CHAPTER XVI.

Yardley Oak; of immense Size and imposing Appearance. Cowper's Description singularly illustrative of his complete Mastery over Language. — Peasant's Nest. - The Poet's Vocation peculiarly one of Revolution. The School of Pope; supplanted in its unproductive Old Age by that of Cowper. - Cowper's Coadjutors in the Work. Economy of Literary Revolution. — The old English Yeoman. Quit Olney. - Companions in the Journey.—Incident. -- Newport Pagnell.-Mr. Bull and the French Mystics. - Lady of the Fancy. - Champion of all England. - Pugilism. - Anecdote.

HALF an hour's leisurely walking—and, in consideration of my companion's three score and eleven summers, our walking was exceedingly leisurely-brought us, through field and dingle, and a country that presented, as we ascended, less of an agricultural and more of a pastoral character, to the woods of Yardley Lodge. We enter through a coppice on a grassy field, and see along the opposite side a thick oak wood, with a solitary brick house, the only one in sight, half hidden amid foliage in a corner. The oak wood has, we find, quite a character of its own. The greater part of its trees, still in their immature youth, were seedlings within the last forty years: they have no associates that bear in their well-developed proportions, untouched by decay, the stamp of solid mid-aged tree hood; but here and there, standing up among them, like the 'ong-lived sons of Noah, in their old age of many centuries, amid a race cut down to the three score and ten, some of the most ancient oaks in the empire, trees that were

we find

trees in the days of William the Conqueror. These are mere hollow trunks, of vast bulk, but stinted foliage, in which the

fox shelters an the owl builds, mere struldbrugs of the forest. The bulkiest and most picturesque among their number we find marked by a white-lettered board: it is a hollow pollard of enormous girth, twenty-eight feet five inches in circum ference a foot above the soil, with skeleton stumps, bleached white by the winters of many centuries, stretching out for a few inches from amid a ragged drapery of foliage that sticks close to the body of the tree, and bearing on its rough gray bole wens and warts of astounding magnitude. The trunk, leaning slightly forward, and wearing all its huger globosities behind, seems some fantastic old-world mammoth, seated kangaroofashion on its haunches. Its foliage this season had caught a tinge of yellow, when the younger trees all around retained their hues of deep green; and, seen in the bold relief which it owed to the circumstance, it reminded me of Æneas' golden branch, glittering bright amid the dark woods of Cumea. And such is Yardley oak, the subject of one of the finest descriptions in English poetry, one of the most characteristic, too, of the muse of Cowper. If asked to illustrate that peculiar power which he possessed above all modern poets, of taking the most stubborn and untractable words in the language, and bending them with all ease round his thinking, so as to fit its every indentation and irregularity of outline, as the ship-carpenter adjusts the stubborn planking, grown flexible in his hand, to the exact mould of his vessel, I would at once instance some parts of the description of Yardley oak. But farewell, noble tree! so old half a century ago, when the poet conferred on thee immortality, that thou dost not seem older now!

"Time made thee what thou wast, king of the woods;
And Time hath made thee what thou art, -a cave

For owls to roost in. Once thy spreading boughs
O'erhung the champaign; and the numerous flocks

That grazed it stood beneath that ample cope
Uncrowded, yet safe sheltered from the storm.
No flock frequents thee now. Thou hast outlived

Thy popularity, and art become

(Unless verse rescue thee a while) a thing

Forgotten as the foliage of thy youth.

While thus through all the stages thou hast pushed
Of treeship, first a seedling hid in grass;

Then twig; then sapling; and, as century rolled
Slow after century, a giant bulk

Of girth enormous, with moss-cushioned root
Upheaved above the soil, and sides embossed
With prominent wens globose,— till, at the last,
The rottenness, which time is charged to inflict
On other mighty ones, found also thee."

- returned with my guide to the rustic bridge; resumed my walk through the hitherto unexplored half of the chestnut colonnade; turned the corner; and then, passing downwards along the lower side of the park, through neglected thickets,the remains of an extensive nursery run wild, I struck outwards beyond its precincts, and reached a whitened dwellinghouse that had been once the "Peasant's Nest." But nowhere else in the course of my walk had the hand of improvement misimproved so sadly. For the hill-top cottage,

"Environed with a ring of branchy elms
That overhung the thatch,"

I found a modern hard-cast farm-house, with a square of offices attached, all exceedingly utilitarian, well kept, stiff, and dis greeable. It was sad enough to find an erection that a journeyman bricklayer could have produced in a single month substituted for the "peaceful covert" Cowper had so often wished his own, and which he had so frequently and fondly visited. But those beauties of situation which awakened the

admiration, and even half excited the envy, of the poet, improvement could not alter; and so they are now what they ever were. The diagonal valley to which I have had such frequent occasion to refer is just escaping from the park at its lower corner: the slope, which rises from the runnel to the level, still lies on the one hand within the enclosure; but it has escaped from it on the other, and forms, where it merges into the higher grounds, the hill-top on which the "Nest" stands; and the prospect, no longer bounded by the tall belting of the park, is at once very extensive and singularly beautiful.

"Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads, with cattle sprinkled o'er,
Conducts the eye along its sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast-rooted in their bank,
Stand, never overlooked, our favorite elms,
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut;
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream,
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds,
Displaying on its varied side the grace

Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square towers,
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the listening ear,

Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote.”

Leaving the farm-house, I descended into the valley; passed along a tangled thicket of yew, plane and hazel, in which I lingered a while to pick blackberries and nuts, where Cowper may have picked them; came out upon the Olney road by the wicket gate through which he used to quit the highway and strike up to the woodlands; and, after making my old woman particularly happy by a small gratuity, returned to Olney.

I trust it will not be held that my descriptions of this oldfashioned park, with its colonnade and its avenues, its dells

and its dingles, its alcove and its wilderness, have been too minute. It has an interest as independent of any mere beauty or picturesqueness which it may possess, as the field of Bannockburn or the meadows of Runnimede. It indicates the fulcrum, if I may so speak, on which the lever of a great original genius first rested, when it upturned from its foundations an effete school of English verse, and gave to the literature of the country a new face. Its scenery, idealized into poetry, wrought one of the greatest literary revolutions of which the history of letters preserves any record. The school of Pope, originally of but small compass, had sunk exceedingly low ere the times of Cowper: it had become, like Nebuchadnezzar's tree, a brass-bound stump, that sent forth no leafage of refreshing green, and no blossoms of pleasant smell; and yet, for considerably more than half a century, it had been the only exist. ing English school. And when the first volume of "Poems by William Cowper, Esq., of the Inner Temple," issued from the press, there seemed to be no prospect whatever of any other school rising to supplant it. Several writers of genius had appeared in the period, and had achieved for themselves a standing in literature; nor were they devoid of the originality, in both their thinking and the form of it, without which no writer becomes permanently eminent. But their originality was specific and individual, and terminated with themselves: whereas the school of Pope, whatever its other defects, was of a generic character. A second Collins, a second Gray, a sec ond Goldsmith, would have been mere timid imitators, mock Paganims, playing each on the one exquisite string of his master, and serving by his happiest efforts but to establish the fidelity of the imitation. But the poetry of Pope formed an instrument of larger compass and a more extensive gamut, and left the disciples room to achieve for themselves, in run

mere