Augustus John Cuthbert Hare

“ More crowds of people joined from Windmill Hill and Lime Cross; it was as if by simultaneous movement the whole parish came forward to do honour to one who had certainly been as its father for twenty-two years. As the procession halted to change bearers at the bend of the road, I knew that my mother was looking out and could see it from her window. An immense body of clergy joined us at Hurstmonceaux Place, and many very old and familiar people—old Judith Coleman led by a little girl, old Pinnock on his crutches, and others. ”

“ Our intimacy was never broken while I stayed at Oxford. But I never saw my dear friend afterwards. In 1857 I heard with a shock of what it is strange that I had never for an instant anticipated—her engagement to make a second marriage. She wrote to tell me of it herself—but I never heard from her again. She had other children, girls, and a few years afterwards she died. Her death was the first great sorrow I had ever felt from death out of my own family. Her memory will always be a possession to me. ”

“ We have been so much together this vacation, and so uncloudedly happy, that it is unnatural to be separate; but my darling mother and I are never away from one another in heart, though we so often are in body. And what a blessing it is for me to have left my mother so well, and to feel that she can still take so much interest and be so happy in the old home, and that I may go on cheerily with my Oxford work. ”

“ The dear mother says her great wish is that I should study—drink deep, as she calls it—in Latin and Greek, for the strengthening of my mind. It is quite in vain to try to convince her that college lectures only improve one for the worse, and that I might do myself and the world more good by devoting myself to English literature and diction, the one only thing in which it is ever possible that I might ever distinguish myself. ”

“ Elizabeth stands in a niche against a pillar of the nave, and that is all. In the transept is the ‘heilige Mausoleum.’ Its red steps are worn away by the pilgrims: the tomb is covered with faded gold and vermilion; on its canopy are remains of fresco-painting, and within is a beautiful sleeping figure of Elizabeth. All around are grey monuments of the Landgraves, her predecessors, standing upright against the walls. The choir opens into the sacristy, where is the golden shrine of the saint. As we reached it, a pilgrim was just emerging, deeply solemnised by a tête-à-tête with her bones. ”

“ Schona on Elbe, July 16.—We left Dresden by the steamer—the last view of the town very striking, with the broad flood of the Elbe sweeping through a line of palaces. At Pirna we left the boat, and a long walk through hot fields brought us to the entrance of the Ottowalder Grund. A flight of steps leads into a chasm, with high rocks towering all round and the most brilliant and varied greens beneath. In one place the narrow path is crossed by a natural arch; then it winds up again through masses of forest and deep rocky glens, till it emerges on the top of the Bastei. ”

“ Erfurth, July 8.—It is a delightful walk to the Wartburg from Eisenach. A winding path through a fir-wood leads to an opening whence you look across a valley to a hill crowned with a worn gateway, something like one of the gates of Winchelsea. In the intervening hollow some stone steps lead to a dark gap in the wood, where is the fountain of St. Elizabeth under a grey archway with sculptured pillars and overgrown with ferns. The water here is excluded from the public as too holy for common use, but a little is let out for the people into a stone basin below. ”

“ My journal, however, has many touching reminiscences of quiet evenings in our home life at this time when I read aloud to my dearest mother, and she played and sang “Comfort ye,” I sitting on the little sofa by her side, the light from the candles falling upon “the Reading Magdalen” over the pianoforte and of her simple, earnest prayers aloud by the little round table in her own room that “the pleasures given us in this world might not draw us out of the simple way of God.” ”

“ My darling mother has been given back to me from the brink of the grave to love and to cherish, and, whatever it costs me, can I ever say anything to cause her even one flush of pain? My will is strong, I know, and it shall be exercised in always ignoring my own troubles and prejudices, and never forgetting to anticipate each thought, each wish of hers. ”

“ A precipitous rock rises out of the flats, with the Lahn rushing beneath, and all up one side the picturesque old black and white houses of the town, while growing out of the bare rock, its front almost on the precipice, like Durham, towers the magnificent cathedral, one of the oldest in Germany, abounding in all those depths and contrasts of colour which make the old German churches so picturesque—each window having its different moulding of blue, yellow, and red stone: and reflected in the clear water beneath. ”

“ Jowett’ upon it. Having knocked some time in vain, I went in, and found two empty rooms, an uncomfortable external one evidently for lectures, and a pleasant inner sanctuary with books and prints and warm fire. My mother’s letter was on the table, so she was the first person to welcome me to Oxford. Then Mr. Jowett came in, in cap and gown, with a pile of papers in his hand, and immediately hurried me out to visit a long succession of colleges and gardens, since which we have had dinner in his rooms and a pleasant evening. I like him thoroughly. It is a bright beginning of college life. ”

“ Suddenly I heard her cry out, and John Gidman stood by my bedside sobbing violently—“You must be told she is worse.” I went into the room. She was in violent delirium. Aunt Kitty was trying to calm her with texts of Scripture; Lea was kneeling in her dressing-gown at the foot of the bed. I was determined she should not die. I felt as if I were wrestling for her life. I could not have spared her then. But God had mercy upon my agony. She became calmer. ”

“ Fortescues ball, my friend P. came late at night to see me. He said, “I have a dreadful thing to tell you. I have a secret to reveal at which you will be aghast. . .—I am Mrs. Fortescue!” Early in the year, observing how apt men were to assume intimacies which they did not possess, he and one or two other friends had agreed to talk incessantly of one person, a wholly imaginary person, and, while “making her the fashion,” see if, very soon, a number of men would not pretend to be intimate with her. Dozens fell into the trap. ”

“ Thence you look down, first by a great precipice upon a wilderness of glaciers, and beyond, upon a still greater wilderness of mountains all covered with snow. They tell you one is Monte Rosa, another the Weiss Horn, and so on, but they all look very much alike, except the great awful Matterhorn, tossing back the clouds from its twisted peak. It is a grand view, but I could never care for it. The snow hides the forms of the mountains altogether, and none of them especially strike you except the Matterhorn. There is no beauty, as at Chamounix or Courmayeur: all is awful, bleak desolation. ”

“ Indeed, at more than double the age I was then, the tension and anxiety I was in often repeated itself to me in sleep, and I woke in an agony thinking that “Moderations” were coming on, and that I was not a bit prepared! One day, in the midst of our work, I went in a canoe down Godstowe river, accompanied by a friend (who had also “stayed up”) in another canoe, as far as the ruin, and we dined at the little inn. The spring sun was peculiarly hot, and I remember feeling much oppressed with the smell of the weeds in the river, being very unwell at the inn, and reaching college with difficulty. ”

“ Connected with a college of which many of the members belonged to the lower upper classes of society, I had peculiar opportunities for observing how often young men thought it worth while to pretend to a position and acquaintances which did not belong to them. One instance of this is too extraordinary to be omitted. From the very beginning of February, certain men in Hall (the great place for gossip and scandal) had ‘spoken constantly of a certain Mrs. Fortescue, who had come to reside in Oxford, an exceedingly clever person and very highly connected’. ”

“ In a certain class of men, every one was afraid of being behind his neighbour in boasting of an intimacy, &c. with one who was praised so highly. They pretended to have received invitations to the imaginary ball. But the trick had assumed much greater dimensions than ever was intended at first; many people had been duped whose fury at the discovery would be a serious matter; many Oxford ladies had been asked to the ball, and, in fact, there was nothing to be done now but to go through with the whole drama to the end—the ball must take place! ”

“ Jowett. ... I am to go to him every night with a hundred lines of Sophocles, some Latin composition, and a piece of Cicero by heart—a great addition to my eighteen lectures a week, but the greatest advantage; and really he could not have done a more true kindness: I do not know how to say enough of it.
“I wish I knew some one in this college. It is most disagreeable being stared at wherever one goes, and having no one to speak to, and though the Hall, with its high roof and pictures, may seem picturesque at first, solitude in society becomes a bore! Expenses appear to be endless. ”

“ I think it was during the Easter vacation of this year that a day of national humiliation was appointed on the outbreak of the Crimean War. Severely indeed was the fast-day observed at Hurstmonceaux. At Lime we had nothing to eat but bread, and for dinner some boiled sea-kale, a vegetable which I have ever since associated with that time; and I have a vivid remembrance of the seno-comic face of our butler, John Gidman, when we were ushered into the dining-room, with the table laid out as usual, and, when the covers were taken off; only that amount of food was displayed. ”

“ Jan. 23, 1855.—Before I was up, John came and said he thought there was a worse account from Hurstmonceaux. Soon Lea came, and I asked what it was. ‘It is over. He is gone. The Archdeacon is dead!’ One had always fancied one expected this, but the reality is a different thing—that he who had always in one way or another influence daily thoughts and occupations had utterly passed out of one’s life—would never influence it again. ”

“ It was nervous work walking in the cold morning down the High Street to University. Mr. Jowett’s last advice had been, ‘Don’t lose your presence of mind; it will be not only weak, but wrong.’ Thus stimulated, I knocked at the Dean’s (Mr. Hedley’s) door. He took me to the Hall—a long hall, with long rows of men writing at a long table, at the end of which I was set down with pens, ink, and paper. Greek translation, Latin composition, and papers of arithmetic and Euclid were given me to do, and we were all locked in. ”

“ The sacristan unlocked a great chest to show us Bible tapestry worked by the hands of the saint. Some of the old pictures in the church portrayed the flight from the Wartburg, and St. Elizabeth washing the feet of the lepers: all reminded me of the stories you used to read to me as a very little child out of the great book at the Rectory.
“We went from the grave of St. Elizabeth to her palace—the great castle of Marbourg, seen far and wide over the country and overhanging the town, with a vast view over the blue-green billows of Thuringian pine-forest. ”

“ Travelling in these parts is quite different now, but I have a most wretched recollection of the long walks in the cold mist, no sound but the cry of the marmots—yet one always had a wish to go on, not back.
Delightful was the change as we descended upon Courmayeur, with its valleys of chestnut-trees and its noble view of Mont Blanc, and Aosta with its Roman ruins. In returning, I was overtaken by a tremendous snowstorm at the top of the St. Bernard, and detained the whole of a most tedious day in the company of the kind priests (monks they are not) and their dogs. ”

“ Awfully in sympathy with our sensations is the ghastly scenery at the top of the Gemmi—the black lake, which is frozen all the year round, and the dismal, miserable inn beside it, which is the scene of Werther’s horrible tragedy, of which I have so often since told the foundation-story. ”

“ It was really beautiful, raised above the world on that great height, in the clear atmosphere of the sky. As the voices ceased, the bells began, and the tower rocked so that you could see it swaying backwards and forwards. Milligan and I walked round Magdalen walks afterwards, and when my scout found me dressed on coming to call me, he asked if I had been ‘out a-Maying.’ Yesterday afternoon I rowed with Milligan on the river to Godstowe. It was so shallow, that if we had upset, which was exceedingly probable, we could have walked to shore. ”

“ Jowett was—tiresome perhaps, in some ways, but—one of the most unselfish persons I have ever known. By his own life, as in his sermons, he constantly inculcated disinterestedness, sympathy, and the love of God. The Christian doctrines of the Incarnation, Resurrection, &c., he utterly ignored, out of the pulpit as in it, and I believe Arthur Stanley quite agreed with him in his heart, though he had not quite “the courage of his opinions.”
“Reading men” used to congratulate me upon my intimacy with Jowett, little knowing of how admonitory a nature were all his conversations with me. ”

“ Sometimes you might find a sick and solitary old lady sitting alone in the water on a bench in the corner, with her hands and feet stretched out before her; but for the most part the patients were full of activity, laughter, and conversation. They held in the water the sort of society which once characterised the pump-room at Bath: the old people gossipped in groups, the young people flirted across their little tables. Each person possessed a tiny floating table, on which he or she placed handkerchief, gloves, flowers, smelling-bottle, newspaper, or breakfast. ”