Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/683

 to allude to Stratford, it would not he in connection with the fact that Shakespeare came into the world there. It would be rather to speak of a delightful old house near the Avon which struck me as the ideal home for a Shakespearian scholar, or indeed for any passionate lover of the poet. Here, with books, and memories, and the recurring reflection that he had taken his daily walk across the bridge, at which you look from your windows straight down an avenue of fine old trees, with an ever-closed gate at the end of them, and a carpet of turf stretched over the dismal drive—here, I say, with old brown wainscotted chambers to live in, old polished doorsteps to lead you from one to the other, deep window seats to sit in, with a play in your lap—here a person for whom the cares of life should have resolved themselves into a care for the greatest genius who has represented and ornamented life, might find a very harmonious resting place. Or, speaking a little wider of the mark, the charming, rambling, low-gabled, many-staired, much-panelled mansion I speak of, would be a most delectable home for any person of taste who prefers an old house to a new. I find I am talking about it almost like an auctioneer; but what I chiefly had at heart was to commemorate the fact that I had lunched there, and while I lunched kept saying to myself that there is nothing in the world so delightful as a human habitation which three or four hundred years have done their best to make irregular.

And yet that same day, on the edge of the Avon, I found it in me to say that a new house too may be a very charming affair. But I must add that the new house I speak of had really such exceptional advantages that it could not fairly be placed in the scale. Besides, was it new after all? I suppose that it was, and yet one's impression there was all of a kind of silvery antiquity. The place stood upon a genteel Stratford street, from which it looked harmless enough; but when, after sitting a while in a charming modern drawing-room, one stepped thoughtlessly through an open window upon a veranda, one found that one was "in" for something more than one bargains for in the customary morning call of our period. I will not pretend to relate all that I saw after stepping off the veranda; suffice it that the spire and chancel of the beautiful old church in which Shakespeare is buried, with the Avon sweeping its base, were an incidental feature of my vision. Then there were the smoothest lawns in the world stretching down to the edge of this lovely stream, and making, where the water touched them, a line as even as the rim of a champagne glass—a line near which you inevitably lingered to see the spire and the chancel—the church was close at hand—among the well grouped trees, and look for their reflection in the river. The place was a garden of delight; it was a stage set for one of Shakespeare's comedies—for "Twelfth Night" or "Much Ado." Just across the river was a level meadow which rivalled the lawn on which I stood, and this meadow seemed only the more essentially a part of the scene by reason of the richly fleeced sheep that were grazing on it. These sheep were by no means mere edible mutton; they were poetic, historic, romantic sheep; they were there to be picturesque, and they knew it. And yet, knowing as they were, I doubt whether the wisest old ram of the flock could have told me how to explain why it was that this happy mixture of lawn, and river, and mirrored spire, and blooming garden, seemed to me for a quarter of an hour the prettiest corner of England.

If Warwickshire is Shakespeare's country, I found myself remembering that it is also George Eliot's. The author of "Adam Bede" and "Middlemarch" has called the rural background of those admirable fictions by another name, but I believe it long ago ceased to be a secret that her native Warwickshire had been in her