CHAPTER VIII

THE STATE OF DENMARK

149. THE house on Denmark Hill, where my father and mother, in the shortening days of 1845, thankfully received back their truant, has been associated, by dated notepaper, with a quarter of a century of my English life; and was indeed to my parents a peaceful, yet cheerful, and pleasantly, in its suburban manner, dignified, abode of their declining years. For my father had no possibilities of real retirement in him; his business was the necessary pride and fixed habit of his soul: his ambition, and what instinct of accumulative gain the mercantile life inevitably begets, were for me only; but involved the fixed desire to see me moving in the western light of London, among its acknowledged literary orders of merit; and were totally inconsistent with the thought, faintly and intermittingly haunting my mother and me, that a rose-covered cottage in the dells of Matlock or the vale of Keswick, might be nearer the heavenly world, for us, than all the majesty of Denmark Hill, connected though it was, by the Vauxhall Road and convenient omnibuses, with St. James’s Street and Cavendish Square.

But the house itself had every good in it, except nearness to a stream, that could with any reason be coveted by modest mortals. It stood in command of seven acres of healthy ground (a patch of local gravel there overlying the London clay); half of it in meadow sloping to the sunrise, the rest prudently and pleasantly divided into an upper and lower kitchen garden; a fruitful bit of orchard, and chance inlets and outlets of woodwalk, opening to the

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]