DOD GRILE IN ENGLAND.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 89, 12 September 1874, Page 3

DOD GRILE IN ENGLAND.

STRATFORD-ON-AVON. The first English soil that kisses the American foot is, almost from necessity, that of Liverpool—a mildly uninteresting commercial soil—a sordid earth, in which nothing but trade will flourish. Liverpool is the purgatory through which the departed Yankee must pass to reach the paradise of Loudon; from which, also, he must purchase the release for his own soul at a ruinous price—more, in fact, than the article is worth.

In this purgatory, indeed, you are purged of nothing but your gold and your good patience. The tourist, if he be intelligent, will lose no time in exchanging the horrors of Liverpool for the delights of London—delights, however, from the full and satisfying enjoyment of which he is ever hindered by a haunting fever of impatience to go to Stratford-on-Avon. Until he shall have compassed the fulfilment of this wish, and attained to the true seventh heaven of his hope, the birth-and-burial-place of Shakespeare, the 1 educated American’ is tormented with an inward flame, to which even the charms of the world’s capital are but oil and resin.

There are few experiences more delightful than travelling on one of the main lines of railway leading out of London; provided, of course, you go first-class and take along an easy conscience. The little cushioned compartment for six—it is ten to one you get it all to yourself and companion—is a wonder of cosy and comfortable privacy. And then the speed ! Away you go, taking cities twenty leagues asunder at a single stride—reaching across the loveliest of spaces, and flashing past scores of big towns with never a slackening of the gait—gliding over greensided rivers so quickly that the hues of bank and water are blended to the sight—sweeping past parks, through which you can catch dim glimpses of a modern palace or an ancient ruin—ever and anon leaping over a smoking manufacturing town actually plunging house-high through its forest of tall chimneys, and wondering how it happens that your engine does not tumble them about like ten pins! Should the engine-driver err, it will not be for the lack of instruction. Planted alongside the metal, among all the milestones, is all manner of information for his professional guidance. Little boards, inscribed with figures to indicate curves and their degree of curvature ; other little boards to denote grades and theirgradients; big boards telling him how fast to run and where to whistle, On 1 long level reaches of

air line, where there exists no necessity for these things, the monotony is pleasingly broken by other boards painted with the time of the day, quotations from the poets and Scripture texts. In some places where the country is particularly interesting, definitions fromJuhnson’s Dictionary are posted up; but there is a good deal of complaint among passengers that the driver never c ■ amis to them. All these devices for supplying the place of the driver’s mind, would be of great a-sislance wore it not that the train is driven so fast as to lender them quite invisible. After the thousavu-and- ne description of Shakspeare’s birth-place and tomb, I am not hot to describe tin in myself. In the first place I do not care to provoke a comparison between myself and Washington living, who is dead and defenceless; secondly, I was not sufficiently observant of the old half-tim-bered house in Henley street, and the rather uninteresting church on Avonside to qualify myself for the work. I did not much mark Hiese things ; 1 did not much care for them. I had eyes for nothing in its outer aspect, and a heart for but one thought. Never for one waking moment was that thought absent from my mind ; and in my sleep it haunted me like a sad-cyed spectre. Whether gazing my shilling’s worth at the Shakespeare relics in the Henley street cot tage —or standing where stood the Shakespeare mulberry tree, cut down by a vandal clergyman (may Heaven forgive his villain soul, as I do!) —or sauntering in the brown fields about Shottery—or tracking the late moon in the gloaming Avon—or bending with a full heart above the old tombstone with its terrible malediction —this saddest of reflections was ever to the fore, making an ass of itself: “This Giant from whose ‘stupendousintellectual altitude’ the difference between the highest and the lowest of vs. must have been imperceptible—who was higher above the highest than he above the lowest—in a world of men this first and only man—even he did die and rot, and—there you are!” I am not exceptionally sentimental, nor, I think, very impressible. I have seen hundreds die, and forgot to grieve for them. I have stood at the graves of some of the world’s greatest and best, and it never occurred to me to be sorry they were dead. It has seemed to me that Death, like the King, could do no wrong. But standing in the little old church on Avonside, with the ashes of that mighty brain beneath the soles of my feet, I could have wept for the dead man of two hundred and fifty years ago as for the grief “of an hours age.” I think this is not a general but an individual experience. I have remarked the Poet’s admirers, and even his lovers, furbishing up the dull platitude that he still lives in his works—lives for posterity and eternity. How pitiful was the failure of this bastard consolation, when, in the presence of the dumb dust, I first realised its utter shallowness and mockery—the sounding brass of this tinkling sentiment! And how bitter seemed the unconscious satire of this expression in my little guidebook, “ The tomb of the immortal Bard!” A tomh for an immortal! Heaven help us to better sense! I hope to never again see Stratford; the two days of my visit were the saddest of my life. There was no spot to which I could escape —no corner into which T could cower and shut out the dread sense of helplessness, inspired by the spot where pitiless nature had reared her fairest son for the slaughter. In every street I heard, in fancy, his death groan. In every field the wind whispered of his presence, and his absence. The very children playing by the wayside suggested unutterable things ; thus had played their little ancestors when be had passed—and passed away. A bald and bent old man whom I met in the churchyard roused my resentment like an insult. He seemed thrust upon my notice on purpose to recall the age at which death murdered my idol ; the riper years accorded to the grosser clay were a shocking example of Nature’s wicked partiality. Still, I did not think it best to kill him, and I am almost glad now that 1 did not.