GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



al residence, which is the only one it vouchsafes to show to a 

 legitimately interested as opposed to a merely inquisitive public. 

 The prospect on a fine summer's day, or on a sunny autumn one, 

 when the oaks, and sycamores, and beeches, are turning to red and 

 gold, is enchanting. The sweeping curve of the stream that here 

 takes a considerable bend towards Twickenham, includes the whole 

 of that portion of the grounds and park that slopes to the water's 

 edge, and shuts out all but a hint of the tall factory chimneys and 

 wharves of Brentford. There are happily no villas, pseudo- 

 Gothic, or pseudo-Queen Anne, to intrude an insistent modernity 

 into the gentle beauty of the scene ; no bridges triumphs, no doubt, 

 of engineering science, but matter-of-fact products of yesterday 

 only ; no traffic, beyond an occasional white or red-funneled steam- 

 boat, going up to Richmond, or down to London, with the tide- 

 nothing, in a word, to distract one's dream of the past, if one be 

 in the mood to indulge in it. It is true that there is the towing- 

 path itself ; but there have been towing-paths, surely, from time 

 immemorial, and a sad day it will be for London when its familiar 

 barges, though now they are propelled by steam, have become as 

 much part of a bygone age as the red, blue, and yellow omnibuses 

 of less than a dozen years ago. How picturesque those omnibuses 

 were we never knew till we had lost them ! 



Lower down the river, at the Tower, at London Bridge, at Green- 

 wich, or Westminster, where all is lively and busy, it is impossible 

 to invoke the mood of reverie necessary to the reconstruction of 

 the past. Even at Chelsea and Cheyne Walk itself, it is difficult 

 to do so, for, from medisevalism to modernism, from that same past 

 as we conceive it to have been, to the actual, living present, is a 

 cry too far for the most vivid imagination to compass, even though 

 it may have been fed by years of archaeological and historical 

 study ; and this is because we are obsessed by the reality, some- 

 times in itself as beautiful as any dream. 



Up here, however, on the towing-path, facing that old, yet 

 strangely new-looking palace of the Percys, " all in the blue, un- 

 clouded weather," when the surface of the river, oily and smooth, 

 either reflects the quiet temper of the sky, or, ruffled by a gentle 

 breeze, dances and sparkles in the sunshine ; when the far-away 

 cloud of smoke over London is very faint indeed, one can realize 

 a little how Sion must have looked, three, four, or even five 



100 



