Robert Elsmere | Page 2

of these solitary houses, the afternoon sun, about to descend
before very long behind the hills dividing Long Whindale from
Shanmoor, was still lingering on this May afternoon we are describing,
bringing out the whitewashed porch and the broad bands of white
edging the windows, into relief against the gray stone of the main
fabric, the gray roof overhanging it, and the group of sycamores and
Scotch firs which protected it from the cold east and north. The
Western light struck full on a copper beech, which made a welcome
patch of warm color in front of a long gray line of outhouses standing
level with the house, and touched the heckberry blossom which marked
the upward course of the little lane connecting the old farm with the
road; above it rose the green fell, broken here and there by jutting crags,
and below it the ground sank rapidly through a piece of young hazel
plantation, at this present moment a sheet of bluebells, toward the level
of the river. There was a dainty and yet sober brightness about the
whole picture. Summer in the North is for Nature a time of expansion
and of joy as it is elsewhere, but there is none of that opulence, that
sudden splendor and superabundance, which mark it in the South. In
these bare green valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the
summer; the memory of winter seems to be still lingering about these
wind-swept fells, about the farm-houses, with their rough serviceable
walls, of the same stone as the crags behind them, and the ravines in
which the shrunken brooks trickle musically down through the _débris_
of innumerable Decembers. The country is blithe, but soberly blithe.
Nature shows herself delightful to man, but there is nothing absorbing
or intoxicating about her. Man is still well able to defend himself
against her, to live his own independent life of labor and of will, and to
develop that tenacity of hidden feeling, that slowly growing intensity of
purpose which is so often wiled out of him by the spells of the South.
The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing from that of
the few other farmhouses which dotted the fells or clustered beside the
river between it and the rocky end of the valley. But as one came nearer

certain signs of difference became visible. The garden, instead of being
the old-fashioned medley of phloxes, lavender bushes, monthly roses,
gooseberry trees, herbs, and pampas grass, with which the farmers'
wives of Long Whindale loved to fill their little front enclosures, was
trimly laid down in turf dotted with neat flowerbeds, full at the moment
we are writing of with orderly patches of scarlet and purple anemones,
wallflowers, and pansies. At the side of the house a new bow window,
modest enough in dimensions and make, had been thrown out on to
another close-shaven piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant
sophisticated order of things disturbed the homely impression left by
the untouched ivy-grown walls, the unpretending porch, and wide
slate-window sills of the front. And evidently the line of sheds standing
level with the dwelling-house no longer sheltered the animals, the carts,
or the tools which make the small capital of a Westmoreland farmer.
The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and closely
shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves in what
had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to a narrow
gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single footmark. No,
evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was, had been but lately,
or comparatively lately, transformed to new and softer uses; that rough
patriarchal life of which it had once been a symbol and centre no longer
bustled and clattered through it. It had become the shelter of new ideals,
the home of another and a milder race than once possessed it.
In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on this particular
evening, the sense of a changing social order and a vanishing past
produced by the slight but significant modifications it had undergone,
would have been greatly quickened by certain sounds which were
streaming out on to the evening air from one of the divisions of that
long one-storied addition to the main dwelling we have already
described. Some indefatigable musician inside was practising the violin
with surprising energy and vigor, and within the little garden the distant
murmur of the river and the gentle breathing of the West wind round
the fell were entirely conquered and banished by these triumphant
shakes and turns, or by the flourishes and the broad cantabile passages
of one of Spohr's Andantes. For a while, as the sun sank lower and