... Here let us sweep The boundless landscape: now the raptured eye Exulting swift to huge Augusta send, Now to the Sister Hills that skirt her plain, To lofty Harrow now, and now to where Majestic Windsor lifts his princely brow.... Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around, Of hills and dales, and woods and lawns and spires, And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all The stretching landscape into smoke decays.
Richmond Park is nearly nine miles in circuit, at its Robin Hood Gate almost adjoining the wilder expanse of Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common. It is a royal demesne, but by degrees, one of them a "village Hampden" lawsuit, it has come to be treated as a public pleasure-ground. Quite recently King Edward crowned former concessions by giving up game-preserving in the many thickets that shade its swards, stocked with herds of not too shy deer. In a central hollow are ponds that serve for skating. Every part is now open except the enclosures of several residences within the park, which are tenanted by royal favour. The White Lodge on the farther side was the youthful home of the Princess of Wales. Pembroke Lodge, near the Richmond Gate, was granted as retreat to the veteran statesman Earl Russell, having originally been built for that Countess of Pembroke young George III. loved in vain. On a mound here Henry VIII. is said to have watched for the rocket from Anne Boleyn's scaffold on Tower Hill, as signal of his being a not disconsolate widower.
On the riverside below Richmond Green, for public recreation is also given up the old Deer Park, over which the Chinese pagoda beacons us towards Kew Gardens. The Observatory here has now, through disturbance caused by the vicinity of electric lines, lost its function of testing delicate instruments. Along the road by the Lion Gate of the Gardens, Richmond and Kew almost run into each other. As usual, it is twice as far by the pleasanter path on the bank, which passes outside the Park and Gardens, with views across the river upon St. Margaret's, then on Isleworth, on the grounds of Sion House, the home of an English Duke, but at Lisbon its keys are or long were kept by the sisterhood banished hence at the Reformation; then on the wharves and slums of Brentford, county town of Middlesex, where the Brent makes shamefaced confluence as a canal. Thus we come to the new Kew Bridge and Kew Green, which still keeps a look of the dignity it wore as a favourite residence of George III.; even in our own day it has housed a branch of the royal family at Cambridge Cottage. The place is a great resort of his present Majesty's subjects, for whose refreshment appear many tea-houses and taverns. The grounds of Kew Palace are now thrown into the gardens, that,