Mainly, however, were the boy’s holidays passed with his grandmother Field, the old and trusted housekeeper of the Plumer family at Blakesware, in Hertfordshire: an ancient mansion, topped by many turrets, gables, carved chimneys, guarded all about by a solid red-brick wall and heavy iron gates. He was not allowed to go outside the grounds, and was content to wander over their trimly-kept terraces and about the tranquil park, wherein aged trees bent themselves in grotesque shapes. Beyond, he fancied that a dark lake stretched silently, striking terror to the lad’s imagination.
“So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay--I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion--half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy.” It was the placid tiny Ashe, which, curving about through this valley, here brawls over one of the wears that have given the place its name, and his lake proved to be only one of its little inlets.
Within doors he would wander through the wainscoted halls and the tapestried bedrooms--“tapestry so much better than painting, not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots ... all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actæon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary, coolness of Dan Phœbus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.” He would gaze long in wonder on the busts of the Twelve Cæsars ranged around the marble hall, and would study the prints of Hogarth’s Progress of the Rake and of the Harlot hung on the walls. “Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it,” he says in the essay on “Blakesmoor in H----shire;” under which name he disguises the place. That is a delightful paper, ending with this most musical passage: “Mine too--whose else?--thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pidgeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.”