Southampton To Salisbury

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

IN going from Southampton to Salisbury on the South Western Railway, I stayed for a few hours at Romsey, Hants, where is " Broadlands," the seat of the tate Lord Palmerston. I wished to hunt up some records in the Abbey Church, for which I was furnished every facility. The fine old church itself is a genuine specimen of the early Norman, and it stands in its primitive simplicity. It struck me as having some architectural resemblance to Bakewell Church, Derbyshire. The sexton grew pathetic over a long tress of auburn hair which he had himself exhumed, and which he said belonged to Alfred's daughter, or a Roman princess, I have forgotten which. I spent some time in turning over the ponderous vellum church archives ; but it was like looking for the grave of Merlin, to find any particular name in such a vast unsystematized mass of extinct names.

Three miles from Romsey is " Embley Park," the southern home of Florence Nightingale.

It is a culminating point in one's English travel when he catches his first distant sight of Salisbury Cathedral. If there is any thing graceful it is the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, and above all when it is seen etherealized through the misty English atmosphere, which transmutes solid into aerial forms.

At this season of the year, when the fashionable travel was nearly over, and only business men, or, as they are termed, " commercial travelers," are abroad with their " mackintoshes " and portmanteaus, I was doomed to interminable conversations in railway carriages and coffee-rooms, with hard-brained and plain-spoken men. I met among them oftentimes exceedingly well-informed individuals, and if one is a little cautious not to arouse national prejudices, there are few more interesting and graphic talkers than this class of persons. They are men who blurt out their thoughts without fear or favor. They are practical men, who despise humbug and pipe-claying. Louis Napoleon, to be sure, was determined to burn and sink England before his reign was over ; and they did not know but he could do it, though he would find it a tough job ; but, on all other topics, no people are more sensible and clear-headed. I fell in with some of these men at the " White Hart Inn " in Salisbury. They did not spare their national idols, their leading men. Even Gladstone, who was one of the best of them in their estimation, came in for his ‘hare ; they called him " a book-man " who knew no more of finance than "Boots " here. They berated the boarding-houses of London, and in fact London trades-people generally, and said that any of these would coin his soul for a guinea. Thi honest talk, if it sound rough, lends an individuality and knotty picturesqueness to the commonest Englishman, and makes him stand out from the rest of mankind like a gnarled oak.

It is beautiful to see the pleasant relationship existing between father and son in England. It is free and unrestrained like that of brothers. The father yields up his stiff authority and paternally critical tone, and descends to meet the son almost on a level ; and the son repays this with unbounded affection and confidence. The conversation between them sounds almost like that between young men; they laugh and jest, and yet the fine sense of the true relationship is never lost. I noticed this particularly in the case of a young officer and his father whom I met at Salisbury. They came into the hotel from a walk of sixteen miles in a heavy rain, to and from Stonehenge. The father was really the more brisk of the two. The son was an elegant fellow who could quote " Juvenal" about his fish, and who had seen hard service in India. He told his soldier stories and adventures in a genial way, that American sons would not do before their father. And I confess I liked it, for there seemed to be true love between the two, without the actual loss of filial respect.

Salisbury, the principal city of Wilts County, eighty-two miles from London, seated amid its broad open downs, is the centre of a highly interesting region for the antiquarian. Salisbury itself has some very old houses, many of them having thatched roofs, which, grown undulating and irregular by age, look like black elephants' backs ; but its chief interest concentrates in its Cathedral. The quiet " Close," occupying an area of half a square mile, surrounded by its high wall and quaint antique gates, its smooth lawn and noble trees, comprehends the church, the Bishop's palace, the deanery, and many other buildings of old foundations. These ancient " Closes," more or less de-fined, are found in every ecclesiastical town in England, and indicate the former magnificence of the Church, taking the lion's share of the city, and of every thing good and pleasant in it. They were in fact the hearts of the old civilization, the centres of power, — cities within cities, — and generally ruling all outside of them.

In this green and tranquil yard sheep roam about unmolested, and lie close up under the walls of the church. Salisbury Cathedral has a noble and open site, and can be seen therefore to peculiar advantage. The buildings of the city have not been allowed to encroach upon and crowd it. It is a reverend and awe-inspiring structure, with a moss-grown, scarred, and broken front, but all its lines are elegant and pure.

The octangular spire is wonderfully beautiful, soaring upward slenderly but to an immense height from the forest of crocketed turrets upon the tower, its shaft intersected at intervals with richly wrought bands. Its height to the top of the cross is within wo inches of four hundred feet. I recall my last sight of it. It was on the edge of evening, when the sailing mists had left it entirely free and clear, and the calm golden light of setting day rested brightly for a little time upon it, as it pointed to heaven and seemed to show the way.

The decline of the spire from the perpendicular, of about twenty-four inches, has caused apprehensions of its falling ; and it has been bandaged and strengthened, for it is boldly poised on four arches thrown across the angles of the tower, and clamped with iron. The walls of this tower itself are only two feet in thickness. Salisbury Cathedral from foundation stone to spire-point, is perhaps the most perfect specimen that exists of the " Early English " style. Its first stone was laid in 1220, and it was hardly finished in the reign of Edward III., somewhere about the middle of the 14th century. It is built of Chilmark stone obtained fifteen miles from Salisbury, and is in the form of a double cross. Its majestic west front is covered with the finest tracery work, and has one hundred and twenty-three niches for statues, most of them now empty. Its interior, compared with Winchester or Ely, is severe and bare, but harmonious. It is not an astonishing irregular Gothic epic, but a pure English poem. The columns are clustered and slender ; the windows are lancet-shaped and the mouldings plain. The length is four hundred and forty-nine feet ; and stretched along on either side of this grandly extended nave lie the effigies of heroes who fought in the Holy Land, carved with their legs crossed, and with broad shields on their breasts ; and those also who contended in the ancient bloody civil wars, their gorgeous blazonry gone, and some of the figures headless and handless, but brave still in their wide girdles and chain armor.

The tomb of William Longsword, first Earl of Salisbury, son of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, has been especially battered by time. The Countess of Pembroke, upon whom Ben Jonson wrote the epitaph, is buried in the east choir of the Cathedral. The place is not marked by a monument.

The Chapter House, on the south side of the church, supported gracefully by one slight springing column of Purbeck marble, as if it were a slender fount in stone, shines richly with modern gilding and colors. It has been carefully restored. The architect supposes that he has authority for this high coloring and gilding, from having detected the traces of ancient colors here and there upon the carved work ; but I agree entirely with the remark of a friend, who said, " I doubt whether the room ever looked half so gorgeous in the olden time as now.

A series of old sculptures in alto-relievo of Biblical scenes, runs around the apartment below the windows, and is surprisingly ingenious and elaborate. The same patience and faithfulness are shown in them that we see in ancient missals, and often the same exquisite purity of expression. Besides these, on the face of the archivolt are a number of allegorical figures representing the " Virtues " and " Vices," which for delicacy and power called forth the admiration of Flaxman. Despair presses his hand on his heart like the condemned spirits in Beckford's Hall of Eblis, and Pity throws a cloak over one who is slaying her with a sword.

On the Cathedral door, as may be everywhere seen on parish church doors in England, were pasted notices in large letters of " Income Tax — Land Tax — Assessed Taxes in this liberty."

Let us take a walk of three miles or so out to " Wilton House," through the Fisherton suburb crossing the Avon, and we will stop first at Berner-ton, about two miles from the city. In this obscure village George Herbert lived and labored, following out his own words, —

" Be useful where thou livest."

It was while walking over this very road, Izaak Walton relates, that Herbert stopped to aid a countryman whose cart had been upset, and for this reason arrived late and dirty at a social musical meeting of his friends and brother clergymen in Salisbury ; upon being rallied for such an unseemly operation, he said that, " the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight."

Turning off the main road down a quiet lane, on one side of which is a thick wood, is the little church of Bemerton, somewhat larger than St. Lawrence Church on the Isle of Wight, but they would match pretty well for smallness and humility. It has one minute window upon a side, four tiny buttresses, a red-tiled roof, and a low flat cupola with a vane in the interior are seven pews on each side of the narrow aisle, and a gallery for the choir.

Almost within sight of the proud mansion of his own illustrious Pembroke family, here the Rector of Bermerton, and the glory of Trinity College, Cambridge, fed his illiterate flock. And he hesitated long before he assumed even this humble post, so that a tailor happening to be at Wilton House, so says Izaak Walton, made his canonicals in great haste, he putting off his fine silken clothes and his sword to assume them. Yellow tottering grave-stones stand around this diminutive edifice and crowd up under its shadow, and within its lowly walls, under the altar-table, Herbert was buried. He taught us that a man is made no greater nor less by his place. He is what he is in himself. Nothing can lower him if his heart be above. Does his own poor earthly life lie buried here, —

"Gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root when they have blown ? "

Yet that sweet, Christ-like soul, now " past chang ng," sings : —

" I bud again."

The parsonage where Herbert lived stands just across the little lane that runs by the side of the church. His own study is shown. I noticed no other houses immediately around. A larger church is to be erected near by, by the Herbert family, to bear the name of the poet. Sweeter than ever o me since this visit to Bemerton have George Herbert's poems with all their odd conceits grown, and, above all, that gem : —

" Teach me, my Lord and King,
In all things Thee to see;
And what I do in any thing
To do it as for Thee.

All may of Thee partake;
Nothing can be so mean,
But for this tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for lesse be told ! "

Somewhat further to the west, at the entrance of Wilton town, in the bosom of a magnificent park, stands Wilton House. It was built from designs of Holbein and Inigo Jones, upon the site of a Benedictine Abbey, granted by Henry VIII. to Sir William Herbert. It is indeed a palace, but has some-thing grave and sober about it. Its fair stateliness could not be more precisely described than in the lines of Wordsworth : —

"Like image of solemnity conjoined
With feminine allurement soft and fair
The mansion's self displayed : a reverend pile
With bold projections and recesses deep;
Shadowy yet gay and lightsome as it stood
Fronting the noon-tide sun. We paused to admire
The pillared porch, elaborately embossed;
The low wide windows with their mullions old:
The cornice richly fretted of gray stone;
And that smooth slope from which the dwelling rose,
By beds and banks Arcadian of gay flowers
And flowering shrubs, protected and adorned.

Profusion bright! and every flower assuming
A more than natural vividness of hue,
From unaffected contrast with the gloom
Of sober cypress, and the darker foil
Of yew, in which survived some traces, here
Not unbecoming, of grotesque device
And uncouth fancy. From behind the roof
Rose the slim ash and massy sycamore,
Blending their diverse foliage with the green
Of ivy, flourishing and thick, that clasped
The huge round chimneys, harbors of delight
For wren and redbreast, where they sit and sing
Their slender ditties when the trees are bare."

The trees are of great variety and noble growth. One sweeping ilex has its branches supported by chains. A .group of cedars of Lebanon, towering in massy chambers of foliage, gives an almost Italian, or Oriental, shading to the picture. The river Nadder, which flows through the park, is crossed by a bridge in the grounds. In these quiet shades Sir Philip Sidney wrote his " Arcadia," — it is said, for his sister's pleasure and amusement.

The suite of state apartments, though superb, looked comfortable and as if they were lived in. It was not a show-palace. In the " double cube room," is the noted collection of Vandykes, most of them portraits of the Pembroke family. There was one striking picture of Prince Rupert, as a youth, calm and beautiful, with none of the dashing cavalier about it, but a determined look in the arge brown eyes. I did not notice any portrait of Sir Philip Sidney, or of George Herbert. They must, however, have been there. A small likeness Florence Nightingale, of whom Lady Hebert is said to be a particular friend and co-laborer, stood upon a side-table.

It is a luxurious apartment as far as the opulence of the furniture is concerned, but that is not the real feature of the room. I do not dwell upon the age-darkened and highly carved furniture, the splendid mirrors, the antique marbles, the princely books, the pictures, and the hundred objects of ornament and taste about the room, for every thing is so harmoniously placed that nothing arrested attention ; but there is an aesthetic charm in the apartment, which does not allow one to think of material magnificence. It is a room worthy of a noble mind to take its ease in, to make itself at home in. There is no cold splendor to be warmed up twice a year on the eve of a great ball, but a sense of perpetual ease and enjoyment, a spot lighted with tokens of affection and friendship, and with all that is soothing and ennobling.

From the grounds in front of the house, the glorious spire of Salisbury Cathedral is seen through a skillfully made opening in the thick screen of trees.

The Lombard Gothic church erected by Sir Sidney Herbert in Wilton, with its square bell-tower, as a family memorial church, is one of the most gorgeous modern structures in England. It seems as if Italy and the Continent had been rifled of architectural jewels to enrich it. Its brilliant mosaic pulpit of Caen stone, its white vine-wreathed columns, its gleaming brasses, its blue and gold frescos, its great sparkling rosette windows, and its antique fonts, transport one from the little English carpet manufacturing town, to Siena or Rome. Along the top of the screen are carved the words,

All things come of Thee, and of Thine own we have given Thee." It seemed, however, too rich for the place, and had to me a foreign and un-English look.

Wilton itself is a very ancient town, once the capital of the West Saxon kingdom ; but it was overshadowed by the growth of Salisbury. It was a favorite town of Charles I. The first carpet ever made in England was here manufactured. Massinger is said to have been born at Wilton.

Twelve miles from Wilton, near Hindon, is " Fonthill Abbey," now owned by the Marquis of Westminster, where Beckford spent twenty years and regal revenues in building his jealously in-walled Kubla-Khan palace, employing a little army of workmen night and day. The gigantic tower of his selfish pleasure and pride crumbled, like the tower of Babel, as if it had been smitten by an in-visible hand. I ascended another Saracenic tower erected by him at Bath, from which one could almost have seen among the green Wiltshire hills, this more Titanic monument of a depraved egotism and prostituted genius.

I have left little room for the two most interesting places, to an antiquarian, in the whole Salisbury circle, old Sarum and Stonehenge.

Fortified with a breakfast of hot coffee and muffins, for this is wild weather, we will tramp off to scramble over the site of that ancient Saxon city " Old Sarum," the germ of "New Sarum," or Salisbury.

It lies within sight of Salisbury, about two miles distant, and is simply a hill cut into great steps or terraces, looking like a modern sand-fort, or a huge mound which suggests more than it reveals. Bach to the time of the early Britons this hill was a fortified spot ; the Romans made it a great military centre, and six roads radiated from it ; in the time of Alfred it was a strong city; under the Norman kings it attained great ecclesiastical splendor and importance, two bishoprics being blended here in one ; but in the reign of King John, its bishop, Herbert Poore, determined to come down into the plain and establish his ecclesiastical seat there. This was the death-blow to Old Sarum. Gradually all the in-habitants followed him and gathered around the rising walls of the new "House of God " in the plain below. This new house was itself built of the stones of the old cathedal. The circular forrtress which once crowned the hill, whose walls comprised a space of fifteen hundred feet in circumference, is now reduced to a ragged mass of flint and rubble, which hangs tottering upon the edge of the height. This broken fragment is all that really remains of this once powerful city of Celt, Roman, and Saxon. The hollow of an ancient ditch runs around what was the line of the citadel walls. I startled numerous rabbits in running around the hill, and from a gloomy tangle of foliage that filled one part of the ditch, an owl whirred away ; it is a desolate spot, although a little cultivation smooths one side of the first terrace. Until the passage of the Reform Bill, the election of the members from Old Sarum — which William Pitt so long represented — took place under a " wych-elm " that marked the site of the ancient Town House. There is a wide view from the top of this discrowned hill, in which Salisbury Carthedral spire forms the marked feature.

Stonehenge ! I am not going to add another to the many learned theories which lie strewed at its base, like rusty tools broken against its granite walls ; for when we know who built " Tadmor in the wilderness," we may know who heaved up this rude circle on Salisbury Plain.

This mysterious monument lies eight and a half miles to the northwest of Salisbury. In coming to it one passes over a wide, slightly undulating, and thinly grassed chalk marl-down, where now and then a weather-beaten Shepherd of Salisbury Plain " may be seen sitting with his dog and staff, and his flock feeding near him. In some directions one may ride twenty miles on the plain without seeing a house or human being. It is not until one strikes into the clearly defined ancient avenue that leads up to Stonehenge, and gets pretty near the monument itself, that its vast skeleton form can be seen looming over the hillocks. There is said to be a gradual ascent to it from every direction. As one approaches the temple, the plain is filled with green circles and round barrows, as if it were the burial-place of a numerous nation. Some of these mounds have been opened, and contain the evidences of primitive sepulture. The Celtic " cyrch," or cirque, or circle, the national sacred place of burial, is said to have been the origin of the word " kirk."

The sky had a threatening look, the heavy clouds drooped low, and the gusty autumn wind swept in melancholy cadences over the plain, as I saw before me this oldest structure now standing in England, — this solemn circle of unwrought stones, out of whose rocky loins have come forth her life, art, and history.

" Stonehenge " is a Saxon name, meaning " hanging stone," descriptive of the blocks of stone imposed transversely upon perpendicular masses. The Britons and Druids had another name for it. It was probably, like the great temple at Avebury, in Wiltshire, a hypethral temple, even to the inner circle or adytuin, where is the sacrificial altaristone.

It is a circle within a circle. First comes an outer trench three hundred and sixty-nine yards in circumference. Then a circle of sixty stones, comrposed of thirty perpendiculars and thirty imposts, fastened by rude mortice and tenon, and forming a continuous architrave, the uprights being twenty feet high and four feet apart. Then a second concentric circle of thirty smaller stones without imposts ; and then two ovals of huge uprights with imposts, forming perhaps the real body of the temple. In the inner oval is the altar-stone, a block of hard gray Derbyshire marble. The other rock masses are of crumbling siliceous grit. The entire number of stones was originally one hundred and forty. Of course many of these have disappeared, and many have fallen. A gigantic trilithon recently fell with a force that shook the plain.

The stones taper somewhat to the top, and bear but rude marks of the chisel and hammer. Yet there is a mathematical unity of plan in the structure. It is the thoughtful work of a rough strong people. But where did these great masses come from on that stoneless plain? And how were they transported thither? The character of some of them differs entirely from the rocks of the region.

I feel much inclined to adopt a theory lately put forth concerning the origin of Stonehenge ; that it was built by the Celts, or native Britons, in the Arthurian period, or the fifth century A. D., as a sepulchral temple, to commemorate the treacherous slaughter of the Celts by Henghist in 461 ; that it means " Stone of Henghist."

In all ancient nations of Celtic origin on the Continent, and even to the centre of Asia, circles inclose sacred spots. The form of the Buddhist temple is always circular.

Stonehenge could hardly have been a Druidic temple, because here is, and has been, no grove in which to perform the secret Druidic rites, or to cut the mistletoe with the golden knife.

And this locality was evidently the ancient national British burial-place, although no signs of sepulture are discovered immediately in or under the temple ; yet an immense number of " barrows " or sepulchral mounds are found not far from it, and indeed everywhere upon the plain.

Merlin himself might have built it, for he was evidently the poet, artist, and philosopher of that period.

Harmless sheep feed quietly under this mighty solitary form of barbarian power. A rough shepherd clad in skins, with hay leggins and a long staff, standing in the shadow of one of the colossal pillars, told me the story of the place as it was told to him by his fathers, and will doubtless be told to others by his shepherd sons.