Hampshire

“ Hampshire is such a good creature, and his estates are close to theirs. It is certainly very provoking for them that this Italian must take it into his head to spend a season in London, and lead the cotillon so beautifully that all the young women talked of nothing else but his charms. ”

“ But a grateful and profitable feature of Hampshire are the water-meadows that border the fishful streams of the Itchen, the Test, and the Avon. They merit all the commendation that Fuller gives them, and more; but, so far as the Portsmouth Road is concerned, Hampshire exhibits its most barren, ill-watered, and flinty aspects; from the point where it enters the county, near Liphook, past the chalky excrescence of Butser Hill, through the bare and barren downs of Chalton, to Portsmouth itself. ”

“ New Hampshire has them, but unsprayed,
With no suspicion in stem-end or blossom-end
Of vitriol or arsenate of lead,
And so not good for anything but cider.
Her unpruned grapes are flung like lariats
Far up the birches out of reach of man. ”

“ New-Hampshire is rightly and truly designated the Granite State. Not only in the bare sides of her stupendous mountains, and the broad bases of her rugged hills, does she partake largely of this firm conglomerate, but in her people also she seems to have compounded no small share of the hard material. Stern, unbending, indomitable, with physical frames like the gnarled oak, and characters rough as the huge boulders upon her soil, New-Hampshire may boast a race of men unequalled for energy and endurance by any other in the world. ”

“ I might chance to see hotter service in Hampshire than I have ever done in Gascony. But mark you now yonder lofty turret in the centre, which stands back from the river and hath a broad banner upon the summit. See the rising sun flashes full upon it and sparkles on the golden lions. 'Tis the royal banner of England, crossed by the prince's label. There he dwells in the Abbey of St. Andrew, where he hath kept his court these years back. ”

“ In this North of Hampshire, as everywhere else, the churches and all other things exhibit indubitable marks of decay. There are along under the north side of that chain of hills, which divide Hampshire from Berkshire, in this part, taking into Hampshire about two or three miles wide of the low ground along under the chain, eleven churches along in a string in about fifteen miles, the chancels of which would contain a great many more than all the inhabitants, men, women, and children, sitting at their ease with plenty of room. ”

“ The Northmen made their first attack on the Hampshire coast in 835, and for the two centuries following the district was the scene of perpetual devastations by the Danish pirates, who made their headquarters in the Isle of Wight, from which they plundered the opposite coast. Hampshire suffered less from the Conquest than almost any English county, and was a favourite resort of the Norman kings. The alleged destruction of property for the formation of the New Forest is refuted by the Domesday record, which shows that this district had never been under cultivation. ”

“ It would have been to me an inexpressible gratification on this first visit to the eastern parts of the Union, after so long an absence, to have been able to present the several towns of New-Hampshire with my personal respect, and to have witnessed the great improvement of a State, to which I am bound by early sentiments of attachment and gratitude. ”

“ On one side the stream is Surrey, on the other Hampshire. Where the two counties meet there is a vast extent of heath-land—brown desolate moors and hills so dark as to look almost black.
It is wild, and its wildness is of that kind which comes of a barren soil. It is a country best appreciated by those who, rich or poor, take life easily, who love all aspects of nature, all weathers, and above everything the liberty of wide horizons. ”

“ Did you but know of him, New Hampshire has
One real reformer who would change the world
So it would be accepted by two classes,
Artists the minute they set up as artists,
Before, that is, they are themselves accepted,
And boys the minute they get out of college. ”

“ Of this number four are natives of Hampshire, while the other five, oddly enough, belong to five different counties. But I do not judge only from these few individuals: a rambler about the country who seldom stays many days in one village or spot cannot become intimately acquainted with the cottagers. I judge partly from the few I know well, and partly from a {239} very much larger number of individuals I have met casually or have known slightly. What I am certain of is that the men of this type, as a rule, differ mentally as widely as they do physically from persons of other commoner types. ”

“ Apart from the valuable foreign and shipbuilding trade which grew up with the development of its ports, Hampshire has always been mainly an agricultural county, the only important manufacture being that of wool and cloth, which prospered at Winchester in the 12th century and survived till within recent years. ”

“ On going directly from any other district in southern England to the central parts of Hampshire one is sensible of a difference in the people. One is still in southern England, and the peasantry, like the atmosphere, climate, soil, the quiet but verdurous and varied scenery, are more or less like those of other neighbouring counties—Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Berkshire, {221} Wilts, and Dorset. In general appearance, at all events, the people are much the same ”

“ Do I see the faithful cowering in their hiding-places and straining their ears for the sound of the horsehoof’s of their oppressors? Do I see a time-serving generation, with lies on their lips and truth buried in their hearts? No! I see before me godly men, not from this fair city only, but from the broad country round, and from Dorset, and from Wiltshire, and some even as I hear from Hampshire, all ready and eager to do mighty work in the cause of the Lord. ”

“ In this out-of-the-way corner of the Forest one could imagine the time come when this one small piece of England which lies between the Avon and Southampton Water will be a sanctuary for all rare and beautiful wild life and a place of refreshment to body and soul for all men.
The richest, fullest time of the year is when June is wearing to an end, when one knows without the almanac that spring is over and gone. Nowhere in England is one more sensible of the change to fullest summer than in this low-lying, warmest corner of Hampshire. ”

“ Summer spreads for the son of New Hampshire a shimmering wonder of green and gold with silver rivers winding placidly, fed by those headlong torrents farther up in the rocky hills, where the burning breasts of the mountains are lifted from their headless shoulders. ”

“ The allodial tenure that existed at the time of the Domesday Survey on the manors along the western border of Hampshire and other parts of that county was apparently of the same nature as the odal right still in operation in Norway. It may have been introduced into Hampshire at the time of the settlement of the confederated invaders, the Gewissas, or by a later settlement after one or other of the Danish inroads. ”

“ It happened that the maps which I use in my Hampshire rambles and which I always considered the best—Bartholomew's two miles to the inch—did not mark Priors Dean, so that I had to go and find it for myself. I went with a friend one excessively hot day in July, by Empshott and Hawkley through deep by-roads so deep and narrow and roofed over with branches as to seem in places like tunnels. ”

“ Bless you, my benefactress!—excuse this embrace—you have removed a great load from my breast. To be hanged in New Hampshire is happiness—it leaves an honored name behind a man, and introduces him at once into the best New Hampshire society in the other world. ”

“ Starting with integrity and great strength of purpose, possessed of a keen perception, a shrewd judge of men, and an impressive bearing, he has attained an eminence which all may admire. Well may New Hampshire point with pride to such a man. ”

“ So it is that the sport is played in Hampshire; and so also at Westminster—with a difference, however. In Hampshire the two brutes retain ever their appointed natures. The badger is always a badger, and the bull-dog never other than a bull-dog. ”

“ Nature, we know, is everlastingly harking back, but here in Hampshire I cannot but think that this type, in spite of its very marked characters, is a very much muddied and degenerate form. One is led to this conclusion by occasionally meeting with an individual whose whole appearance is a revelation, and strikes the mind with a kind of astonishment, and one can only exclaim—there is nothing else to say—Here Nature has at length succeeded in reproducing the pure unadulterated form! Such a {229} type I came upon one summer day on the high downs east of the Itchen. ”

“ I have always pitied those (and their name is legion) who hurry away to seek out beauties of scenery in distant lands, oblivious or ignorant of the gems that lie in their own fair country. England will well bear comparison with any land, especially in woodland scenery, and in my opinion there is no better example to be found than in that district of Hampshire called the New Forest. ”

“ There's Bungey; and for Bungey there are towns,
Whole townships named but without population. [9]
Anything I can say about New Hampshire
Will serve almost as well about Vermont,
Excepting that they differ in their mountains.
The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight;
New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil.
I had been coming to New Hampshire mountains.
And here I am and what am I to say?
Here first my theme becomes embarrassing.
Emerson said, "The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land with little men." ”

“ From these smallest churches, which appear like a natural growth where they are seen, I turn to the large and new, and the largest of all at this place—that of Privett. From its gorgeous yet vacant and {191} cold interior, and from the whole vast structure, including that necessary ingredient in an elegant landscape, the soaring spire visible for many miles around, I turn away as from a jarring and discordant thing—the feeling one experiences at the sight of those brand-new big houses built by over-rich stock-jobbers on many hills and open heaths in Surrey and, alas! in Hampshire. ”

“ It never could have happened in New Hampshire.
The only person really soiled with trade
I ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire
Was someone who had just come back ashamed
From selling things in California.
He’d built a noble mansard roof with balls
On turrets like Constantinople, deep
In woods some ten miles from a railroad station,
As if to put forever out of mind
The hope of being, as we say, received. ”

“ It was not the misery of ploughboys and labourers in Hampshire and Kent that had made Wellington and Peel decide that it was unsafe for the King to dine at the Guildhall in the winter of 1830: the Political Unions, which struck such terror into the Court and the politicians, were not bred in the villages. There was a general and acute discontent with extravagant government, with swollen lists and the burden of sinecures, with the whole system of the control of the boroughs and its mockery of representation. ”

“ Some Puritans having given indications of their imagining that they had a spiritual call to do some mischief to the king, his majesty resolved not to be at home to such a call if he could possibly help it, and leaving Hampton Court with three attendants he reached the coast of Hampshire. It was noticed at the time that Charles had probably heard of the celebrated Hampshire hogs, and fancied therefore that Hampshire must be the best place for him to go to in the hope of saving his bacon. ”

“ Dear Sir,—As to the peculiarity of jackdaws building with us under the ground in rabbit-burrows, you have, in part, hit upon the reason; for, in reality, there are hardly any towers or steeples in all this county. And perhaps, Norfolk excepted, Hampshire and Sussex are as meanly furnished with churches as almost any counties in the kingdom. We have many livings of two or three hundred pounds a year, whose houses of worship make little better appearance than dovecots. ”

“ In Hampshire, however, we do not meet with a general blonde type. Of the New Forest district Mackintosh says: ‘The New Forest is inhabited by a mixture of races which almost defy classification, the complexion in general being dark;’ [16] and this prevalence of dark-complexioned people among the inhabitants of the New Forest district is still apparent, as it is in parts of Wiltshire and Dorset.
The same ethnological observer, Mackintosh, [17] also says: ‘In the middle and north of Hampshire the people in general belong to a dark-complexioned race. ”

“ I don't know how many such men you may have in Hampshire; but Yorkshire's a large county, yet the best man in it would find it hard to get a seat in Parliament, where Sir Hugh Tyrold would offer himself to be a candidate. We all say, in Yorkshire, he's so stuffed full of goodness and kindness, that there's no room left in him for anything else ”

“ The person from another county, or from a distance, unrelated to anyone in the community, is always a foreigner, and the foreign taint may descend to the children: may it not be that in Hampshire anyone with bright colour in eyes, hair, and skin is also by association regarded as a foreigner? ”

“ Marshall's account of the common-field townships in Hampshire at the end of the eighteenth century. Each occupier of land in the common fields contributed to the town flock a number of sheep in proportion to his holding, which were placed under a shepherd who fed them and folded them on all parts of the township. ”

“ And in the pages of his “History of New Hampshire” may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable man, in many respects, among all the older clergymen preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in state and national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a Territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to him. This manifold individual was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts,—the Reverend Manasseh Cutler. ”