Blended that human art must
despair of making even a tolerable imitation. And these are beauties
which not even the sun can portray; the photographer's art has not yet
enabled him to seize and fix them on the mirror which he holds up to
nature. He can give the limbs and outward flourishes, but not the soul
of such a scene. His representation bears the same relation to the
reality that a beautiful corpse does to the flashing eye and glowing
cheek of living beauty." - (From "Maple Leaves," 1865.)
LONGWOOD.
THE COUNTRY SEAT OF THE HON. WM. SMITH
(1760-1847.)
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea,
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The - square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land,
If a step should sound or a word be spoken
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
SWINBURNE'S Forsaken Garden.
On a grey, cheerless May afternoon, I visited what I might call the ruins
of this once bright abode - Longwood - at Cap Rouge. Here the eccentric,
influential and scholarly historian of Canada and statesman, the Honorable
William Smith, spent the evening of his long and busy life. Whence the
name Longwood? Did the Hon. William bestow on his rustic home the name of
the residence where sojourned his illustrious contemporary - his admired
hero, Napoleon I. (born like himself in 1769), to commemorate his own
release from the cares of State? Was Cap Rouge and its quiet and sylvan
bowers to him a haven of rest like St. Helena might have been to the
Petit Caporal?
The locality, at present, can only attract from its woodland views. The
house, of one story, is about eighty feet in length by forty in breadth,
of wood, with an oval window over the entrance to light up that portion of
the large attic. Its roomy lower apartments and attics must have fitted it
admirably for a summer retreat. It is painted a dull yellow; the blinds
may have been once green. When I saw it, I found it as bleak, as forlorn,
as the snows and storms of many winters can well make a tenantless
dwelling.
Outside, the "ghost of a garden" had stared at me, and when the key turned
and grated in the rusty old lock of this dreary tenement, with its
disjointed floors, disintegrated foundations, darkened apartments with
shutters all closed, I almost thought I might encounter within the ghost
of the departed historian;
All within is dark as night:
In the windows is no light;
And no murmur at the door,
So frequent on its hinge before,
still the time had been when the voice of revelry, the patter of light
feet, the meeting of many friends, had awakened gladsome echoes in these
now silent halls of Longwood. Traditions told of noted dinner parties, of
festive evenings, when Quebec could boast of a well appointed garrison,
and stately frigates crowded its port.
How many balls at the Barons' Club? how many annual dinners of the
Veterans of 1775, at Menut's? how many levees at the old Chateau,
had the Laird not attended from the first, the historical levee of Dec. 6,
1786, "where the Governor-General, Lord Dorchester, monopolised the
kissing," so graphically depicted by William's dignified papa, [249] the
Chief Justice, down to the jocund fetes champetres of Sir James Craig at
Powell Place immortalized by old Mr. DeGaspe - to the gay soirees of the
Duke of Richmond - the literary reunions of the scholarly Earl of
Dalhousie - the routs and lawn parties at Spencer Wood.
The Honorable William Smith, a son of the learned chief Justice of New
York in 1780 - of all Canada in 1785, was indeed a prominent figure in
Quebec circles for more than half a century; his high, confidential and
official duties, his eminent position as member of the Executive Council,
to which his powerful protector Earl Bathurst had named him in 1814 - his
refined and literary tastes, his tireless researches in Canadian annals,
at a time when the founts of our history as yet unrevealed by the art of
the printer, lay dormant under heaps of decaying - though priceless - M.SS.
in the damp vaults of the old Parliament Buildings; these and several
other circumstances surround the memory, haunts and times of the Laird of
Longwood with peculiar significance.
But for the Honorable William one bleak autumn came, when the trees he had
planted ceased to lend him their welcome shade - the roses he had reared,
to send perfume to his tottering frame - the garden he had so exquisitely
planned, to gladden his aged eyes. He then bid adieu forever to the
cherished old spot and retired to his town house, now the residence of
Hon. Chas. Alleyn, Sheriff of Quebec, [250] where those he loved received
his last farewell on the 7th December, 1847, bequeathing Longwood to his
son Charles Webber Smith, who lived some years there as a bachelor, then
decked out his rustic home for an English bride and retired to England
where he died in 1879. Desolation and silence has reigned in the halls of
Longwood for many a long day, and in the not inappropriate words of
Swinburne,
Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not.
As the heart of a dead man the seed plots are dry;
From the thickets of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
