Luxurious, there, rove through the pendent woods
That nodding hang o'er Harrington's retreat.
And stooping thence to Ham's embowering walks,
Now let us trace the matchless vale of Thames,
Fair winding up to where the Muses haunt
In Twitnam's bowers, and for their Pope implore
The healing god—to Royal Hampton's pile."
The home of the court for so many years, the interests of politics and literature met within its walls. It would be difficult to say whether it was better known as the home of statesmen or the resort of wits. But one distinction it enjoys which no other royal palace can rival. It is the scene of the most characteristic, and in its way the most perfect, poem of the age, "The Rape of the Lock."
II
"Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flow'rs,
Where Thames with pride surveys his rising tow'rs,
There stands a structure of majestic frame,
Which from theneighb'ring Hampton takes its name.
Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom
Of foreign Tyrants, and of Nymphs at home;
Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes Counsel take—and sometimes Tea."
A generation which ignores Pope, as it has forgotten Dryden, should yet find time to read, in the summer afternoons on the terrace by the Thames, the poem in which the former has given Hampton Court a literary immortality.
