Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/359

 a dozen chimney-pieces, and most delightful, I should suppose, with its southern exposure, as that "winter morning-room" for which the housekeeper declared that it served.

What a charming place, filled with groups of pleasant people, say in Christmas week! There is a chapel, with a high gallery all round, divided into little cushioned niches, plentifully supplied with prayer-books and easily accessible from bed-rooms, during morning prayers, by tardy worshippers on tiptoe. Very pretty indeed is this little chapel, and very much like a private theatre, with the small niches I speak of as boxes in the second tier. Then there is a great banquetting-hall, with a stone pavement and an arched roof, in which, if I rightly understood the attendant, the possessors of the house, while there, daily partake of some meal with their children—or in which the children, at any rate, habitually dine. This is one of those facts which an American may be allowed to find impressive. When it is mentioned to him he lingers some moments, looking up at the time-darkened rafters and the serious walls, and envies this parcel of modern youngsters the education of such a habit—the daily contact with things which remind them so solidly of the continuity between their own small lives and the gathered honors of their race. And, meditating, he turns away with a kind of awe of young persons moulded by influences so ennobling. He turns away and goes out into the park; but here he does not get rid of the "influences." He meets them at every turn, in the rustle of the old oaks and the flicker of the verdurous light.

The park at Hatfield is worthy of the house; one cannot say more for it. It is of the highest antiquity, and seems like a remnant of early English forest. Its gnarled and twisted oaks are disposed in avenues in which you would stroll up and down indefinitely if it were not that you constantly incline to wander away and fling yourself at the foot of one of the innumerable detached trees, as mighty of girth and as fantastic of limb, which are scattered at hazard over the sides of the grassy undulations. One of these trees is more definitely historical than the rest. Nothing but a rugged trunk and half a dozen mouldering twigs remain; they are the last surviving witnesses of a great occasion. Here, according to tradition, sat Elizabeth Tudor, reading a book, when the panting nobleman who had hurried down from London, brought her the news that the death of her childless sister had placed the crown of England upon her head. The same story has it that she rose with such animation, to make her way back to the house, that her hat fell off in the movement, and, having been picked up reverentially by one of her courtiers, was preserved ever afterward in verification of the scene. It lies in the drawer of a cabinet, and is taken forth and shown to the still more reverent visitor: a curious circle of delicate and elaborate basket-work, lined, if I remember rightly, with faded silk. I have omitted to mention that Elizabeth was for some time a resident of Hatfield, where she had been placed by her sister in a sort of honorable confinement. She lived in the elder house, a portion of which constitutes the present gateway, and of which only the chapel remains—being now, as I have said, transformed into the most picturesque of stables. There is an ecclesiastical stable of this kind in "Daniel Deronda"—the property, if I remember rightly, of Sir Hugo Mallinger—which is the scene of one of the first incidents in the hero's remarkable flirtation with Gwendolen. I found it natural to wonder whether this curious fragment of early Hatfield had suggested to George Eliot the disposition of the domicile of Sir Hugo's stud. The studs of English gentlemen are certainly better lodged than some of their tenants, and at Hatfield the very horses are subjected