FLORIN
WEBSITE
A
WEBSITE ON
FLORENCE © JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO ASSOCIAZIONE,
1997-2024: ACADEMIA
BESSARION
||
MEDIEVAL: BRUNETTO LATINO, DANTE ALIGHIERI, SWEET
NEW STYLE: BRUNETTO LATINO, DANTE
ALIGHIERI,
& GEOFFREY
CHAUCER
|| VICTORIAN:
WHITE SILENCE: FLORENCE'S
'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY
|| ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
|| WALTER
SAVAGE LANDOR
|| FRANCES
TROLLOPE
|| ABOLITION
OF SLAVERY
|| FLORENCE IN SEPIA
|| CITY AND BOOK CONFERENCE
PROCEEDINGS
I, II, III,
IV,
V,
VI,
VII
, VIII, IX, X || MEDIATHECA 'FIORETTA MAZZEI'
|| EDITRICE
AUREO ANELLO CATALOGUE
|| UMILTA
WEBSITE
||
LINGUE/LANGUAGES: ITALIANO,
ENGLISH
|| VITA
New: Opere
Brunetto Latino || Dante vivo || White Silence
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR WEBSITE: Essay
'Walter Savage Landor' in New Spirit of the Age || Jean Field, 'Walter Savage Landor's Warwick' || 'Black and Red Letter Chaucer'
|| Kate Field, Atlantic
Montly, 'The Last Days of
Walter Savage Landor' || Mark Roberts, 'The
Inscription on the Grave of Walter Savage Landor' || Alison Levy, 'The Widow of Walter Savage Landor'
|| Kristin Bragadottir, 'William Morris and Daniel
Willard Fiske' (Villa Landor) || Piero Fusi, 'A. Henry Savage Landor'.
AUDIO FILES OF WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, GEBIR I, GEBIR II
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR'S WARWICK
JEAN FIELD
'Never without a pang do I leave the house where I was born',
so wrote Walter Savage Landor to his friend Robert Southey in
later life. Like all members of the extended Landor family,
Walter Savage loved the rambling old house in the centre of the
historic town of Warwick.
Eastgate House, as it was called until the King's High School
for Girls took over the property in 1879, had originally been
built in the late 15th century, or rather the two dwellings
which occupied the site had been built then. Considerably
altered and refurbished in 1692 by a wealthy physician Dr
William Johnson, from 1733 onwards the house and garden of
around one and a half acres was rented out to support Ann
Johnson's Charity. Having come to Warwick in 1760, Dr Walter
Landor suffered great sadness when his first wife and four of
their daughters died, but in 1744 he married again, this time
heiress Elizabeth Savage of Bishop's Tachbrook, and the couple
took up residence in Eastgate House, renting it from the
charity. Walter Savage Landor and his three brothers and three
sisters were all born in the house between 1775 and 1782. After
Dr Landor's death in 1805, first his widow and then Elizabeth,
the eldest of the sisters, rented the house, the family only
surrendering the tenancy in 1854 when Elizabeth died.
The house has a main staircase of oak, constructed in 1692,
still with the magificent banisters constructed, like the other
rebuilding, by Roger Hurlbut, a master carpenter who had
completed work in Warwick Castle. In the time of the Landors the
house had seven or eight bedrooms of varying sizes, some in the
oldest part of the house adjoining Chapel Street, little altered
from the 1500s. The Landors used what had once been the main
bedroom as an upstairs drawing room, this room above the hall
being of a good size and position.
It seems likely that Walter Savage Landor was born in one of the
bedrooms fronting onto Smith Street, probably in the room on the
corner of Chapel Street. Later it would appear that the small
panelled room adjoining this became Walter Savage's own bedroom
and it was possibily in this room, largely unaltered for
centuries, that many of his early poems were written.
At one time the garden area housed a brewhouse, hen house and
dairy, but later in the tenancy of the Landors, the garden was
redesigned, becoming a magnificent affair with grass plots,
gravel walks and numerous flower borders, yet retaining a number
of fine old trees including chestnuts, elms and mulberries.
There was also an octagonal summer house in a secluded area near
Chapel Street and nightingales regularly serenaded the
inhabitants of the house.
Lord Leycester's
Hospital, Warwick
For the first four and a half years of his life Walter Savage
did not travel far from the home, but in 1779 he was sent to
boarding school of Knowles, around eight miles away and from
that time onwards, an increasing amount of his time was spent
away from Warwick, either at school, Univesity or abroad.
When writing to Robert Southey in 1811, Landor recalled some of
his earliest return visits to his childhood home, when he paid
special attention to his favourite plants and bushes.
They always meet one in the same place, at the same
seaon; and years have no more effect on their placid
countenances than on so many of the favoured gods. I remember
a little privet which I planted when I was about six years
old, and which I considered the next of kin to me after my
mother and elder sister. Whenever I returned from school or
college. - for the attachment was not stifled in that sink, -
I felt something like uneasiness till I had seen and measured
it.
This sensitivity towards trees and plants carried on throughout
Landor's life and when decades later he was visiting his eldest
sister who still lived in the family house, he complained about
the 'incessant mowing and weeding' which went on in the garden.
He preferred to let nature take its course, as expressed in this
extract from a poem entitled 'Faesulan Idyl', published in 1831.
There describing his garden at the Villa Landor in San
Domenico, Fiesole.
Villa Landor, San Domenico
Fiesole, May Flowers
And t'is and ever was my wish and way
To let
all flowers live freely, and all die,
When'er
their Genius bids their souls depart,
Among
their kindred in their native place.
I never
pluck the rose; the violet's head
Hath
shaken with my breath upon its bank
And not
reproacht me: the ever-sacred cup
Of the
pure lily between my hands
Felt
safe, unsoil'd, not lost one grain of gold.
East Gate, Warwick
One of the most important of Landor's visits to Warwick was in
1798 when his first long poem was published by Henry Sharp, who
possessed printing and publishing premises in High Street, near
the corner of Swan Street, on a site now occupied by an antique
shop. Landor was staying at Ipsley Court, the family property
near Redditch, with his parents and the rest of the family.
However, on several occasions in May 1798 he needed to visit
Warwick in order to sort out the page proofs, for his writing
was notoriously difficult to read and he kept changing his mind,
so his manuscript was full of blots and crossings out. Doubtless
each time he came he would revisit Eastgate House to refresh his
horse, or perhaps stay the night, for the five servants were
always in residence in Warwick.
Although the first publication attracted attention from Southey
who reviewed it for the Critical
Review in 1799, later writers such as Charles Lamb, De
Quincy and Shelley discovered it. It was said the Gebir remained Shelley's
favourite poem throughout his life and his biographer Thomas
Jefferson Hogg used to relate how Shelley refused to be parted
from the book when he was a student at Oxford. Even today Gebir remains Landor's most
popular long work.
This passage where the sea-nymph first appears has always been
one of the most loved.
'Twas evening, though no sun-set, and spring-tide
Level
with these green meadows, seem'd still higher;
'Twas
pleasant: and I loosen'd from my neck
The pipe
you gave me, and began to play.
O that I
ne'er had learnt the tuneful art!
It always
brings us enemies or love!
Well, I
was playing - when above the waves
Some
swimmer's head methought I saw ascend;
I,
sitting still, survey'd it, with my pipe
Awkwardly
held before my lips half-clos'd.
Gebir! it
was a nymph! a nymph divine!
I cannot
wait describing how she came,
How I was
sitting, how she first assum'd
The
sailor: of what happened, there remains
Enough to
say, and too much to forget.
The sweet
deceiver stept upon this bank
Before I
was aware; for, which suprize
Moments
fly rapid as with love itself.
Stooping
to tune afresh the hoarsen'd reed,
I hear a
rustling; and where that arose
My glance
first lighted on her nimble feet.
He feet
resembled those long shells explore
By him
who to befriend his steeds' dim sight
Would
blow the pungent powder in their eye. -
Her eyes
too! O immortal Gods! her eyes
Resembled
- what could they resemble - what
Ever
resemble those! E'en her attire
Was not
of wonted woof nor vulgar art:
Her
mantle shew'd the yellow samphire pod,
Her
girdle, the dove-color'd wave serene.
'Shepherd',
said she, 'and will you wrestle now,
And with
the sailor's hardier race engage?'
I was
rejoiced to hear it, and contrived
How to
keep up contention; - could I fail
By
pressing not too strongly, still to press,
'Whether
a shepherd, as indeed you seem,
Or
whether of the hardier race you boast,
I am not
daunted, no: I will engage.'
'But
first', said she, 'what wager will you lay?'
'A
sheep', I answered, 'add whate'er you will'.
I
cannot', she replied, 'make that return:
Our hided
vessels, in their pitchy round,
Seldom,
unless from rapine, hold a sheep.
But I
have sinuous shells, of pearly hue
Within,
and they that lustre have imbibed
In the
sun's palace porch . . .
After Tamar has lost the wrestling match and the nymph has
triumphed, she watches her return to the sea with her prize of a
sheep.
She went away: I, on the wicker gate
Lean'd,
and could follow with my eyes alone.
The sheep
she carried easy as a cloak.
But when
I heard its bleating, as I did
And saw,
she hastening on, its hinder feet
Struggle,
and from her snowy shoulder slip,
(One
shoulder its poor efforts had unveil'd,)
Then, all
my passions mingling fell in tears!
Restless
then ran I to the highest ground
To watch
her; she was gone; gone down the tide;
And the
long moon-beam on the hard wet sand
Lay like
a jasper column half uprear'd.
On several occasions Landor was visited in Warwick by Dr Samuel
Parr, the well-known Whig scholar and Curate of Hatton from
1785-1825. On one occasion around 1800 Landor returned to
Warwick unexpectedly from London, travelling by stage coach. In
the same coach was a guest of Dr Parr's who announced to his
host over dinner that he had travelled with Landor. After the
main part of dinner was done, Dr Parr left his guests and rode
hastily to Warwick to speak with Landor. They may have conversed
in the hall, but mindful of his guests, Parr would not partake
of refreshment of any kind, leaving after half an hour or so to
ride the two or three miles back home. In after years, Landor
used to joke over the incident.
In 1804 Landor was reading a newspaper in Bath when he had the
painful reminder of many happy visits he had made in the past to
the house of Dr Parr and also to Dr William Lambe, the young
physician who had taken over the medical practice of Dr Landor
in 1790. The Lambe family had recently moved to London and the
death of Mrs Lambe and her youngest child were reported in the
paper
Dr Lambe's wife Harriet had been a great friend of Landor in his
teenage years and when he read how after the death of two
babies, her five year-old daughter had died of scarlet fever and
how she herself had died just three days afterwards, Landor
wrote a poem 'On Reading in a Newspaper the Death of a Mother
and Three Children'. The following is a short extract.
. . . O Lambe, my early guide, my guardian friend
Must thus
our pleasures, thus our prospects end!
All that
could swell thy heart, thy soul elate,
Heaven
gave; but pond'ring found one gift too great.
When
marble-cold her meek Eliza lay,
Was this
the hour to snatch they love away!
When the
fond mother claspt her fever'd child,
Death
hailed the omen, waved his dart and smiled . . .
In 1845, as had been his custom for several years, Landor
visited Warwick for several weeks in the summer. In the course
of his visit he dined with his friends the Percies at Guy's
Cliffe House and later he wrote a poem for Miss Isabella Percy
about her chapel and the legend that Guy of Warwick was buried
under the floor.
To Miss Isabella Percy
If that
old hermit laid to rest
Beneath your chapel floor,
Could
leave the regions of the blest
And visit earth once more:
If human
sympathies could warm
His tranquil breast again,
Your
innocence that breast could charm
Perhaps your beauty pain.
Sometimes Landor's visits to Warwick led to his accompanying his
sister Elizabeth on short trips to their youngest brother
Robert, Rector of Birlingham, near Pershore. It was perhaps on
one of these visits to Birlingham in the 1840s that Landor heard
a local anecdote about a country lad and the new railway which
gave rise to the amusing dialogue entitiled A Railroad Eclogue. The
place names in the poem are all on the railway line to
Cheltenha, Defford being less that two miles from Birlingham.
A Railroad Eclogue
Father.
What brought thee back, lad?
Son.
Father!
the
same
feet
As
took me brought me back, I warrant ye.
Father.
Couldst thou not find the rail?
Son.
The deuce himself,
Who can find most
things, could not find the rail.
Father.
Plain as a pikestaff miles and miles it lies
Son.
So they all told me. Pike-staffs in your
day
Must have
been hugely plainer than just now.
Father.
What dist thou ask for?
Son.
Ask for? Tewkesbury
Thro
Defford opposite to Breedon-hill.
Father.
Right; and they set ye wrong?
Son.
Me
wrong?
not
they;
The
best among 'em should not set me wrong,
Nor
right, nor anything; I'd tell 'em that. -
Father.
Herefordshire's short horns and shorter wits
Are known in
every quarter of the land,
Those
blunt, these blunter. Well! no help for it!
Each might
do harm if each had more of each . . .
Yet even in
Herefordshire there are some
Not downright
dolts . . before the cidar's broacht,
When all are much
alike . . yet most could tell
A railroad
from a parish or a pike.
How thou
couldst miss that railroad puzzles me,
Seeing there
lies none other round about.
Son.
I found the rails along the whole brook-side
Left
of
that
old stone bridge across yon Avon.
Father.
That is the place.
Son.
There was a house hard-by,
And
past
it
ran a furnace upon wheels,
Like
a
mad
bull, tail up in air, and horns
So low ye
might not see 'em. On it bumpt,
Roaring, as
strait as any arrow flits,
As strait,
as fast too, ay, and faster went it,
And, could
it keep its wind up, and not crack,
Then woe
betide the eggs at Tewkesbury
This
market-day, and lambs, and sheep! a score
Of pigs
might be made flitches in a trice,
Before they
well could knuckle.
Father! father!
If
they
were
ourn, thou wouldst not chuckle so,
And
shake
thy
sides, and wipe thy eyes, and rub
Thy
breeches-knees, like Sunday shoes, at that rate.
Hows'ever .
. .
Father.
'Twas the tain, lad,
'twas the tain.
Son.
May-be: I had no business with a train.
'Go
thee
by
rail, you told me; by the rail
At
Defford'
.
. . and didst make a fool of me.
Father.
Ay, lad, I did indeed: it was methinks
Some
twenty
years
agone last
Martinmas.
One of the saddest visits that Landor ever paid to his sister
and his birthplace was in July and August 1851. It was at
Warwick that he received a letter telling him that the woman he
had loved for years but had never been able to marry, in reality
Sophia Jane Swifte, whom he called Ianthe, had died three days
previously in Versailles. With his love of solitude and of
nature, perhaps Landor took refuge in the garden, alone with his
grief.
The second part of a poem entitled 'The Dreamer' published a few
years later sums up the misery that Landor felt at Ianthe's
death.
Sophia! whom I seldom call'd by name,
And
trembled when I wrote it; O my friend
Severed
so long from me! one morn I dreamt
That we
were walking hand in hand thro' paths
Slippery
with sunshine: after many years
Had flown
away, and seas and realms been crost,
And much
(alas how much!) by both endured
We joined
our hands together and told our tale.
And now
thy hand hath slipt away from mine,
And the
cold marble cramps it; I dream one,
Dost thou
dream too? and are our dreams the same?
The last visit Walter Savage Landor paid to the house where he
was born was in the summer of 1853, but several mispaps happened
to his luggage. The following is from a letter written by his
sister to her niece.
About bedtime Walter discovered there was no
appearance of a box or bag - he had some keys - he was sure (I
was not) that he had started with a black trunk and saw it put
on the train - we sent here and there and wrote to where he
had changed trains, in vain. A nightcap I could furnish, but
the under male garments were not resident here - we sent to
Tachbrook and had some from thence. However the box did come
on Wednesday afternoon uninjured.
During his visit to Warwick in 1853 Landor spent much of his
time in the garden. The first few mulberries had fallen on the
gravel paths and as he picked some up he recalled to his friend
John Foster that he remembered doing the same thing 75 years
previously. Landor wrote a poem 'To an Old Mulberry' which
seemed to sum up his feelings of frailty at the age of 78.
Old mulberry! with all thy moss around,
Thy arms
are shatter'd, but thy heart is sound:
So then
remember one for whom of yore
Thy
tenderest boughs the crimson berry bore:
Remember
one who, trusting in thy strength,
Lay on
the low and level branch full length.
No
strength had he, alas! to climb it now,
Nor
strength to bear him, if he had, hast thou.
It is interesting to note that this old mulberry (or a similar
one) survived until around 1940 in the section of garden near to
the parlour window. When the tree finally collapsed, a scion of
it was planted near Chapel Street, where it survives until this
day.
In retrospect, one of the happiest of Landor's visits to Warwick
was in December 1841. Elizabeth Savage Landor used the old house
for a great reunion of the Landor brothers - the excuse being
that the youngest brother Robert Eyres had celebrated his
sixtieth birthday some months before. By then the two youngest
sisters were dead, but Walter, Charles and his family, Henry and
Robert joined their sister Elizabeth who was then renting the
house. By all accounts it was a very merry gathering and Walter
stayed on till the New Year, visiting St Mary's Church during
his stay.
St Mary's Church,
Warwick
While in St Mary's he read a memorial in Latin to one of his
childhood friends who died in 1780, when she was six and he
five. The poem Walter Savage Landor wrote 'On the Dead' was
published in the Examiner
on 8 January 1842.
Thou in this wide cold church art laid
Close to
the wall, my little maid!
My little
Fanny Verchild! thou
Sole idol
of an infant vow!
My
playmate in life's break of day,
When all
we had to do was play!
Even
then, if any other girl
To kiss
my forehead seiz'd a curl,
Thou
wouldst with sad dismay run in,
And stamp
and call it shame and sin.
And
should some rough, intrusive boy
Bring
thee an orange, flower, or toy,
My tiny
fist was at his frill,
I bore my
jealousy so ill,
And felt
my bosom beat so bold,
Altho' he
might be six years old.
Against
the marble slab my eyes
Dwell
fixt; and from below arise
Thoughts,
not yet cold nor mute, of thee
It was
their earliest joy to see.
One who
had march't o'er Minden's pain,
In thy
young smile grew young again.
That
stern man melted into love,
That
father traced the line above
His Roman
soul used Roman speech,
And
taught (ah, though too, thou didst teach!)
How, soon
as in our course we start,
Death
follows with uplifted dart.
One would guess from the first line of the poem that Landor was
not too keen on St Mary's Church, yet that is where his own
memorial is sited. Paid for by his second son, Walter Savage
Landor II, the memorial was dedicated 30 January, 1888, twenty
four years after Landor's death and on the 113th anniversary of
his birth. On that bleak day in January a number of dignatories
visited Warwick especially for the unveiling and these included
Kitty Landor, his niece from Bishop's Tachbrook and
representatives from the Southey and Kingsley families. Landor
House was visited too, for on that same day the sign Landor Born was erected
over the front door.
In recent years, near Landor's bust has been fixed a copy of his
most famous verse, written in 1849 on his 74th birthday.
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:
Nature I loved, and next to nature Art:
I warm'd
both hands before the fire of Life
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
Taken from the 'Imaginary Conversation' between Aesop and
Rhodope, this paragraph appears in most books of quotations.
Laodamia died; Helen died; Leda the beloved of
Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth
betimes than to sit up late; better, than to cling
pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us and protract
an inevitable fal. We may enjoy the present while we are
insensible of infirmity and decay; but the present, like a
note in music is nothing but as it it appertains to what is
past and what is to come. There are no fields of amaranth on
this side of the grave; there are not voices, O Rhodope, that
are not too soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with
whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the
echo is not faint at last.
This tomb in Florence's 'English' Cemetery was in the greatest
need of conservation, lichen having eaten into the marble and
the lead letters becoming lost. The epitaph is by Algernon
Charles Swinburne.
It is now restored, its leads letters also carefully replaced, a
pomegranate planted by it, and we invite you to obey its
inscription:
See also Piero Fusi, Henry Savage Landor
An Artist's Family in Warwick
Frederick Rothwell Bolton, Florence Bolton, Dorothy Joyce
Bolton, John Robert Glorney Bolton, Eileen Mary Bolton in the
garden of Quaker House, Warwick. Granny, a Cash from Coventry, the
wife of the Irish painter, John Nunn Bolton, was widowed when my
father, her oldest child, was seven, supporting her family with
church embroidery and mending the tapestries in Warwick Castle for
her friend, the Countess of Warwick. Her husband had painted many
watercolours of Guy's Cliffe, Quaker House, Lord Leycester's
Hospital, East Gate, and had worked with Napoleon Bonaparte on the
Countess of Warwick's Pageant in the Castle. Derek went to
Cambridge and became a Dean in the Church of Ireland, publishing a
book on the Caroline Church in Ireland; Joyce became a professor
of child growth and development and a fine painter with many
exhibitions in America; my father, who had acted the 'Druid's
Sacrifice' in the Countess' Pageant, sang solo as a boy in St
Mary's Church, went to Ardingly and Oxford, working in the
Bodleian Library at 15, and became friends with Gandhi and Pope
John XXIII, publishing seven books; Eileen was a self-taught,
brilliant scholar, publishing Lichens for Vegetable Dyeing.
The engravings here of Warwick are by her.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
WEBSITE:
Recordings of Gebir I, Gebir II || Essay 'Walter Savage Landor' in New Spirit of the Age || Jean Field, 'Walter Savage Landor's Warwick' || 'Black and Red Letter Chaucer'
|| Kate Field, Atlantic
Montly, 'The Last Days of
Walter Savage Landor' || Mark Roberts, 'The
Inscription on the Grave of Walter Savage Landor' || Alison Levy, 'The Widow of Walter Savage Landor'
|| Kristin Bragadottir, 'William Morris and Daniel
Willard Fiske' (Villa Landor) || Piero Fusi, 'A. Henry Savage Landor'.
FLORIN
WEBSITE
A WEBSITE
ON FLORENCE © JULIA
BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO ASSOCIAZIONE,
1997-2024:
ACADEMIA
BESSARION
||
MEDIEVAL: BRUNETTO
LATINO, DANTE
ALIGHIERI, SWEET
NEW STYLE: BRUNETTO LATINO, DANTE
ALIGHIERI, &
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
|| VICTORIAN:
WHITE
SILENCE:
FLORENCE'S
'ENGLISH' CEMETERY
|| ELIZABETH
BARRETT BROWNING
|| WALTER
SAVAGE LANDOR
|| FRANCES
TROLLOPE
|| ABOLITION
OF SLAVERY ||
FLORENCE
IN SEPIA
|| CITY
AND BOOK CONFERENCE
PROCEEDINGS I, II,
III,
IV,
V,
VI,
VII
, VIII, IX, X || MEDIATHECA
'FIORETTA MAZZEI'
|| EDITRICE
AUREO
ANELLO CATALOGUE || UMILTA WEBSITE ||
LINGUE/LANGUAGES:
ITALIANO,
ENGLISH
|| VITA
New: Opere
Brunetto Latino || Dante vivo || White Silence
