Mary Smith

“ Powers all ignored by fame, their silent course
Keeping unseen around life’s common day,
Into thy deeper soul a charm have thrown,
Keeping it even in the grander way
Of Public Progress and of Modern Life.
So hast thou grown illumined by the ray–
Deep in thy bosom still, through all thy strife–
The ray of heavenly wisdom, whose soft sway
Has changed thy destinies, thy spirit rife
With old barbaric hate, and wrought in thee
The life and purpose of a city free.
Henceforth thy path is onward. Victory
Is thine in other fields than those of blood ”

“ Again in the Walks, we followed on by winding paths to the caves on that side, whose surrounding beauty we should almost profane by attempting to describe. But the caves—the matchless masonry of Nature, hollows in the solid perpendicular rock, and opening on the river—how they silence all trivial thought, and make one forget flesh and blood. “Thoughts that wander through eternity” start here, and we think of the sublime silences of unpeopled centuries which these sunken, lidless eyes in this ponderous rocky brow of nature must have seen the secrets of. ”

“ With the kindly greetings of himself and his, then unbroken, family, we passed by the castle, and, by his own direction, through the gardens, as the nearest way to the station. We were among the last of our party, and in the dim silence of our own innumerable thoughts, felt devoutly thankful for our afternoon in Corby Walks, and thankful also that this stately home of England, which stands so beautifully on its honoured soil, has for its head a gentleman so truly generous, with an inheritance so largely likely to promote both moral and spiritual refinement. ”

“ Has been to prosper; and thy purer heart,
Strengthened by sorrow, unto virtue bound,
Nor undevoid of feelings which create
Religion’s purer thought and purer life,
Shall still be thy protection, still thy state
Increase and prosper, and thy future strife
Enrich with nobler meed of nobler thought,
Bringing thee guerdon of things truly great–
A nobler spirit, and a wisdom fraught
With purposes diviner, of a reach
With the great coming ages, which shall teach
All men new doctrines, and shall all men free
With the pure power of purest Charity. ”

“ Poor lady, on her beautiful head descended the retribution of many wrongs. Queen of Scotland, and born on its rugged soil, she yet through her maternity and education was entirely French. All her affinities with the Scotch nature had been destroyed, and from this all her troubles sprang. She was the victim of circumstances—the heiress of the results of a century of mistakes and acrimonious unwisdom. We must pity her. She must ever be pitied, and her final treatment must be for ever deprecated. But still Elizabeth acted not alone. ”

“ And, east and west, its affluents, whose soft tides,
Flow where they will, are still with beauty crowned.
And every beck and little streamlet found,
Or far or near thy fell-bound precincts round,
Has something more, a something quite apart
From every other streamlet, the great heart
Of Nature, in her freest fairest moods,
Throbs in their flow, and fills their solitudes.
Beauteous for ever! Time on them has laid
No trace of age or change; they brightly fall
As glide the seasons, either swift or staid. ”

“ So passing Durran Hill Cottage, the clean, quiet, well-to-do village of Scotby, and the pretty new Station at Wetheral, we came to Corby Bridge, where we alighted. Right on we passed through the village, clean and trim and bright with roses and carnations–which spread their splendid hues before and behind the quiet cottages till we came to the lodge gate—the lodge, which is a very worthy appendant of the castle, being our first object of admiration. Here all at once the scene of beauty opens. ”

“ All ways we look as we pass under these stately, solemn denizens of memorial and immemorial time, fearing lest we lose any of the imposing, soul-abstracting beauty they so abundantly display, our hearts o'er-brimming, although we have but just entered, with feelings which, like odoriferous incense, carry us away to the vast, the illimitable, to the heaven of an enlarged existence, far above and beyond the fret and fever of all our petty cares, and still pettier ambitions. ”

“ There is much in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley illustrative of this special enterprise with which every visitor of the castle should be acquainted, as these old stones will be nothing to him whose heart has never been touched by the emotions of pity and regret for the noble young hearts that perished in their shadow.
Sir Walter Scott himself is among our notabilia, having visited the castle many times–a reverend and loving connoisseur of all its old glories and many legends, "part seen, imagined part." ”

“ And it was nothing more. "
many of us in this old city of Carlisle are apt, we fear, to look upon our ancient castle simply as a castle, and nothing more; either forgetful or uninformed of all its strange brave histories, and its equally strange and striking perils and pageantries and long silenced sorrows. In these days we read so much history that its truth—its vivid living realities almost escape us: we do not hear the rush and push and struggle of the brave, or see the tears and terrors which in far off homes, or subsequently, in nearer dungeons, were often their tragic accompaniment. ”

“ Carlisle and the Scotland and Newcastle roads lying like an open map under its ancient brows, and on the south side, field and fell lie naked and open to it for miles, while it is so shut in by trees that it is unseen till nearly reached. ”

“ But coming out of the obliquity of the accustomed flow of house and street life, and standing as we stood on a bright November afternoon lately, in cells where the chained captive must often have sighed for death—thought returns, the imagination clears, and the wonderful panorama of the past rushes on and on before the excited mind in all the vivid hues of restless, changing, struggling, suffering human life. ”

“ A right heroic princely man, he rises upon us through the mists of time, his successful defence of the castle against William the Lion, of Scotland, during many months' siege, being the grand deed about which his name and fame revolve. And this was no common deed, for the city during that time was invested with 8,000 Scotch soldiers, and the resolute garrison were at fearful extremities, and on the very brink of yielding, when an accident–the Scotch king being taken prisoner at Alnwick–at last delivered them from their peril. ”

“ Thy heart is strong, and the loud loom to-day
Stands where of eld thy skull-crowned ramparts stood
And Commerce in thy streets in peaceful mood
Pursues its hopeful customs now secure
Of loss of property and loss of peace:
And more than these–firm root of thine increase,
The blessing of thy people rich and poor–
Fair Knowledge reigns in thee, her rest and ease
Spreading from gate to gate, from door to door. ”

“ It would be worth much now to many to annihilate the intervening years, and catch but for one brief minute the look and tone that pierced the hearts of that grotesque auditory on that special day in this castle court. So plain a man and yet so powerful, so courageous and yet so humble he rises on the imagination ”

“ The time hope paints, which yet in truth shall be–
Their virtues firm, their scorn of fireside ease,
Their swift decision, and their energy
Shall be thy strength again, and thy old might
In every need shall still return to thee.
Thy past has been a struggle stern and strong;
The Danes of old turned their fierce fires on thee,
And thou laidst black and waste for centuries long,
A refuge but for want; thy poverty
Bringing thee strange acquaintance ”

“ It has an arched roof, and at each end there is a long loophole, now glazed, by which, through the thick walls, the shadowy light reaches its interior. There is also, on the right-hand side of the entrance, the form of a door, now built up, which probably in some remote times led to a staircase, or was the opening of a staircase in the wall, by which it communicated with the upper stories. Standing on this floor, reflections of the stormy past come thickly and fast to the mind. Who, in anguish or despair, had trod that narrow space in the older days of the castle? ”

“ The castle itself has no castleated roof, nor any of the usual features of the real Gothic castle, but is a large handsome massive structure, in the modern style of architecture, surmounted by a well-executed collosal lion, which gives an air of princely beauty to the whole building. Fronting the castle is a fine flowing lawn, which gently descending effectively sets off its stately proportions, and being plain, is in excellent keeping with them. ”

“ They are eight or nine feet thick in many places, a stone staircase having been cut in the south side, from the second to the third story through the breadth of the wall, leaving still a breadth on both sides equal or more than equal to the thickest modern walls, a fact pregnant with history—a stony tome, from which we may gather the perils, and prescience, and laborious endeavours of a brave, persistent, deed-living, deed-loving race, now but too inadequately represented. The part of the castle now converted into a dairy seems to have undergone the least change. ”

“ How many thoughts that old tree suggested of our ancient England, and the wild wildering years fraught with the exhalations and voices, the breath and bruit of persons and things now become almost, or quite questionable, from their very remoteness, or perhaps lost entirely from the great roll of the world's accredited and accepted facts. What was our England when this tree was a seedling or a sapling? ”

“ Which deep in Cumbria’s heart lie fast and sweet–
Tales of true love and trust and woman’s name,
Which told, make winter hours as summer’s fleet.
These are for female hearts and female tongues,
For household gatherings where the gentle meet–
Sweet ditties sweetly sung in Cumbria’s songs,
With simple truth and trust and love replete;
Tales unto which the virtue still belongs
To make the heart with genuine pleasure beat. ”

“ As we waited in the evening sun for the boat to take us back again, our hearts lifted and hushed by the grandeur of art, and thoughts of the vastness of the soul, and the splendours of its achieved and possible realizations, we seemed more fully cognizant than ever of the sweeping scene of beauty that stretched before us. ”

“ The outer gate is a lofty stone entrance of immense strength and thickness, and dim and black hued by time to a still greater extent than the inner one. It has also a greater number still of antiquated initials, and over it, on the outer side, is a defaced tablet of the arms of Henry the Seventh. This gate, from its appearance, must have been coeval with the most ancient parts of the castle, and, as such, is of great interest, as under its solid masonry must have passed and repassed all the notabilia of the castle from Rufus's reign downwards. ”

“ Where all is so vague and conjectural, very little can be said; but in perambulating the precincts of the Castle it is well to pause here and let the mind realise the fact that a living lady was once the sufferer of an extraordinary barbarism there, since it is the spirit which we bring to or find amongst things which is the best help to knowledge, and which avails the most also in producing within us the faculties which lead to its proper use. ”

“ Nature never strikes the wrong note. The holy stars and the silent solemn earth will be to-night the wrapt auditors of this eternal wanderer—this awful orator whom time and death never disable, never still. ”

“ Gliding on, for we walk as in a church, through these solemn aisles of prototypal ecclesiastical architecture, we come to the well—the Wishing Well we are told—whose cool crystal waters, together with the kindly placed cups, are an irresistable temptation to the summer wanderer. ”

“ We greet each other kindly, gladness is at the very core of our hearts. Nature has cheered and comforted us; we have come into the clime of birds and bees, and we return with their music in our hearts—return admiring the ferns beautifully luxuriant, and gathering some of them and the red campion, which, spreading everywhere, beautifies the whole extent of the woods. ”

“ It is an old, old place, its cottages and farm-houses following, like antiquated country people, the fashions of very remote and uncouth times, and its gardens and fences generally, too, seem soundly conservative; the pretty simple flowers, which are both eye-salve and heart-salve to meditative loiterers, growing in promiscuous prolixity under a busliy bearding of hedge, over which shears surely have never come. ”

“ Whatever we have missed of all the scenes and story of this really interesting relic of antiquity, we feel that for our purpose it is enough to know that here is a spot which, for nearly eighteen lasting centuries of night and day has really been the focus of a great share of all the events and histories of our brave England; and that where we stand to-day, many of all the bravest and noblest men of those centuries have stood also. ”

“ But the century did not close over the city and castle peaceably, for in 1296 siege was again laid to the city by the Scotch, though ineffectually this time, owing to the bravery of the inhabitants–the women even pouring boiling water over their heads from the walls, so that in three days it was abandoned by them. Stirring times these for these old walls, shrill women's voices even mingling with the martial din constantly pervading here! ”