Chapter 18 - Page 2

Redclyffe. "But yet life would be
slow and heavy, methinks, to see nothing but English parks."

Continuing their course through the noble clumps of oaks, they by and
by had a vista of the distant hall itself. It was one of the old
English timber and plaster houses, many of which are of unknown
antiquity; as was the case with a portion of this house, although other
portions had been renewed, repaired, or added, within a century. It
had, originally, the Warden said, stood all round an enclosed
courtyard, like the great houses of the Continent; but now one side of
the quadrangle had long been removed, and there was only a front, with
two wings; the beams of old oak being picked out with black, and three
or four gables in a line forming the front, while the wings seemed to
be stone. It was the timber portion that was most ancient. A clock was
on the midmost gable, and pointed now towards one o'clock. The whole
scene impressed Redclyffe, not as striking, but as an abode of ancient
peace, where generation after generation of the same family had lived,
each making the most of life, because the life of each successive
dweller there was eked out with the lives of all who had hitherto lived
there, and had in it equally those lives which were to come afterwards;
so that there was a rare and successful contrivance for giving length,
fulness, body, substance, to this thin and frail matter of human life.
And, as life was so rich in comprehensiveness, the dwellers there made
the most of it for the present and future, each generation contriving
what it could to add to the cosiness, the comfortableness, the grave,
solid respectability, the sylvan beauty, of the house with which they
seemed to be connected both before and after death. The family had its
home there; not merely the individual. Ancient shapes, that had
apparently gone to the family tomb, had yet a right by family hearth
and in family hall; nor did they come thither cold and shivering, and
diffusing dim ghostly terrors, and repulsive shrinkings, and death in
life; but in warm, genial attributes, making this life now passing more
dense as it were, by adding all the substance of their own to it.
Redclyffe could not compare this abode, and the feelings that it
aroused, to the houses of his own country; poor tents of a day, inns of
a night, where nothing was certain, save that the family of him who
built it would not dwell here, even if he himself should have the bliss
to die under the roof, which, with absurdest anticipations, he had
built for his posterity. Posterity! An American can have none.

"All this sort of thing is beautiful; the family institution was
beautiful in its day," ejaculated he, aloud, to himself, not to his
companion;