the gateway and park. But such a description is pitifully bald, whereas the reality is extremely rich and interesting. Indeed, I have never seen a house-front of which I grew more familiarly fond as I looked at it. The charming proportions, the sweet domestic dignity, the cool, faded, elegant tones of the brick, the happy disposition of the elements, after all simple and subdued, of which it is composed, make it a structure for which I can imagine myself acquiring at last, with familiarity, a kind of tranquil passion. There is another front of a quite different kind, which is much grander and more ornate, but I am not sure that I like it as well. The house is a huge parallelogram, but on the side which is turned away from the village it puts forth, at right angles, two long and stately wings, which form, with this second façade, the three sides of a court. This is properly the grand front. It is adorned with Italian stone work and delicate sculptures, and balanced by neat iron gates which open upon a long straight avenue, stretching away, if I am not mistaken, to London. This immense avenue, with its trees set far back from the road and divided from it by an expanse of grass on each side as wide as the roadway, makes the stateliest approach to the house—such an approach as, in some directions, such a house as Hatfield ought always to have. Here, in former days, the slow-moving coach and its swifter outriders must have been seen at the end of the long vista; the grassy border of the avenue seems a place intended for all retainers and dependants to come and station themselves, with their hats off, in an expectant line. And for the coach, which should see the charming great house at the end of the drive, sitting there on its greensward with parted arms, like a stately mother divided between tenderness and ceremony, this disposition of things must have had its periodically recurring impressiveness. The sides of the house which connect the two façades are very charming places—places with gravelled terraces looking on gardens and shady sitting spots just out of long windows.

Of the inside of Hatfield there would be a good deal to say if one chose to go into enumeration. The most urbane of housekeepers conducted me through it, and I found in wandering from chamber to chamber, from one great saloon to another, from library to hall, and from gallery to chapel, the particular sort of entertainment of which, on the whole, I am fondest. Nothing is more interesting than the observation of interiors—of human habitations which have been greatly lived in. Hatfield is full of the things that make a house interesting—historical memories, picturesque arrangements, handsome appointments, traces of great hospitality and of connection with great contemporary events. Unfortunately, if my relish of old apartments is great, my memory for them is small, and I have only a confused impression of walking through an endless labyrinth of rooms in which sculptured chimney-places reached to darkly carven ceilings, in which oriel windows looked out from deep embrasures into garden and park, in which old monumental beds, and ancient hangings, and polished wainscots, and curious cabinets, and every form of venerable bric-a-brac, in the best condition, created a sort of mild bewilderment of envy. Within, as without, Hatfield has preserved its perfect Jacobian character, though I suppose that in infusing the perfection of modern comfort into its quaintness and antiquity it has done no more than the customary duty of all great English residences. There are certain chambers, called the state apartments, which seemed to me to set off the house very handsomely. There is a long gallery—that charming feature of so many great English houses—running, in the second story, the whole length of the greater façade, continuously windowed on one side, beautifully roofed, furnished with half