Hampton Court/Introduction

by William Holden Hutton

INTRODUCTION

"I AM never merry when I hear sweet music." So, when the "spirits are attentive," is it with the sight of a beautiful old house. The memories of those who have lived in and loved it crowd in upon the mind. Their passions and their sorrows seem to speak now like the "music of the spheres," in a solemn cadence that only the thoughtful and abstracted heart can hear. They are become part of Nature: all that strange symphony of colour and sound and feeling that breathes in upon us as we walk the courts where they lingered, or trace their names cut with a diamond on the old window-panes, or pray where they too have laid down their sins,—all that subtle impression that steals over us and saddens is made of their struggles and their tears. There, we say, men have worked out their lives in duty and loyalty and faith: or there they have made shipwreck, driven by fierce demons of desire, for fame, for pleasure, or for wealth. And now they sleep so still, and thousands pass by and heed them not: and yet they are part of it all, this great Palace, this home of English history, this chronicle in little of what men have done and suffered for their country and their age. Here Wolsey planned to restore the greatness of England. Here Elizabeth plotted and schemed, and yet learnt somehow to say, "I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects. . . . I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too"—some of the finest words man-kind ever uttered. Here Charles showed the beauty of his nature through its outer husk of unworthy duplicity. Here Milton meditated and Cromwell agonised: and here, since the days of these heroes, many noble souls have passed, in quietness and simplicity, to their reward. It were as ill to romp and be facetious here as in some old abbey, or in any ancient place where history has been made. It is ours rather to linger over its memories and to cherish them, and to dream again of the great days that are gone by. And so as we ponder, and as the noble names come up before us, and merge insensibly into the present, where still the echoes of renown are heard in the lodgings of the kindred of our English worthies, the scene assumes an unity which brings the old time together with the new.

"It seems as if in one were cast
The present and the imaged past,
Spanning, as with a bridge sublime.
That fearful lapse of human time,
That gulf unfathomably spread
Between the living and the dead."

And thus it is one picture we are to look upon, the old Palace with its history and its memories and its art. It presents one story, and that the world will not willingly let die.