Chapter VII: Part 7

Only the book itself can persuade the reader of the extraordinary love and knowledge of birds which have thus been nourished. If I were to quote the passage where he speaks of his old desire to pursue wild birds over many lands, “to follow knowledge like a sinking star, to be and to know much until I became a name for always wandering with a hungry heart;” or where he declares that the golden oriole’s clear whistle was more to him “than the sight of towns, villages, castles, ruins, and cathedrals, and more than adventures among the people;” or where he calls being “present, in a sense invisible”--with the aid of silence and binoculars--“in the midst of the domestic circle of beings of a different order, another world than ours,” nearly every one would probably pronounce him an extravagant sentimentalist, a fanatic, or, worst of all, an exaggerator. He is none of these. When he writes of his first and only pet bird and its escapes, there is no pettiness or mere prettiness: it is not on the human scale, yet it is equal to a story of gods or men. He is an artist, with a singular power of sympathizing with wild life, especially that of birds. Their slender or full throated songs, the “great chorus of wild, ringing, jubilant cries,” when “the giant crane that hath a trumpet sound” assembles, the South American crested screamers counting the hours “when at intervals during the night they all burst out singing like one bird, and the powerful ringing voices of the incalculable multitude produce an effect as of tens of thousands of great chiming bells, and the listener is shaken by the tempest of sound, and the earth itself appears to tremble beneath him;” the colouring of birds, brilliant or delicate, their soaring or manœuvring or straight purposed flight, their games and battles, all their joyous, or fierce, passionate, and agitated cries and motions, delight him at least as much as music delights its most sensitive and experienced lovers. At sight of the pheasant he cannot help loving it, much as he hates the havoc of which it is the cause.

There is a very large variety in his enjoyment. It is exquisite and it is vigorous; it is tender and at times almost superhuman in grimness. It is a satisfaction of his senses, of his curious intelligence, and of his highest nature. The green eggs of the little bittern thrill him “like some shining supernatural thing or some heavenly melody.” He is cheerful when his binoculars are bringing him close to birds “at their little games”--a kestrel being turned off by starlings, a heron alighting on another heron’s back, a band of starlings detaching themselves from their flock to join some wild geese going at right angles to their course; for “the playful spirit is universal among them.” The songs of blackbird, nightingale, thrush, and marsh warbler delight him, and yet at other times the loss of the soaring species, eagles and kites, oppresses him, and he speaks contemptuously of “miles on miles of wood, millions of ancient noble trees, a haunt of little dicky birds and tame pheasants.” His vision of the Somerset of the lake-dwellers, of “the paradise of birds in its reedy inland sea, its lake of Athelney,” makes a feast for the eyes and ears. Moreover, he is never a mere bird man, and the result of this variety of interest and pleasure on the part of a man of Mr. Hudson’s imagination, culture, and experience, is that while his birds are intensely alive in many different ways, and always intensely birdlike, presenting a loveliness beyond that of idealized or supernaturalized women and children, yet at the same time their humanity was never before so apparent. The skylark is to him both bird and spirit, and one proof of the intense reality of his love is his ease in passing, as he does in several places, out of this world into a mythic, visionary, or very ancient world. This also is a proof of the powers of his style. At first sight, at least to the novice who is beginning to distinguish between styles without discriminating, Mr. Hudson’s is merely a rather exceptionally unstudied English, perhaps a little old-fashioned. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is, in fact, a combination, as curious as it is ripe and profound, of the eloquent and the colloquial, now the one, now the other, predominating in a variety of shades which make it wonderfully expressive for purposes of narrative and of every species of description--precise, humorous, rapturous, and sublime. And not the least reason of its power is that it never paints a bird without showing the hand and the heart that paints it. It reveals the author in the presence of birds just as much as birds in the presence, visible or invisible, of the author. The series of his books is now a long one, not enough, certainly, yet a feast, and the last is among the three or four which we shall remember and re-read most often.

I left Wells by a road passing the South-Western Railway station, and admired the grass island parting the roads to the passengers’ and the goods’ entrances. The curved edge of the turf was as clean as that of the most select lawn; the grass looked as if it had never been trodden. I now rode close to Hay Hill on my right--a dull, isolated heave of earth, striped downwards by hedges so as to resemble a country umbrella and its ribs. Motor cars overtook me. At Coxley Pound I overtook a peat-seller’s cart. The air was perfumed with something like willow-plait which I did not identify. The wind was light, but blew from behind me, and was strong enough to strip the dead ivy leaves from an ash tree, but not to stop the tortoiseshell butterfly sauntering against it.

“For three miles I was in the flat green land of Queen’s Sedge Moor drained by straight sedgy water-courses along which grow lines of elm, willow, or pine. Glastonbury Tor mounted up out of the flat before me like a huge tumulus--almost bare, but tipped by St. Michael’s Tower.” ]

For three miles I was in the flat green land of Queen’s Sedgemoor, drained by straight sedgy watercourses, along which grow lines of elm, willow, or pine. Glastonbury Tor mounted up out of the flat before me, like a huge tumulus, almost bare, but tipped by St. Michael’s tower. Soon the ground began to rise on my left, and the crooked apple orchards of Avalon came down to the roadside, their turf starred by innumerable daisies and gilt celandines. Winding round the base of the Tor, I rode into Glastonbury, and down its broad, straight hill past St. John the Baptist Church and the notoriously mediæval “Pilgrim’s Inn,” and many pastry cooks. Another peat cart was going down the street. The church stopped me because of its tower and the grass and daisies and half-dozen comfortable box tombs of its churchyard, irregularly placed and not quite upright. One of the tombs advertised in plain lettering the fact that John Down, the occupant, who died in 1829 at the age of eighty-three, had “for more than sixty years owned the abbey.” He _owned_ the abbey, nothing more; at least his friends and relatives were content to introduce him to posterity as the man who “for more than sixty years owned the abbey.” If the dead were permitted to own anything here below, doubtless he would own it still. Outside the railings two boys were doing the cleverest thing I saw on this journey. They were keeping a whip-top, and that a carrot-shaped one, spinning by kicking it in turns. Which was an accomplishment more worthy of being commemorated on a tombstone than the fact that you owned Glastonbury Abbey. The interior of the church is made equally broad at both ends by the lack of screen or of any division of the chancel. It is notable also for a marble monument in the south-west corner, retaining the last of its pale blue and rose colouring. A high chest, carved with camels, forms the resting-place for a marble man with a head like Dante’s, wearing a rosary over his long robes.

At first I thought I should not see more of the abbey than can be seen from the road--the circular abbot’s kitchen with pointed cap, and the broken ranges of majestic tall arches that guide the eye to the shops and dwellings of Glastonbury. While I was buying a postcard the woman of the shop reminded me of Joseph of Arimathea’s thorn, and how it blossomed at Christmas. “Did you ever see it blossoming at Christmas?” I asked. “Once,” she said, and she told me how the first winter she spent in Glastonbury was a very mild one, and she went out with her brothers for a walk on Christmas day in the afternoon. She remembered that they wore no coats. And they saw blossom on the holy thorn. After all, I did go through the turnstile to see the abbey. The high pointed arches were magnificent, the turf under them perfect. The elms stood among the ruins like noble savages among Greeks. The orchards hard by made me wish that they were blossoming. But excavations had been going on; clay was piled up and cracking in the sun, and there were tin sheds and scaffolding. I am not an archæologist, and I left it. As I was approaching the turnstile an old hawthorn within a few yards of it, against a south wall, drew my attention. For it was covered with young green leaves and with bright crimson berries almost as numerous. Going up to look more closely, I saw what was more wonderful--Blossom. Not one flower, nor one spray only, but several sprays. I had not up till now seen even blackthorn flowers, though towards the end of February I had heard of hawthorn flowering near Bradford. As this had not been picked, I conceitedly drew the conclusion that it had not been observed. Perhaps its conspicuousness had saved it. It was Lady Day. I had found the Spring in that bush of green, white, and crimson. So warm and bright was the sun, and so blue the sky, and so white the clouds, that not for a moment did the possibility of Winter returning cross my mind.

Pleasure at finding the May sent me up Wearyall Hill, instead of along the customary road straight out of Glastonbury. The hill projects from the earth like a ship a mile long, whose stern is buried in the town, its prow uplifted westward towards Bridgwater; and the road took me up as on a slanting deck, until I saw Glastonbury entire below me, all red-tiled except the ruins and the towers of St. John and St. Benedict. At the western edge the town’s two red gasometers stood among blossoming plum trees, and beyond that spread the flat land. The Quantocks, fifteen miles distant, formed but a plain wall, wooded and flat-topped, on the horizon northward.

Instead of continuing up the broad green deck of Wearyall Hill, I went along the west flank of it by road, descending through meadows and apple trees to the flat land. I crossed the river Brue immediately by Pomparles bridge, and in half a mile was in the town of Street. It is a mostly new conglomeration of houses dominated by the chimney and the squat tower of Clark’s Boot Factory; and since it is both flat and riverless, it sprawls about with a dullness approaching the sordid. A rough-barked elm tree, a hundred and fifty years old, slung on a timber carriage outside the “Street Inn,” was the chief sign of Spring here after the dust.

I was very glad to see the flat slowly swelling up at last to the long ridge of the Polden Hills, which was soon to carry my road. Walton, the next village, is a winding hamlet of thatched cottages, pink, yellow, and stone-coloured, alternating with gardens, plums in blossom, the vicarage trees and shrubbery, and the green yard of a quaint apsidal farmhouse, once the parsonage. It has a flagged pavement on the right, trodden solely by a policeman. The road was in the power of a steam-roller and its merry men, but the fowls of the old parsonage presented the only immediate signs of life. The plum blossom and new green leaves in hedge and border were spotless at Walton, its wallflowers very sweet on the untroubled air.

Thus I came clear of Street and the flat land. Outside of Walton I was in a country consisting of ups and downs rather than undulations, a grass country mainly, with orchards and hedges, elms in the hedges, pigs and sheep in the orchards. After the flat it was blessed. Perhaps it was not beautiful. It had character, but without easily definable features, and it fell an easy victim to such an accident as the absurdly dull stucco “Albion” inn, which appeared to have been designed for Pevensey or Croydon. Nevertheless, a sloping orchard of bowed apple trees sweeping the grass with their long, arched branches, and the smell of peat smoke, counterbalanced the “Albion.” At Ashcott, where a man is free to choose between very good water from a fountain on the right and the coloured drinks of the “Bell” opposite, I was two hundred feet up. I went into the church--a delightful place for a retired deity--and enjoyed this inscription on an oval tablet of marble, behind the pulpit, relating to the “remains” of Joseph Toms, who died in 1807, at the age of sixteen,--

“This youth was an apprentice to a grocer in Bristol, and as long as health permitted proved that inclination no less than duty prompted the union of strict integrity with industry. During his illness unto death he was calm, resigned, and full of hope. His late master has erected this small tribute to perpetuate the worth of so promising a character.”

My road ran along the ridge of the Poldens, and, after Ashcott, touched but a solitary house or two. One set of villages lay to the south or left, just above the levels of Sedgemoor, but below the hills. Another set lay below to the north, each with its attendant level--Shapwick Heath, Catcott Heath, Edington Heath, Chilton Moor, Woolavington Level--beyond. Shapwick I turned aside to visit. The village is scattered along a parallelogram of roads and cross lanes. An old manor house, low and screened by cedars, stands apart. The church, of clean, rough stone, with a central tower, is in a cedared green space at a corner, having roads on two sides, a farm and an apple orchard on the others; and trees have supplanted cottages on one roadside. A flagged path leads among the tombstones to the church door. One of the inscriptions that caught my eye was that in memory of Joe Whitcombe, fifty years a groom and factotum in the Strangways family at the manor house, who died at the age of sixty-four in 1892. Along with these facts are the lines,--

“An orchard in bloom in the sunny spring
To me is a wondrous lovely thing.”

Very different from Old Joe’s are the epitaphs inside the church, the work largely, I believe, of a former vicar, G. H. Templer, who built the big blank vicarage with its square, high-walled fruit garden and double range of stables, and planted cedars and cork trees. The epitaph of Lieut.-Col. Isaac Easton of the East India Company is a fair sample of this practically imperishable prose,--

“Through all the gradations of military duty, his love of Enterprise, his Valour, his Prudence, and Humanity, obtained the admiration and affection of his fellow-soldiers with the confidence and commendation of that government which knew as well to distinguish as to reward real merit. In the more familiar walks of private life, all who knew him were eager to approve and to applaud the brilliant energy of his mind and the polished affability of his manners. His heart glowed with all the sensibility which forms the genuine source of real goodness and greatness, with gratitude to his benefactor, with generosity to his friend, and liberality to mankind. The sudden loss of so many virtues and so many amiable qualities, who that enjoyed his confidence or shared his conviviality can recall without a sigh or a tear? With a constitution impaired by the severities of unremitted service and the rigours of an oppressive climate, he returned, to the fond hope of enjoying on his native soil the well-earned recompense of his honourable labours, when a premature death hurried him to his grave in 1780, at the age of 45.”

Templer’s position in prose is the same as that of Jolliffe’s encomiast in verse at Kilmersdon. The relation of his work to life at Shapwick in the eighteenth century is about as close as that of the “Arcadia” to Sidney’s age. More telling are the inscriptions of two men named Cator and Graham, who were killed during a fight with a French privateer in the Bay of Bengal in October 1800. The Bulls and Strangways have big slabs; the Bulls adding the blue and crimson of their arms to the chancel. Not less silent than the church was the street leading down towards the manor house and railway station, silent except for a transitory twitter of goldfinches. The one shop had its blinds drawn in honour of early closing day. It is a peaceful neighbourhood, where every one brews his own cider and burns the black or the inflammable ruddy peat from the moor. A corner where there are a beautiful chestnut and some waste grass provides a camping ground for gypsies from Salisbury and elsewhere; and it seemed fitting that men and boys should spend their idle hours in the lane at marbles. It is famous, if at all, since the battle of Sedgemoor, for giving a home to F. R. Havergal and an occasional resting-place to Churton Collins.

Very still, silvery, and silent was the by-road by which I rode up through ploughland back again to the ridge. Lest I had missed anything, I turned away from my destination for a mile towards Ashcott. I was for most of the distance in Loxley Wood. Primroses, as far as I could see, clustered thick round the felled oaks, the fagot heaps, and the tufts of last year’s growth on the stoles. A few stones on the right inside the wood are called Swayne’s Jumps, and it is related that a prisoner of the name, whether in Monmouth’s or Cromwell’s time I forget, escaped by means of some tremendous jumps there, taken when he was pretending to show his captors how they ought to jump.

Even without the wood this road was beautiful. For it was bordered for some way on the left by a broad grass strip planted with oaks, and not common oaks, but trees all based on small moss-gilded pedestals of their own roots above the earth, their bark and branches silver, their main limbs velveted with moss and plumed with polypody ferns. Moreover, they have filled the few gaps with young trees. On the right, after coming to the end of Loxley Wood and before the signpost of Greinton, I saw a rough waste strip of uneven breadth, partly overgrown by bushes from the hedge and by pine trees. Here ran the rank of telegraph posts, and in the grass were remains of fires. A hundred yards later, and as far as the turning of Shapwick, the waste was quite a little rushy common fed by horses.

Turning once more westward and again piercing Loxley Wood, the wayside strip there consecrated to the oak avenue ceased, but that it had once been prolonged far along the road was plain, whether it had been swallowed up by wood or meadow, or hedged off and planted with larches or apple trees, or ploughed up, or usurped by cottage and garden. Shorn thus, the road travels four miles of a ridge as straight and sharp as the Hog’s Back. It was delicious easy riding, with no company but that of a linnet muttering sweetly in the new-green larches, and a blackbird or two hurrying and spluttering under the hedge.

All the country on either hand was subject to my eyes. Before me the red disc of the sun was low, its nether half obliterated by a long, misty cloud. The levels on my right, and their dark, moss-like corrugations, were misted over, not so densely that a white river of train smoke could not be seen flowing through it; and Brent Knoll far off towered over it like an islet of crag, dark and distinct; nor was the prostrate mass of Brean Down invisible on the seaward side of Brent Knoll. Not a sound emerged from that side beyond the bleat of a few lambs. On the left was the misty country of Athelney, and a solitary dark tower raised well above the midst of the level. The most delicate scene of all my journey was nearer. The Poldens have on this side several foothills, and at the turning to Righton’s Grave one of these confronted me; I had it in full view for a mile and could hardly look at anything else. This was Ball Hill. It is a smooth island lifted up out of an ever so faintly undulating land of hedged meadows and sparse elm trees. It rose very gradually, parallel to my road and about half a mile from it, so as to make a long, nascent curve, up to a comb of trees; and its flank was divided downwards and lengthwise amongst rosy ploughland and pale green corn in large hedgeless squares and oblongs, beautifully contrasted in size and colour. Next to Ball Hill is another one, as distinct, but steeper and wooded, called Pendon Hill. In the dip between the two lay the church tower and cottages of Stawell, and a dim orchard rose behind them with trees that were like smoke. Though the lines of these hills and their decorated slopes are definitely beautiful, during the dusk on that silver road in the first Spring innocence they were a miraculous birth, to match the Spring innocence and the tranquillity of the dusk as I slid quietly on that road of silver.

Then came two shams. The first was a towered residence close to the road, with Gothic features. The second, black against the sky, three miles ahead, was a tower and many ruinous arches on top of the wooded hill at Knowle. It is hard to show how not very experienced eyes begin to suspect a sham of this sort. But they did, and yet were able to dally a little with the kind of feeling which the real thing would have produced. For, when I saw the ruins most clearly, at the turn to Woolavington, Highbridge, and Burnham, twilight was half spent.

The road was descending. Bridgwater’s tower, spire, and chimneys, and smoke mingling with trees, were visible down on the left, and past them the dim Quantocks fading down to the sea. I was soon at the level of the railway, and Bawdrip behind the embankment showed me a pretty jumble of roofs, chimneys, a church tower, and a green thorn tree over the rim. The high slope of Knowle and its rookery beeches--where the ruin is--hung upon the right very darkly over the small pale “Knowle Inn” and the white scattered blackthorn blossom and myself slipping by. The road went on to Puriton and Pawlett, and down it under the trees two lovers were walking slowly, but opposite Knowle I had to turn sharp to the left. Those green trees in the last of the twilight seemed exceptionally benign. After the turning I immediately crossed the deep-cut King’s Sedgemoor drain--with a flowering orchard betwixt it and the road I had left--and in a few yards the single line of the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway. Two miles of flat field and white-painted orchard, and I was in a street of flat, dull, brick cottages and foul smoke, but possessing an extraordinarily haughty white hart chained over an inn porch of that name. Then the river Parrett; and a dark ship drawn up under the line of tall inns and stores with glimmering windows. I crossed the bridge and walked up Corn Hill between the shops to where the roads fork, one for Taunton, one for Minehead, to left and right of Robert Blake’s statue and the pillared dome of the market. I took the Minehead road, the right-hand one, past the banks, the post office, the “Royal Clarence” hotel, and by half-past seven I was eating supper, listening to children outside in the still, dark street, laughing, chattering, teasing, disputing. I read a page or two of the “History of Prince Lee Boo,” and fell asleep.

IX.

BRIDGWATER TO THE SEA.

The night at Bridgwater was still. I heard little after ten except the clear deep bells of St. Mary’s telling the quarters. They woke me with the first light, and I was glad to be out of the hotel early because the three other guests (I think, commercial travellers) not only did not talk--which may have been a blessing--but took no notice of “Good evening” or “Good morning.” It was a clean, new, and unfriendly place, that caused a sensation as of having slept in linoleum. The charge for supper, bed, and breakfast was the usual one, a few pence over four shillings.

I wandered about the western half of the town. This being built on a slight hill above the river, was older and better worth looking at than the flat eastern half, though it was lacking in trees, as may be guessed from the fact that some rooks had had to nest in horse-chestnut trees, which they avoid if possible. Castle Street is the pleasantest in the town, a wide, straight old street of three-storey brick houses, rising almost imperceptibly away from the quay. The houses, all private, have round-topped windows and are flat-fronted, except for two at the bottom which have bays. Across the upper end a big, sunlit, ivied house, taller than the others and of mellower brick, with a chestnut tree, projects somewhat, and on the pavement below it is a red pillar box.

The quay itself is good enough to recall Bideford. The river is straight for a distance, and separated from the quayside buildings only by the roadway. These buildings, ship-brokers’ and contractors’, port authority’s and customs and excise offices, a steam sawmill, and the “Fountain,” “Dolphin,” and “King’s Head,” are plain enough, mostly with tall flat fronts with scant lettering and no decoration, all in a block, looking over at the low level of the Castle Field north-eastward, where cattle grazed in the neighbourhood of chimney-stacks and railway signals. The _Arthur_ was waiting for a cargo. The _Emma_ was unloading coal. But for the rest the quay was quiet, and a long greyhound lay stretched out across the roadway, every inch of him content in the warm sun.

The next best thing to the quay was the broad sandstone Church of St. Mary and its tall spire, standing on a daisied, cropped turf among thorns and a few tombstones, and walled in on three sides by houses, shops, and the “White Lion” and “Golden Ball.” The walls inside provide recesses for many tombs. The most memorable tomb in the church is that of an Irish soldier named Kingsmill. He is a fine fellow, albeit of stone, leaning on his elbow and looking at the world or nothing as if satisfied with his position. He “sleeps well”--no man, I should say, better. This and his features reminded me of a man still living, a man of brawn and spirit, a despiser of beastly foreigners, and a good sleeper. I have seen him looking like old Kingsmill, with this one difference--that when he was in that stage of wakingness he had a cigarette between his lips invariably. He awoke, smiling at the goodness of sleep and of the world, and lay back, whoever called him, to sleep again. Resurrected at length, or partly so, he would sigh, but not in sorrow, and then swear, and turn over to reach a cigarette from beside the bed. The lighted cigarette regilded the world: he envied no man, any more than Kingsmill does, and certainly no woman. The cigarette, though enchanted, came to an end, even so; and he did what Kingsmill perhaps never did, took a cold bath, but in a manner which Kingsmill would have admired. The bath being filled to within an inch or two of overflowing, he let himself slowly in until he was completely under water, where he lay in a state apparently of bliss lasting many seconds, for beneficent providence had ordained that he should be almost as much aquatic as he was earthly, worldly, and territorial. Then out he came like Mars rising from the foam. After drying himself for ten minutes he lit another cigarette and rambled about his room without artificial covering until he had smoked it. Next he began dressing, an operation not to be described in my style in less than two volumes octavo, and worthy of something incomparably more godlike, for he was as a god and his dressing was godlike.... After Kingsmill’s effigy the chief spectacle of St. Mary’s is the unexpected, big Italianate picture of Christ’s descent from the cross, which forms an altar-piece. The story is that it was taken from a Spanish vessel--some add that it was one of the Great Armada; that it reached Bridgwater after a long seclusion at Plymouth, and was claimed by Plymouth when Bridgwater was seen to have it, but that Bridgwater kept it in a packing case for two years.

With the quay and the church ranks the statue of Robert Blake, if only for the inscription,--

“Born in this town, 1598.
Died at sea, 1657.”

I am told that there is also a passage quoted from one Edmund Spencer, but I did not see it; nor is it so great an error as the inscription about Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and they have less time in Bridgwater market-place than in Salisbury Cathedral for literary accuracy.

It was half-past ten on a beautiful morning when I rode out of the town by a very suburban suburb of villas, elms, and a cemetery. My road carried me at first along a low ridge, so that over the stone walls I looked down east and northward to the vale of the Parrett; a misty, not quite flat expanse of green, alternating with reddish and already crumbling ploughland, which was interrupted a mile away by the red walls, elms, and orchard of Chilton Trinity, and farther off, by the pale church tower of Cannington. Two horses were drawing a scarifier across the furrows of a field by the roadside. On my left or westward I looked beyond a more broken country, with white linen blowing on cottage garden bushes, to the dim Quantocks still far off. The sun was hot, but the wind blew from behind me, and the dust was not an offence when a motor car was not passing me. A chiff-chaff was singing at Wembdon. Larks crowded their songs into a maze in every quarter. Overhead a single telegraph wire sizzled.

Three miles out of Bridgwater my road had dropped to the level, and proceeded over it to Cannington, but instead of sticking to it I turned at a smithy on my left into a by-road, which wound between low hedges of thorn and maple mounted either on ivied walls or on banks covered with celandines. It passed Bradley Green’s few cottages, the “Malt Shovel” inn, an oak copse with a chiff-chaff in it, and here a robin on a wall, and there a linnet on a thorn tip, in a slightly up and down country of grass, ploughland, and orchard. In a mile the road twisted at right angles to cross the Cannington brook and rejoin the main road; and at this angle, by a green bowered lane, was a stone house and chapel in one. This was Blackmoor Manor Farm, a group that no longer has anything stately or sacred save what it owes to its antiquity and continuous human occupation.

The main road, when I rejoined it, was rising once more between banks of gorse. So bright was the blossom of the gorse that its branches were shadowy and nearly invisible in the brightness. For the sun was now as warm as ever it need be for a man who can move himself from place to place. On both hands the undulating land was warm and misty, but particularly on the right. There, as I approached Swang Farm, at the third milestone from Nether Stowey, a hill, almost as graceful as Ball Hill near Stawell, rose parallel to the road, its long-curving ridge about a third of a mile away. Its smooth flank was apportioned by hedgerows and a few elms among bare ploughland and young corn above, and drabby grass with sheep on it below. Near by, on the other side, was another such hill, a nameless one above Halsey Cross Farm, which I first took notice of when it was cut in two perpendicularly by the signpost pointing to Spaxton. It was but a blunt, conical hillside of green corn, rosy ploughland, sheep-fed pasture, and a few elms in the partitions; and behind it the dim Quantocks. Between these two hills, at a spot where the road twists again at right angles, a brick summer-house perched on the walled roadside bank, at the very corner. Here, as I heard, a few generations ago, ladies from the house near by used to sit to watch for the coaches. I was now two hundred feet up in the foothills of the Quantocks. Three or four miles in front bulked the moorlands of the main ridge.

Nether Stowey begins with a church and a farm and farmyard in a group. Then follows a street of cottages without front gardens, dominated by a smooth green “castle” rampart a third of a mile away. The street ends in a “First and Last Inn” on one side, and a cottage on the other, announced as formerly Coleridge’s by an inscription and a stone wreath of dull reddish brown. Altogether Nether Stowey offered no temptations to be compared with those of the road leading out of it. Immediately outside the village it was walled by deep banks, and on these grew arum, celandine, and nettle, with bushes of new-leaved blackthorn and spindle. Here I saw the first starry, white stitchworts or milkmaids. And henceforward I was always walking steeply up or steeply down one of the medley of lesser hills. Below on the right was chiefly red ploughland; above on the left wilder and wilder heights of sheep-fed moorland. The road was visible ahead, looping half way up the slopes.

Honeysuckle ramped on the banks of the deep-worn road in such profusion as I had never before seen. The sky had clouded softly, and the sun-warmed misty woods of the coombs, the noise of slender waters threading them, the exuberant young herbage, the pure flowers such as stitchwort and the pink and “silver white” cuckoo flowers, but above all the abounding honeysuckle, produced an effect of wildness and richness, purity and softness, so vivid that the association of Nether Stowey was hardly needed to summon up Coleridge. The mere imagination of what these banks would be like when the honeysuckle was in flower was enough to suggest the poet. I became fantastic, and said to myself that the honeysuckle was worthy to provide the honeydew for nourishing his genius; even that its magic might have touched that genius to life--which is absurd. And yet magic alone could have led Coleridge safely through the style of his age, the style of the author of Jolliffe’s epitaph at Kilmersdon, the style of Stephen Duck and his benefactors, the style of his own boyish effusions, where he personified Misfortune, Love, Wisdom, Virtue, Fortune, and Content with the aid of capitals. He fell again when weary into lines like,--

“Thro’ vales irriguous, and thro’ green retreats;”

he rose and fell once more, until finally the conventions had either slipped away or been adopted or subdued. Perhaps it was not in vain, or so fatuous as it seems to us, that he personified, like any lady or gentleman of the day,--

“The hideous offspring of Disease,
Swoln Dropsy ignorant of Rest,
And Fever garb’d in scarlet vest;
Consumption driving the quick hearse,
And Gout that howls the frequent curse;
With Apoplex of heavy head
That surely aims his dart of lead.”

Whether we can follow him or not into intimacy with those “beings of higher class than man,” Fire, Famine, Slaughter, Woes, and Young-eyed Joys, the more or less than fleshly creatures of his later poems may owe something to that early dressing up, as well as to the honeydew-fed raptures of Nether Stowey.

Some of the early poems reveal underneath the dismal tawdry vesture of contemporary diction the beginnings of what we now know as Coleridge. It is to be seen in the sonnet, “To the Autumnal Moon,” written in 1788 when he was sixteen, which begins,--

“Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night,
Mother of Wildly-working visions hail;”

and then again more subtly in 1795, when he is looking for a Pantisocratic dell,--

“Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,
And dancing to the moonlight roundelay,
The Wizard Passions weave an holy spell” ...

though it is impossible to say that the collocation of calm and careless, wizard and holy, would have arrested us had Coleridge made no advance from it, had he remained a minor poet. The combination of mild and wild is a characteristic one, partly instinctive, partly an intellectual desire, as he shows by speaking of a “soft impassioned voice, correctly wild.” The two come quaintly together in his image of,--

“Affection meek
(Her bosom bare, and wildly pale her cheek),”

and nobly in the picture of Joan of Arc,--

“Bold her mien,
And like a haughty huntress of the woods
She moved: yet sure she was a gentle maid.”

Coleridge loved equally mildness and wildness, as I saw them on the one hand in the warm red fields, the gorse smouldering with bloom, the soft delicious greenery of the banks; and on the other hand in the stag’s home, the dark, bleak ridges of heather or pine, the deep-carved coombs. Mildness, meekness, gentleness, softness, made appeals both sensuous and spiritual to the poet’s chaste and voluptuous affections and to something homely in him, while his spirituality, responding to the wildness, branched forth into metaphysics and natural magic. Some time passed before the combining was complete. There was, for example, a tendency to _naiveté_ and plainness, to the uninspired accuracy of “pinky-silver skin” (of a birch tree), and to the matter of fact--

“The Mariners gave it biscuit worms--”

which he cut out of “The Ancient Mariner.” He cut out of “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” a phrase informing us that he was kept prisoner by a burn. At first he called “the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens” the “dear old ballad,” and the lines,--

“Yon crescent Moon is fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue”

were followed by--

“A boat becalm’d, a lovely sky-canoe”

It was natural to him at first to address Wordsworth as

“O Friend! O Teacher! God’s great gift to me!”

and it became natural to him to cut out the last phrase. Formerly Geraldine said to Christabel, “I’m better now”; and instead of lying entranced she lay “in fits.” The poem still includes the phrase describing Christabel’s eyes,--

“Each about to have a tear;”

while “Frost at Midnight” retains the allusion to the “fluttering stranger” in the fire, the filmy blue flame, as a note instructs us, “supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend.” There is, too, a whole class of homely poems, on receiving the news of his child’s birth, on being warned not to bathe in the sea: “God be with thee, gladsome Ocean,” it begins.

The mildness, meekness, gentleness, beloved of Coleridge’s tender and effusive nature, appear with such diverse company as in “Poverty’s meek woe,” “mild and manliest melancholy,” and “mild moon-mellow’d foliage,” and repeated with variations four times in one verse of the lines written at Shurton Bars, near Bridgwater,--

“I felt it prompt the tender Dream,
When slowly sank the Day’s last gleam;
You rous’d each gentler sense,
As sighing o’er the Blossom’s bloom
Meek Evening wakes its soft perfume
With viewless influence.”

Sometimes the mildness expands to conscious luxury, as in the poem “Composed during Illness, and in Absence,” beginning,--

“Dim Hour, that sleep’st on pillowing clouds afar,
O rise and yoke the Turtles to thy car!
Bend o’er the traces, blame each lingering Dove,
And give me to the bosom of my Love!
My gentle Love, caressing and carest,
With heaving heart shall carol me to rest!
Shed the warm tear-drop from her smiling eyes--
Lull with fond woe, and medicine me with sighs,
While finely-flushing float her kisses meek,
Like melted rubies o’er my pallid cheek.”

Here he is half laughing at his own tendency, but he had only transitory thoughts of checking it. In “Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement,” he speaks of dreaming,--

“On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart
With feelings all too delicate for use.”

He is in revolt against the tendency, but only with his intellect. The honeysuckle intoxicates his heart too surely under the “indulgent skies” of that summer with Wordsworth.

A marked variety of his luxury is disclosed by his many references to the maiden’s bosom and the swelling of it with emotion. I choose the following example because it includes so much that is characteristic besides,--

“Oft will I tell thee, Minstrel of the Moon,
‘Most musical, most melancholy’ Bird!
That all thy soft diversities of tune,
Tho’ sweeter far than the delicious airs
That vibrate from a white-armed Lady’s harp,
What time the languishment of lonely love
Melts in her eye, and heaves her breast of snow,
Are not so sweet as is the voice of her,
My Sara--best beloved of human kind!
When breathing the pure soul of tenderness,
She thrills me with the Husband’s promised name!”

This quality is more effective in company with the other quality and relieved by it. I mean the quality which responds to ghostliness and to the wildness of Nature. “The Keepsake” has it perfect, in this picture of a girl,--

“In the cool morning twilight, early waked
By her full bosom’s joyous restlessness,
Softly she rose, and lightly stole along,
Down the slope coppice to the woodbine bower,
Whose rich flowers, swinging in the morning breeze,
Over their dim, fast-moving shadows hung,
Making a quiet image of disquiet
In the smooth, scarcely-moving river-pool.”

It is perfect again, differently combined, in part of “The Æolian Harp,”--

“The long sequacious notes
Over delicious surges sink and rise,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam’d wing!”

The work of this best period, the Quantock sojourn, shows this uniting of richness and delicacy, of sweetness and freshness, of sensuousness and wildness, of spirit and sense, irresistibly intruding on “Religious Musings,” as here,--

“When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massy gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies
And odours snatched from beds of Amaranth,
And they, that from the crystal river of life
Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales;”

or, as in “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner,” both written in the Quantocks, raised again and again to a peculiar harmony from the innermost parts of our poetry’s holy of holies.

Except for Coleridge, I had the road to myself between Nether Stowey and Holford. Sheep were feeding on some of the slopes, and in one coomb woodmen were trimming cordwood among prostrate regiments of oak trees; but these eaters of grass, or of bread and cheese and bacon, were ghosts by comparison with the man who wrote “The Ancient Mariner;” the very hills, their chasms and processions of beeches, were made unforgettable by his May opium dream of--

“That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.”

Then the sea. At a mile past Holford the road bent sharp to the left and west, to get between the sea and the Quantocks. A sign-board pointed to the right to Stringston’s red-roofed white church. On the left two converging hillsides framed a wedge of sea, divided into parallel bands of gray and blue. It came as if it were a reward, an achievement, the unsuspected aim of my meanderings. A long drift of smoke lay over it from the seaward edge of the hills. The bottom of the wedge held the village of Kilve, and, a little apart, the cube of Kilve Court. As if to a goal I raced downhill to Kilve and its brook.

I had lunch at the “Hood Arms,” and made up my mind to stay there for that night. Two o’clock had not long passed when I left the inn and the main road and went north to Kilve Church and the sea. The by-road accompanied the brook, and skirted its apple orchards and tall poplars wagging myriads of wine-red catkins. Having passed a mill, a farm, and a cottage or two, the road took me to the church and its big, short-boughed yew tree, and became a farm track only. The small towered church is a poor place, clean and newly repointed outside, the arches filled in which had apparently communicated with a side chapel, and all its possible crosses lacking. Inside it has a cheap rickety gallery at the tower end, and was being stripped of its plaster to show the wood carving at the cornice. Tablets hang on the wall in memory of people named Cunditt and Sweeting, and of Norah Muriel Sweet-Escott, aged twenty, who died in South Africa of yellow fever. As I was leaving the church, entered the Other Man. Laughing nervously at the encounter, he explained that he had come to Kilve to see if it really had a weather-cock. He reminded me of Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers,” where the poet pesters his son of five to give his reason for preferring Liswyn to Kilve, until, a broad, gilded vane catching his eye, the child gives the inspired answer,--

“At Kilve there is no weather-cock;
And that’s the reason why.”

“There _is_ no weather-cock,” said the Other Man, laughing a little more freely and disappearing for the last time. A white-fronted farm-house, the heavily ivy-mantled ruin of a chantry adjacent, green mounds of long submerged masonry, and a big knobby poplar with wine-red catkins, are next neighbours to the church, a stone’s throw from the churchyard. The chantry has come to this by several stages. Part of it, for example, has been used as a dwelling, and adapted to the purpose by makeshift methods, which now add a sordid, contumelious element to the ruins. Fowls pecked about the chambers in the dust, in the bramble, ivy, and nettles. The big poplar stands, or, rather, reclines just off the ground, between the chantry and the brook. The running water led me seaward, through a tangled thicket of scrub oak, gorse, and bramble, filled in with teasel and burdock, and through a small marshy flag-bed. A low cliff, pierced by the stream, separates the beach from the rough, undulating, briery pasture. This cliff of sand and rock gave me shelter from the wind; the flat gray pebbles gave me a seat; and I looked out to sea.

A ragged sky hung threatening over a sea that was placid but corrugated and of the colour of slate, having a margin of black at the horizon. The water was hardly distinguishable, save by its motion, from the broad beach of gray pools, blackened pebbles, and low rock edges. Only the most fleeting and narrow lights fell upon the expanse, now on a solitary sail, now on the pale lighthouse of Flat Holm far out. Between this island, which just broke the surface of the sea on the left, and Brean Down, the last outpost of the mainland on the right, the cloudy pile of Steep Holm towered up.

KILVE.

“A ragged sky hung threatening over a sea that was placid but corrugated, and of the colour of slate, save a margin of black at the horizon.”]

Not even the sea could altogether detain the eyes from the land scene westward; for there massed and jostled themselves together the main eminences of Exmoor, of a uniform gray, soft and unmoulded, that was lost from time to time either in the wild, hurrying, and fitfully gleaming sky, or in tawny smoke rolling low down from the Quantocks seaward. Hardly less sublime was the long, clear-cut ridge between me and Exmoor, low but precipitous, projecting into the sea a mile or two distant, and bearing a dark church tower like a horn. The fire on the Quantocks now burnt scarlet.

The Kilve brook on my left was noisily twisting over the pebbles and the slanting, gray, mossy-weeded rock down to the sea, tossing up a light but unceasing spray; and pied wagtails flitted from the fresh water to the salt over the rocks. But what I was most glad to see was the meadow pipit. Feebly, like a minor lark, and silently, he launched himself twenty or thirty feet up from the wet, dark rock; then, with wings uplifted and body curved to a keel like a crescent, he descended slantwise, singing the most passionate and thrilling-sweet of all songs that “o’er inform this tenement of clay” until he alighted. Before one had finished another began, and not a moment was the song silenced. Here, too, and among the briers of the rough pasture behind the cliff, the wheatear, as clean as a star, flirted his tail and showed his whiteness.

Over Exmoor storm and sun quarrelled in the cauldron, but here only one drop fell on each dry, warm pebble and vanished. The wind slackened; the heat grew; the warm, soft gray sky closed in and imprisoned the air which the earth breathed. It was pleasant to get hot out of doors in March. It was pleasant to bicycle up out of Kilve and away west on the Minehead road, which carried me well up round the end of the Quantocks. I took the second turning seaward for East Quantoxhead. The cottage gardens in this lane were rich in wallflowers, daffodils, and jonquils; and japonica was blood-red on the walls. Still better were the hedges past the few cottages, because they were green entirely, and were the first I had seen so in that spring. Nor were they mere thorn or elder hedges, but interwoven elm, thorn, brier, and elder, all with their young leaves expanded. But the heat was already great, and I was going downhill too much not to reflect that I should have to come up again. The pale Court House and contiguous church of East Quantoxhead, homes of the living and of the dead Luttrells for many centuries, as men go, were still a quarter of a mile away across a wide meadow with oak trees, and I never got nearer. I turned instead along a hedged, stony lane upon the left. It soon created a suspicion that I ought not to have taken it. I stuck to it, however, uphill and then precipitously down under untrimmed hedges, where it was no better than a river bed of mud and stones, until it ceased to exist, having emerged into the fields which it served. As I refused to return, I had to ascend along the edges of several ploughed fields and among sheepfolds and through gateways before I recovered the main road at about the sixth milestone from Nether Stowey. The heat, the climbing with a bicycle, and, above all, the useless, indignant impatience of annoyance, tired me; yet I rode on westward. The gorse was beautiful on the hills above, and in the old sandstone quarries beside the road. The sides of these quarries were bearded with it, their floors were carpeted with gilt moss, out of which rose up straight young larch trees in freshest green. At the head of a deep coomb of oak and foxglove the rock had been cut away for the widening of the road, and from the newly exposed sandstone hundreds of the rough rosettes of foxglove had broken forth; but a smooth slab had been devoted to an advertisement of somebody’s flock of long-woolled Devon sheep.