From the book, Wearing of the Gray: Being Personal Portraits, Scenes, and Adventures of War by John Esten Cooke. His sister Sarah (Sal) Dandridge Duval lived at Orapax in far western New Kent adjacent to Roslyn with her husband, Robert Randolph Duval.
Roslyn and the White house: before and after.
“Quantum mutatus ab illo!¹” That is an exclamation which rises to the lips of many persons on many occasions in time of war.
In 1860, there stood on the left bank of the Chickahominy, in the county of New Kent, an honest old mansion, with which the writer of this page was intimately acquainted. Houses take the character of those who build them, and this one was Virginian, and un-“citified.” In place of flues to warm the apartments, there were big fires of logs. In place of gas to light the nights, candles, or the old-fashioned “astral” lamps. On the white walls there were no highly coloured landscape paintings, but a number of family portraits. There was about the old mansion a cheerful and attractive air of home and welcome, and in the great fireplaces had crackled the yule clogs of many merry Christmases. The stables were large enough to accommodate the horses of half a hundred guests. The old garden contained a mint patch which had supplied that plant for the morning juleps of many generations. Here a number of worthy old planters had evidently lived their lives, and passed away, never dreaming that the torch of war would flame in their borders.
The drawing-room was the most cheerful of apartments; and the walls were nearly covered with portraits. From the bright or faded canvas looked down beautiful dames, with waists just beneath their arms, great piles of curls, and long lace veils; and fronting these were gentlemen with queer blue coats, brass buttons, snowy ruffles, hair brushed back, and English side-whiskers. The child in the oval frame above the mantel-piece-with the golden curls, and the little hand on the head of her pet dog could look at her father and mother, grandfather, grandmother, and great-grandmother, almost without turning her head. Four generations looked down from the walls of the old mansion; about it was an indefinable but pervading air of home.
Of the happy faces which lit up this honest old mansion when I saw it first, I need not speak. Let me give a few words, however, to a young man who was often there-one of my friends. He was then in the bloom of youth, and enjoyed the spring-days of his life. Under the tall old trees, in the bright parlour full of sunshine, or beneath the shadow of the pine-wood near, he mused, and dreamed, and passed the idle hours of his “early prime.” He was there at Roslyn in the sweetest season of the year; in spring, when the grass was green, and the peach-blossom red, and the bloom of the apple-tree as white as the driven snow; in summer, “when the days were long” and all the sky a magical domain of piled — up clouds upon a sea of blue; and in the autumn, when the airs were dreamy and memorial — the woods a spectacle from faery-land, with their purple, gold, and orange, fading slow. Amid these old familiar scenes, the youth I write of wandered and enjoyed himself. War had not come with its harsh experiences and hard realities-its sobs and sighs, its anxieties and hatreds-its desolated homes, and vacant chairs, and broken hearts. Peace and youth made every object bright; and wandering beneath the pines, dreaming his dreams, the young man passed many sunny hours, and passed them, I think, rationally. His reveries brought him no money, but they were innocent. He had “never a penny to spare,” but was rich in fancy; few sublunary funds, but a heavy balance to his credit in the Bank of Cloudland; no house to call his own, but a number of fine chateaux, where he entered as a welcome guest, nay, as their lord! Those brave chateaux stood in a country unsurpassed, and those who have lived there say no air is purer, no sky more bright. War does not come there, nor the hum of trade; grief and care fly away; sorrow is unknown; the doors of these old chateaux are closed against all that carries that most terrible of maladies, the Heartache.
They were Chateaux en Espagne², you will say, good reader; and truly they were built in that fine land. Do you know a better? I do not.
Many years have passed since the youth I speak of wandered amid these happy scenes; but I know that the dead years rise like phantoms often before his eyes, and hover vague and fitful above the waves of that oblivion which cannot submerge them. While memory lives they will be traced upon her tablets, deeper and more durable than records cut on “monumental alabaster.” The rose, the violet, and the hyacinth have passed, but their magical odour is still floating in the air — not a tint of the sky, a murmur of the pines, or a song of the birds heard long ago, but lives for ever in his memory!
But I wander from my subject, which is Roslyn “before and after.” The reader has had a glimpse of the old house as it appeared in the past; where is it, and what is it now?
That question will be answered by a description of my last visit to the well-known locality. It was a day or two after the battle of Cold Harbour, and I was going with a few companions toward the White House, whither the cavalry had preceded us. I thought I knew the road; I was sure of being upon it; but I did not recognise a single locality. War had reversed the whole physiognomy of the country. The traces of huge camps were visible on the once smiling fields; the pretty winding road, once so smooth, was all furrowed into ruts and mud-holes; the trees were hewn down; the wayside houses dismantled; the hot breath of war had passed over the smiling land and blasted it, effacing all its beauty. With that beauty, every landmark had also disappeared. I travelled over the worn-out road, my horse stumbling and plunging. Never had I before visited, I could have made oath, this portion of Virginia!
All at once we came — I and the “merry comrades” who accompanied me — in sight of a great waste, desolate-looking field, of a clump of towering trees, and a mansion which the retreating enemy had just burned to the ground. There were no fences around this field; the roads were obliterated, deep ruts marking where army wagons had chosen the more level ground of the meadow, or had “doubled” in retiring; no landmarks were distinguishable. I recognised nothing-and yet something familiar in the appearance of the landscape struck me, and all at once the thought flashed on me, “I know this place! I know those peach trees by the garden-fence! the lawn, the stables, the great elms! --this is Roslyn!”
It was truly Roslyn, or rather the ghost of it. What a spectacle. The fair fields were trodden to a quagmire; the fences had been swept away; of the good old mansion, once the abode of joy and laughter, of home comfort and hospitality, there remained only a pile of smoking bricks, and two lugubrious, melancholy chimneys which towered aloft like phantoms!
I heard afterwards the house's history. First, it had been taken as the headquarters of one of the Federal generals; then it was used as a hospital. Why it was burned I know not; whether to destroy, in accordance with McClellan's order, all medical and other stores which could not be removed, or from wanton barbarity, it is impossible to say. I only know that it was entirely destroyed, and that when I arrived, the old spot was the picture of desolation. Some hospital tents still stood in the yard with their comfortable beds; and many articles of value were scattered about-among others, an exquisitely mounted pistol, all silver and gilding, which a boy had picked up and wished me to purchase. I did not look at him, and scarcely saw the idle loungers of the vicinity who strolled about with apathetic faces. It was the past and present of Roslyn that occupied my mind he recollection of the bright scenes of other years, set suddenly and brutally against this dark picture of ruin. There were the tall old trees, under which I used to wander; there was the wicker seat where I passed so many tranquil hours of reverie in the long, still afternoons, when the sun sank slowly to the western woods; there was the sandy road; the dim old pinewood; the flower-garden-every object which surrounded me in the glad hours of youth-but Roslyn itself, the sunny old mansion, where the weeks and months had passed so joyously, where was Roslyn? That smouldering heap of debris, and those towering, ghost-like chimneys, replied. From the shattered elms, and the trodden flowers, the genius of the place seemed to look out, sombre and hopeless. From the pine-trees reaching out yearning arms toward the ruin, seemed to come a murmur, “Roslyn! Roslyn!”
In war you have little time for musing. Duty calls, and the blast of the bugle jars upon the reveries of the dreamer, summoning him again to action. I had no time to dream over the faded glories, the dead splendour of Roslyn; those “merry comrades” whereof I spoke called to me, as did the friends of the melancholy hero visitor to Locksley Hall³, and I was soon enroute again for the White House.
¹ - "How changed it is from what it was."- Virgil
² - a castle in Spain i.e. something improbable
³ - Locksley Hall, the childhood home of the narrator of the Tennyson poem of the same name.
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