and speculator, built the house from the designs of Capability Browne at a cost of over a hundred thousand pounds. His dwelling and his monument remain to represent Clive. After him, two or three occupants removed, came Leopold of Belgium, with his bride, the Princess Charlotte, pet and hope of the British nation. Their stay was more transient still—a year only, when death dissipated their dream and cleared the way to the throne for Victoria. Leopold continued to hold the property, and it became a generation later the asylum of Louis Philippe. To an ordinary mind the miseries of any one condemned to make this lovely spot his home are not apt to present themselves as the acme of despair. A sensation of relief and lulling repose would be more reasonably expected, especially after so stormy a career as that of Louis. The change from restless and capricious Paris to dewy shades and luxurious halls in the heart of changeless and impregnable England ought, on common principles, to have promoted the content and prolonged the life of the old king. Possibly it did, but if so, the French had not many months' escape from a second Orleans regency, for the exile's experience of Claremont was brief. We may wander over his lawns, and reshape to ourselves his reveries. Then we may forget the man who lost an empire as we look up at the cenotaph of him who conquered one. Both brought grist to Miller Bull, the fortunate and practical-minded owner of such vast water-privileges. His water-power seems proof against all floods, while the corn of all nations must come to his door. Standing under these drooping elms, by this lazy stream, we hear none of the clatter of the great mill, and we cease to dream of affixing a period to its noiseless and effective work.
If we are not tired of parks for today, five minutes by rail will carry us west to Oatlands Park, with its appended, and more or less dependent, village of Walton-upon-Thames. But a surfeit even of English country-houses and their pleasances is a possible thing; and nowhere are they more abundant than within an hour's walk of our present locality. So, taking Ashley Park, Burwood Park, Pains Hill and many others, as well as the Coway Stakes—said by one school of antiquarians to have been planted in the Thames by Cæsar, and by another to be the relics of a fish-weir—Walton Church and Bradshaw's house, for granted, we shall turn to the east and finish the purlieus of Hampton with a glance at the old Saxon town of Kingston-on-Thames. Probably an ardent Kingstonian would indignantly disown the impression our three words are apt to give of the place. It is a rapidly—growing town, and "Egbert, the first king of all England," who held a council at "Kyningestun, famosa ilia locus," in 838, would be at a loss to find his way through its streets could he revisit it. It has the population of a Saxon county. Viewed from the massive bridge, with the church-tower rising above an expanse of sightly buildings, it possesses the least possible resemblance to the cluster of wattled huts that may be presumed to have sheltered Egbert and his peers.
A more solid memento of the Saxons is preserved in the King's Stone. This has been of late years set up in the centre of the town, surrounded with an iron railing, and made visible to all comers, skeptical or otherwise. Tradition credits it with having been that upon which the kings of Wessex were crowned, as those of Scotland down to Longshanks, and after him the English, were on the red sandstone palladium of Scone. From the list of ante-Norman monarchs said to have received the sceptre upon it the poetically inclined visitor will select for chief interest Edwy, whose coronation was celebrated in great state in his seventeenth year. How he fell in love with and married secretly his cousin Elgiva; how Saint Dunstan and his equally saintly though not regularly beatified ally, Odo, archbishop of Canterbury, indignant at a step taken against their fulminations and protests, and jealous of the fair queen, tore her from his arms, burnt with hot iron the bloom out of her cheeks, and finally put her to death with the most cruel tortures; and how her broken-hearted boy-lord, dethroned and hunted, died before reaching twenty,—is a standing dish of the pathetic. Unfortunately, the story, handed down to us with much detail, appears to be true. We must not accept it, however, as an average illustration of life in that age of England. The five hundred years before the Conquest do not equal, in the bloody character of their annals, the like period succeeding it. Barbarous enough the Anglo-Saxons were, but wanton cruelty does not seem to have been one of their traits. To produce it some access of religious fury was usually requisite. It was on the church doors that the skins of their Danish invaders were nailed.
Kingston has no more Dunstans. Alexandra would be perfectly safe in its market-place. The rosy maidens who pervade its streets need not envy her cheeks, and the saints and archbishops who are to officiate at her husband's induction as head of the Anglican Church have their anxieties at present directed to wholly different quarters. They have foes within and foes without, but none in the palace.
Kingston bids fair to revert, after a sort, to the metropolitan position it boasted once, but has lost for nine centuries. The capital is coming to it, and will cover the four remaining miles within a decade or two at the existing rate of progress. Kingston may be assigned to the suburbs already. It is much nearer London, in point of time, than Union Square in New York to the City Hall. A slip of country not yet endowed with trottoirs and gas-lamps intervenes. Call this park, as you do the square miles of such territory already deep within the metropolis.
London's jurisdiction, as marked by the Boundary Stone, extends much farther up the river than we have as yet gone. Nor are the swans her only vicegerents. The myrmidons of Inspector Bucket, foot and horse, supplement those natatory representatives. So do the municipalities encroach upon and overspread the country, as it is eminently proper they should, seeing that to the charters so long ago exacted, and so long and so jealously guarded, by the towns, so much of the liberty enjoyed by English-speaking peoples is due. Large cities may be under some circumstances, according to an often-quoted saying, plague-spots on the body politic, but their growth has generally been commensurate with that of knowledge and order, and indicative of anything but a diseased condition of the national organism.
But here we are, under the shadow of the departed Nine Elms and of the official palace of the Odos, deep enough in Lunnon to satisfy the proudest Cockney, in less time than we have taken in getting off that last commonplace on political economy. Adam Smith and Jefferson never undertook to meditate at thirty-five miles an hour.
LINES WRITTEN AT VENICE IN OCTOBER, 1865
Sleep, Venice, sleep! the evening gun resounds
Over the waves that rock thee on their breast:
The bugle blare to kennel calls the hounds
Who sleepless watch thy waking and thy rest.
Sleep till the night-stars do the day-star meet,
And shuddering echoes o'er the water run,
Rippling through every glass-green, wavering street
The stern good-morrow of thy guardian Hun.
Still do thy stones, O Venice! bid rejoice,
With their old majesty, the gazer's eye,
In their consummate grace uttering a voice,
From every line, of blended harmony.
Still glows the splendor of the wondrous dreams
Vouchsafed thy painters o'er each sacred shrine,
And from the radiant visions downward streams
In visible light an influence divine.
Still through thy golden day and silver night
Sings his soft jargon the gay gondolier,
And o'er thy floors of liquid malachite
Slide the black-hooded barks to mystery dear.
Like Spanish beauty in its sable veil,
They rustle sideling through the watery way,
The wild, monotonous cry with which they hail
Each other's passing dying far away.
As each steel prow grazes the island strands
Still ring the sweet Venetian voices clear,
And wondering wanderers from far, free lands
Entranced
