GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
« al residence, which is the only one it vouchsafes to show to a 
.egitimately 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 medizvalism 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 archeological 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 
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