Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/677

 IN WARWICKSHIRE.

accomplished contributor to these pages lately used a happy phrase in speaking of that charming region whose name I have just written. He called it the "heart of England." Making a short stay there very lately, I remembered this appellation. I felt as if I were at the grassy centre and core of the English world. It is in fact central England, midmost England, essential, immitigable England. I have a sense of knowing a good deal more about this admirable country by reason of this heedful sojourn. I feel as if, after a fashion, I had been "interviewing" the genius of pastoral Britain. From a charming lawn—a lawn delicious to one's sentient bootsole—I looked without obstruction at a sombre, soft, romantic mass, whose outline was blurred by mantling ivy. It made a perfect picture; and, in the foreground, the great trees overarched their boughs from right and left, so as to give it a symmetrical frame. This interesting object was Kenilworth castle. It was within distance of an easy walk, but one hardly thought of walking to it any more than one would have thought of walking to a purple-shadowed tower in the background of a Berghem or a Claude. Here there were purple shadows, and slowly shifting lights, and a soft-hued, bosky country in the middle distance.

Of course, however, I did walk over to Kenilworth castle; and of course the walk led me through leafy lanes, and inside the hedgerows, that make a tangled screen for lawn-like meadows. Of course too, I am bound to add, there was a row of ancient peddlers outside the castle wall, hawking twopenny pamphlets and photographs. Of course, equally, at the foot of the grassy mound on which the ruin stands, there were half a dozen public houses; and, always of course, there were half a dozen beery paupers sprawling on the grass in the moist sunshine. There was the usual respectable young woman to open the castle gate and to receive the usual sixpenny fee. And there were the usual squares of printed cardboard, suspended upon venerable surfaces, with further mention of twopence, threepence, fourpence. I do not allude to these things querulously, for Kenilworth is a very tame lion—a lion that, in former years, I had stroked more than once. I remembered perfectly my first visit to this romantic spot—how I chanced upon a picnic; how I stumbled over beer bottles there; how the very echoes of the beautiful ruin seemed to have dropped all their h's. That was a sultry afternoon; I allowed my spirits to sink, and I came away hanging my head. This was a beautiful fresh morning, and in the interval I had grown philosophic. I had learned that, with regard to all the public lions in England, there is a minimum of cockneyfication with which you must make your account. There are always people on the field before you, and there is generally something being drunk on the premises.

I hoped, on the occasion of which I am now speaking, that I had chanced upon the minimum; and indeed, for the first five minutes I flattered myself that this was the case. In the beautiful grassy court of the castle, on my entrance, there were not more than eight or ten fellow-intruders. There were a couple of old ladies on a bench, eating something out of a newspaper; there was a dissenting minister, also on a bench, reading the guide-book aloud to his wife and sister-in-law; there were three or four children pushing each other up and down the turfy hillocks. This was sweet seclusion indeed; and I got a capital start with the various