THE only really hot weather we felt in the British Isles fell to our lot at Brighton. The fashionable world was “up in London.” The metropolis is always “up,” go where you will. “The season” takes in July, then everybody stays in the country until after Christmas, usually until April. Benighted Americans exclaim at the unreason of this arrangement, and are told—“It is customary.”

“But you lose the glory of Spring and Summer; and muddy (AnglicÉ, ‘dirty’) roads and wintry storms must be a serious drawback to country pleasures. We think the American plan more sensible and comfortable.”

“It is not customary with us.”

With the Average Briton, and with multitudes who are above the average in intelligence and breeding, “custom” is an end of all controversy.

For one week of the two we spent in Brighton, it was unequivocally hot. The sea was a burnished mirror between the early morning and evening hours. The Parade and the Links were deserted; the donkey-boys and peripatetic minstrels retired discouraged from the sultry streets. We had a pleasant suite of rooms upon Regency Square and kept tolerably comfortable by lowering the awning of the front balcony and opening all the inner doors and windows to invite the breeze. Our landlord had been a butler in Lord Somebody’s family for twenty-eight years; had married the housekeeper, and with their joint savings and legacies leased the “four-story brick,” No. 60 Regency Square, and kept a first-class lodging-house. Every morning, at nine o’clock, he appeared with slate and pencil for orders for the day. “Breakfast,” “Luncheon,” “Dinner” were written above as many spaces, and beneath each I made out a bill-of-fare. Meals were served to the minute in the back-parlor and the folding-doors, opened by his august hand, revealed him in black coat and white necktie, ready to wait at table. Cookery and service were excellent; the rooms handsomely furnished, including napery, china, silver, and gas. We paid as much as we would have done at a hotel, but were infinitely more contented, having the privacy and many of the comforts of a real home.

Our worthy landlord remonstrated energetically at sight of the open windows; protested against the draughts and our practice of drawing reading-chairs and lounges into the cooling currents.

“The wind is east, sir!” he said to Caput, almost with tears,—“and when it sets in that quarter, draughts are deadly.”

We laughed, thanked him and declared that we were used to east winds, and continued to seek the breeziest places until every one of us was seized with influenza viler than any that ever afflicted us in the middle of a Northern winter. Upon Caput, the most robust of the party, it settled most grievously. The dregs were an attack of bronchitis that defied all remedies for a month, then sent him back to the Continent for cure. I mention this instance of over-confidence in American constitutions and ignorance of the English climate as a warning to others as rash and unlearned.

The wind stayed in the east all the time we were in Brighton and the sun’s ardor did not abate. Our host had a good library,—a rarity in a lodging-house, and we “lazed” away noon-tides, book or fancy-work in hand. We had morning drives into the country and evening rambles in the Pavilion Park, and out upon the splendid pier where the band played until ten o’clock, always concluding, as do all British bands, the world around, with “God save the Queen.” Boy, attended by the devoted Invaluable, divided the day between donkey-rides, playing in the sand,—getting wet through regularly twice per diem, by an in-rolling wave,—and the Aquarium. The latter resort was much affected by us all. It is of itself worth far more than the trouble and cost of a trip from London to Brighton and back.

The restfulness,—the indolence, if you will have it so—of that sojourn in a place where there were few “sights,” and when it was too warm to make a business of visiting such as there were, was a salutary break,—barring the influenza—in our tour. Perhaps our mental digestions are feebler or slower than those of the majority of traveling Americans. But it was a positive necessity for us to be quiet, now and then, for a week or a month, that the work of assimilation and nourishment might progress safely and healthfully. After a score of attempts to bolt an art-gallery, a museum, a cathedral, or a city at one meal, and to follow this up by rapidly successive surfeits, we learned wisdom from the dyspeptic horrors that ensued, and resigned the experiment to others. Nor did we squander time and strength upon a thing to which we were indifferent, merely because Murray or Baedeker prescribed it, or through fear of that social nuisance, the Thorough Traveler. We cultivated a fine obtuseness to the attacks of this personage and never lost an hour’s sleep for his assurance that the one thing worth seeing in Munich was the faÏence in a tumbling-down palace only known to virtuosos “who understood the ropes,” and which we, being simple folk unversed in rope-pulling, had not beheld; or that he who omitted to walk the entire length of the Liverpool Docks, or to see the Giant’s Causeway by moonlight, or to go into the Blue Grotto, might better have stayed at home and given his ticket and letter-of-credit to a more appreciative voyager.

Our fortnight at Brighton, then, was one of our resting-spells, and one morning, after a night-shower had freshened the atmosphere, and the wind blew steadily but not too strongly from the sea, we drove, en famille, to the Downs and the Devil’s Dyke, a deep ravine cleaving the Downs into two hills. The devil’s name is a pretty sure guarantee of the picturesque or awful in scenery,—a sort of trade-mark. Our course was through the open, breezy country; the road, fringed and frilled with milk-white daisies and scarlet poppies, overlooking the ocean on one side, bounded upon the other by corn-fields and verdant downs stretching up and afar into the hilly horizon. The evenness of the grass upon these rolling heights, and of the growth of wheat and oats was remarkable, betokening uniformity of fertility and culture unknown in our country. Wheat, oats, barley—all bearded cereals—are “corn” abroad, maize being little known.

Leaving the waggonette at the hotel on the top of the Downs, and turning a deaf ear to the charming of the photographer, whose camera and black cloth were already afield, early in the day as it was, we walked on the ridge for an hour. We trod the springy turf as upon a flowery carpet; the air was balm and cordial; from our height we surveyed five of the richest counties of England, seeming to be spread upon a plane surface, the distance leveling minor inequalities. Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire were a mottled map below our plateau, a string of hamlets marking highways and knotting up, once in a while, into a larger settlement wound about a church. Some of these were very primitive sanctuaries, with thatched roofs and towers, and the straw gables of the cottages were like so many embrowned hay-ricks.

Then and there, our feet deep in wild thyme and a hundred unknown blossoming grasses, the pastoral panorama unrolled for our vision, from the deep blue sea-line to the faint boundary of the far-off hills, the scented breezes filling lungs that panted to inhale yet larger draughts of their cool spiciness—we first heard the larks sing! We had been sceptical about the sky-lark. And since hearing the musical “jug-jug” and broken cadenzas of Italian nightingales, and deciding that the mocking-bird would be a triumphantly-successful rival could he be induced to give moonlight concerts, we had waxed yet more contemptuous of the bird who builds upon the ground, yet is fabled to sing at heaven’s gate. We had seen imported larks, brown, spiritless things, pecking in a home-sickly way at a bit of turf in the corner of their cage, and emitting an infrequent “tweet.” Our hedge-sparrow is a comelier and more interesting bird, and, for all we could see, might sing as well, if he would but apply his mind to the study of the sustained warble.

Our dear friend, Dr. V——, of Rome, once gave me a description of the serenades of the nightingales about his summer home on the Albanian Hills, so exquisite in wording, so pulsing with natural poetry as to transcend the song of any Philomel we ever listened to. I wished for him on the Downs that fervid July morning. I wish for his facile pen the more now when I would tell, and cannot, how the sky-larks sang and with what emotions we hearkened to them. They arose, not singly or in pairs, but by the score, from the expanse of enameled turf, mounting straight and slowly heavenward. Their notes blended in the upper air into a vibrating ecstasy of music. Pure as the odor of the thyme, free as the rush of the sea-air over the heights, warble and trill floated down to us as they soared, always directly up, up, until literally invisible to the naked eye. I brought the field-glass to bear upon two I had thus lost, and saw them sporting in the ether like butterflies, springing and sinking, tossing over and over upon the waves of their own melody, and, all the while, the lower air in which we stood was thrilling as clearly and deliciously with rapturous rivulets of sound as when they were scarce twenty feet above the earth.

Our last memory of Oxford is a landscape—in drawing, graphic and clear as a Millais, rich and mellow as a Claude in coloring. We brought away both picture and poem from Brighton Downs.

It was still summer-time, but summer with a presage of autumn in russet fields and shortening twilights, when we left the railway train at Slough, a station near Windsor Castle, and took a carriage for Stoke-Pogis. This, the “Country Church-yard” of Thomas Gray, is but two and a half miles from the railway, and is gained by a good road winding between hedge-rows and coppices, with frequent views of quiet country homes. The flag flaunting from the highest tower of Windsor was seldom out of sight on the route.

It was impossible to abstain from repeating the couplet, inevitable that it should recur to us, a majestic refrain, at each glimpse of the royal standard. We stopped in the broad shadow of a clump of oaks at the side of the road; passed through a turn-stile and followed a worn foot-path across the fields. The glimmer of a pale, graceful spire among the trees was our guide. About sixty yards beyond the stile is an oblong monument of granite, surmounted by a sarcophagus with steeply-slanting sides and a gabled cover. The paneled sides of the base are covered with selections from Gray’s poems. The turf slopes from this into a shallow moat, on the outer bank of which reclined two boys. They were well-favored fellows, dressed in well-made jackets and trousers, and had, altogether, the air of gentlemen’s sons. While one copied into a blank book the inscription on the side nearest him, his companion was at work upon a tolerable sketch of the monument.

read Caput from the monument. Then, glancing at the sarcophagus: “Can Gray himself be buried here? I thought his grave was in the church-yard?”

The boys wrote and sketched on, deaf and dumb. Caput approached the elder, who may have been fifteen years old.

“I beg your pardon! but can you tell me if this is the burial-place of the poet Gray?”

The lads looked at each other.

“Gray?” said one—

“Poet?” the other.

Then—this is solemn truth, dear Reader!—both uttered, with the unison and monotony of a church-response—“I really carn’t say!”

We pursued the little foot-path to the church. There would surely be some record there to satisfy our query. Stones should have tongues upon the soil that produces the Average Briton. “The summer’s late repentant smile” cast a pensive beauty over the country-side, made of the sequestered church-yard a home fair to see and to be desired when the “inevitable hour” should come. The wall has a luxuriant coping of ivy throughout its length. Prehensile streamers have anchored in the turf below and bound the graves with green withes. The ivy-mantle of the old square tower leaves not a stone visible except where it has been cut away from the window of the belfry. A new steeple rises out of the green mass. A modest and symmetrical pinnacle, but one that displeases prejudice, if not just taste, and which is as yet shunned by the ivy, that congener of honorable antiquity. It clings nowhere more lovingly than to the double gable, under the oriel window of which is the poet’s grave. This is a brick parallelogram covered by a marble slab. Gray’s mother is buried with him. A tablet in the church-wall tells us in which narrow cell he sleeps.

Just across the central alley the sexton was opening an old grave, probably that it might receive another tenant, possibly to remove the remains to another cemetery. A gentleman in clerical dress stood near, with two young girls. The grave-digger and his assistant completed the group. Caput applied to the clergyman, rightly supposing him to be the parish rector, for permission to gather some of the pink thyme and grasses from the base of the brick tomb. During the minute occupied by courteous question and reply, the contents of the grave were exposed to view.

“A ‘mouldering heap’ of dust!” said Caput, coming back to us, “Here and there a crumbling bone. A mat of human hair. Not even the semblance of human shape. That is what mortality means. Gray may have seen the like in this very place.”

We picked buttercups, clover, and thyme, some blades of grass and sprigs of moss, that had their roots in the fissures of the bricks, and as silently quitted the vicinage of the open pit. Every step furnished proof of the fidelity to nature of the imperishable idyl. It was an impossibility—or so we then believed—that it could have been written elsewhere than in that “church-yard.” The moveless arabesques of the rugged elm-boughs slept upon the ridged earth at our left; the yew-tree blackened a corner at the right. The “upland lawn” was bathed in sunshine; the

at whose foot the recluse stretched his listless length at noontide, still leaned over the brook. We stayed our lingering steps to listen to its babbling, and point out the wood and the “’customed hill.”

We rode back to the station by way of the hamlet, into whose uncouth name genius has breathed music, and saw Gray’s home. It is a plain, substantial dwelling, little better than a farm-house. In the garden is a summer-house, in which, it is said, he was fond of sitting while he wrote and read. Constitutionally shy, and of exceeding delicacy of nerve and taste, his thoughtfulness deepened by habitual ill-health,—one comprehends, in seeing Stoke-Pogis, why he should have preferred it to any other abode, yet how, in this seclusion, gravity and dreaming should have become a gentle melancholy tingeing every line we have from his pen. As, when apostrophizing Eton:—

This continual guest, Pain, engendered an indolent habit of body. His ideal Heaven was “where one might lie on the sofa all day and read a novel,” unstung by conscience or the contempt of his kind.

“William Penn was born at Stoke-Pogis!” I remembered, aloud and abruptly.

Caput’s eyes were upon the fast-vanishing spire:

“The Elegy—in which I defy any master of English to find a misapplied word—was written twenty times before it was printed,” he observed sententiously.

“Papa!” from the young lady on the back seat of the carriage—“Now, I thought it was an impromptu——”

“Dashed off upon the backs of a pocketful of letters, between daylight and dark, a flat grave-stone for a desk,—and published in the next morning’s issue of the ‘Stoke-Pogis Banner of Light!’” finished the senior, banteringly.

But there is a lesson, with a moral, in the brief dialogue.