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Discovering Diverse Content Through
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Way, therefore, had been deserted and a new descent made,
curving like an S; yet, even so, bold enough for a high speed to be
attained before we got down to the “George” and the loose-
clustered houses of Nettlebridge. The opposite ascent was also in an
S. At the top of it we sat on a wall by the larches of Horridge Wood,
and looked back and down. The valley was broad and destitute of
trees. Gorse scrambled over its sides. Ducks fed across the turf at
the bottom. Straight down the other side came the Fosse Way,
denoted by its hedges, and round its crossing of the brook was
gathered half of Nettlebridge. The rough, open valley, the running
water, the brookside cluster of stone cottages, reminded me of
Pembrokeshire. There is no church.
From that bleak and yet pleasant scene I turned with admiration
to a farm-house on the other side of the road. It stood well above
the road, and the stone wall enclosing its farm-yard followed the
irregular crown of the steep slope. This plain stone house, darkened,
I think, by a sycamore, and standing high, solitary, and gloomy,
above Nettlebridge, seemed to me a house of houses. If I could
draw, I would draw this and call it “A House.” For it had all the spirit
of a house, farm, and fortress in one, grim without bellicosity,
tranquil, but not pampered.
Presently, at Oak Hill, we were well up on the main northern
slope of the Mendips. The “Oak Hill” inn, a good inn, hangs out its
name on a horizontal bar, ending in a gilded oak leaf and acorn. I
had lunch there once of the best possible fat bacon and bread fried
in the fat, for a shilling; and for nothing, the company of a citizen of
Wells, a hearty, strong-voiced man, who read the Standard over a
beef-steak, a pint of cider, and a good deal of cheese, and at
intervals instructed me on the roads of the Mendips, the scenery, the
celebrated places, and also praised his city and praised the stout of
Oak Hill. Then he smacked his lips, pressed his bowler tight down on
his head, and drove off towards Leigh upon Mendip. I was sorry not
to have arrived at a better hour this time. The village is no more
than the inn, the brewery, and a few cottages, and a shop or two, in
one of which there was a pretty show of horse ornaments of brass
among the saddlery. I almost counted these ornaments, crescents,
stars, and bosses, as flowers of Spring, so clearly did I recall their
May-day flashing in former years. It was darkening, or at least
saddening, as we rode out of Oak Hill along the edge of a park
which was notable for much-twisted, dark sycamores on roots
accumulated above-ground like pedestals. At the far side gleamed
the water, I imagine, of the brewery reservoir. We reached the main
ridge road of the Mendips soon after this, and crossed it at a point
about nine hundred feet high. Shepton is five hundred feet lower,
and but two miles distant; so that we glided down somewhat like
gods, having for domain an expanse that ended in the mass of
Selwood Forest twelve miles to our left, level-topped, huge, and dim,
under a cloudy sky. Unprepared as I was, I expected to meet my
end in the steep conclusion of this descent, which was through
narrow streets; and my brakes were bad. On the other hand,
nothing troubled the godlikeness of my companion. In the rush at
twenty-five miles an hour he sang, as if it had been a hymn of the
new Paganism, a ribald song beginning,—

“As I was going to Salisbury upon a Summer’s day.”

When he had done he shouted across at me, “I would rather have

written that song than take Quebec.”
The Other Man would not stay in Shepton Mallet. He was very
angry with Shepton. He called it a godless place, and I laughed,
supposing he lamented the lack of Apollo or Dionysus or Aphrodite;
but he justified the word by relating his first visit to the church. The
bell was ringing. It was five minutes to eleven on a Wednesday, a
day of north-east wind, in February. With him entered a clergyman,
and except for the old bell-ringer, the church was empty. When the
bells ceased at eleven it was still empty. The clergyman and the bell-
ringer mumbled together, the old man saying, “You see, nobody has
come.” No service was held; the Other Man and the bell-ringer were
unworthy. The clergyman struggled up the road against the north-
east wind. “And look there,” exclaimed the Other Man, as we turned
out of the long, narrow street of shops into Church Lane, mediæval-
looking and narrower, “look there,” he exclaimed, pointing to the
remains of a blue election poster on a wall, where these words
survived,—
“Foreigners tax us; let us tax them.”
“Why,” said he, “it is not even in the Bible,” and with this he
mounted and rode on toward Wells. The church tower was framed
by the end walls of Church Lane, a handsome, tall tower with a
pointed cap to it, and a worn statue of the Virgin and two other
figures over the door. Immediately inside the door are tablets to
seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Barnards and Strodes
of Down Hill, one bearing the inscription,—

“Urna tenet cineres

Animam deus.”

The truth of it sounded like a copper gong in that twilight

silence. I went on among the ashes. Two window ledges, one
looking east, one west, form couches for stone effigies. That in the
eastward ledge, with his hand across the shield on his breast, looked
as if happily sleeping; the other had lost an arm, and was not happy.
I re-entered the main street by a side street broad enough for a
market-place. Here are some of the inns, and at the edge of the
pavement a row of fixed wooden shambles. The market cross stands
at the turn. It is a stone canopy, supported by six pillars in a circle,
and one central pillar surrounded by two stone steps or seats, and
the south side wears a dial, dated 1841. To know the yards of the
“Red Lion,” “George,” and “Bunch of Grapes,” and all the lanes and
high-walled passages between Shepton and the prison, would be a
task (for the first ten years of life) very cheerful to look back upon,
and it would be difficult to invent anything more amusing and
ingenious, as it would be impossible to invent anything prettier than
the ivy, the ivy-leaved toadflax, and that kidney-leafed cressy white
flower, growing on the walls of the passages. There are no public
lights in Shepton, so that away from the shop lamps all now was
dark in the side streets and edges of the town. The stone prison and
all its apertures, like a great wasps’ nest, was a punishment to look
at in the darkness. But night added grandeur to the many round
arches of the viaduct on which the railway strides across the valley.
At this, a sort of boundary to Shepton upon the east, I turned back,
and ended the day at a temperance hotel. Its plain and not old-
looking exterior, ordinary bar and public room, suggested nothing of
the ancientness within. I found a good fire and peace in the
company of a man who studied Bradshaw. With the aid of maps I
travelled my road again, dwelling chiefly on Tellisford, its white
bridge over the Frome, the ruined mill and cottage, the round tower
of Vaggs Hill Farm, and the distinct green valley which enclosed
them, and after this, the Nettlebridge valley and the dark house
above it.
 VIII.
SHEPTON MALLET TO BRIDGWATER.

Day opened cold, dull, and windy in Shepton Mallet. After paying the
usual bill of about four shillings for supper, bed, and breakfast, I
tried to get into the churchyard again; but it was locked, and I set
out for Wells. The road led me past the principal edifice in Shepton
on the west side, as the prison is on the east—the Anglo-Bavarian
Brewery, which is also the highest in position. It is a plain stone
heap and a tubular chimney-stack of brick. A lover of size or of beer
at any price might love it, but no one else. I rode from it in whirls of
dust down to Bowlish and into the valley of the Sheppey. To within a
mile of Wells I was to have this little river always with me and
several times under me. Telegraph posts also accompanied the road.
It was a delightful exit; the brewery was behind me, a rookery
before me in the beech trees of the outskirts. On both hands grassy
banks rose up steeply. The left one, when the rookery was passed,
was topped with single thorn trees, and pigs and chickens did their
duty and their pleasure among the pollard ashes below. Most of the
cottages of Bowlish are on the other side, their gardens reaching
down in front of them to the stream, their straggling orchards of
crooked apple trees behind within walls of ivy-covered stone. Where
Bowlish becomes Darshill, the cottages are concentrated round a big
square silk-mill and its mill pond beside the road. Up in the high
windows could be seen the backs or faces of girls at work. All this is
on the right, at the foot of the slope. The left bank being steeper, is
either clothed in a wood of ivied oaks, or its ridgy turf and scattering
of elms and ash trees are seldom interrupted by houses. A sewage
farm and a farmhouse ruined by it take up part of the lower slope
for some way past the silk-mill: a wood of oak and pine invades
them irregularly from above. Then on both hands the valley does
without houses. The left side is a low, steep thicket rising from the
stream, which spreads out here into a sedgy pool before a weir, and
was at this moment bordered by sheaves of silver-catkined sallow,
fresh-cut. But the right side became high and precipitous, mostly
bare at first, then hanging before me a rocky barrier thinly populated
by oaks. This compelled the road to twist round it in a shadowy
trough. In fact, so much has the road to twist that a traveller coming
from the other direction would prepare himself for scaling the
barrier, not dreaming that he could slink in comfort round that wild
obstacle.
Out of this crooked coomb I emerged into dust whirls and
sunshine. The village of Crosscombe was but a little way ahead, a
long village of old stone cottages and slightly larger houses, and two
mills pounding away. The river running among stones sounds all
through it. At the bridge, where it foams over the five steps of a
weir, a drinking fountain is somewhat complicated by the inscription:
“If thou knewest the gift of God, thou wouldest have asked of Him,
and He would have given thee living water.” At the “Rose and
Crown,” outside which is a cross, or rather a knobbed pillar
surmounting some worn steps, I branched up a steep lane to St.
Mary’s Church. It has a spire instead of a tower, and an image of the
Virgin at the base of it. Its broad-tailed weather-cock flashed so in
the sun as to be all but invisible. The grass was at its greenest, the
daisies at their whitest, in the churchyard, under the black cypress
wedges, where lies something or other of many a Chedzoy, Perry,
Hare, Hodges, and Pike. The upper side is bounded by a good
ancient wall, cloaked in ivy and tufted with yellow wallflower.
Another chiffchaff was singing here. While I was inside the building,
a girl hung about, rattling the keys expectantly (but no more
persuasively than the Titanic roadsters told their tale at Erlestoke),
while I walked among the dark pews and choir stalls of carven oak,
and looked at the tablets of the Hares and Pippets, great Clothiers of
this country, and the brass of Mr. William Bisse, and his nine
daughters and nine sons, and Mrs. Bisse, in the costume of 1625.
The church has a substantial business flavour belonging to the days
when it was so little known as to be beyond dispute that blessed are
the rich, for they do inherit this world and probably the next. A few
yards higher up the slope from the church is a Baptist chapel and a
cottage in one, evidently adapted with small skill or expense from a
church building older than the sect. Nothing divided the vegetable
garden of the cottage from the graveyard of the chapel, and it
looked as if the people of Crosscombe were ill content to raise
merely violets from the ashes of their friends.
CROSSCOMBE.
 The road climbed away from Crosscombe up the left wall of the
valley, which is given a mountainous expression by the naked rock
protruding both at the ridge and on the slope of Dulcote Hill. The
river runs parallel on the right beneath, and along its farther bank
the church and cottages of Dinder in a string; and the sole noise
arising from Dinder was that of rooks. At a turning overshadowed by
trees, at Dulcote, a path travels straight through green meadows to
Wells, and to the three towers of the cathedral at the foot of a
horizontal terrace-like spur of oak, pine, and beech, that juts out
from the main line of Mendip leftwards or southwards. The river,
which follows that main line up to this spot, now quits it, and follows
the receding left wall of its valley, and consequently my road had its
company no longer. My way lay upward and over the spur. The white
footpath was to be seen going comfortably below on the left through
parklike meadows, and beyond it, the pudding-shaped Hay Hill and
Ben Knowle Hill, and the misty dome of Glastonbury Tor farther off.
By ten o’clock I was in the cathedral, and saw the painted dwarf
up on the wall kick the bell ten times with his heel, and the knights
race round and round opposite ways, clashing together ten times,
while their attendant squires rode in silence; and I heard the
remote, monotonous priest’s voice in the Benedicite, and the deep
and the high responses of men and boys. Up there in the transepts
and choir chapels are many rich tombs, and recumbent figures
overarched by stone fretwork; but the first and lasting impression is
of the clean spaciousness of the aisles and nave, clear of all tombs
and tablets.
But clear and clean as was the cathedral, the outer air was
clearer and cleaner. The oblong green, walled in on three sides by
homely houses, and by the rich towered west front on the fourth,
echoed gently with the typical cathedral music, that of the mowing-
machine, destroying grass and daisies innumerable, with a tone
which the sun made like a grasshopper’s, not out of harmony with
the song of a chaffinch asseverating whatever it is he asseverates
from one of the bordering lime trees. The market-place, too, was
warm; the yellowish and grayish and bluish walls, the windows of all
shapes and all sizes, and the water of the central fountain, answered
the sun.
Two gateways lead out of one side of the market-place to the
cathedral and the palace grounds. Taking the right-hand one, I came
to the palace, and the moat that flows along one side, between a
high wall climbed by fruit trees and ivy, and a walk lined with old
pollard elms. Rooks inhabited the elm tops, and swans the water.
Rooks are essential to a cathedral anywhere, but Wells is perfected
by swans. On the warm palace roof behind the wall—a roof
smouldering mellow in the sun—pigeons lay still ecclesiastically.
Sometimes one cooed sleepily, as if to seal it canonical that silence is
better; the rooks cawed; the water foamed down into the moat at
one end between bowery walls. Away from the cathedral on that
side to the foot of the Mendips expanded low, green country. I
walked along the moat into the Shepton road, and turning to the
left, and passing many discreet, decent, quiet houses such as are
produced by cathedrals, and to the left again, so made a circuit of
the cathedral and its high tufted walls and holly trees, back to the
market-place.
It was difficult to know what to do in all this somewhat foreign
tranquillity. I actually entered an old furniture shop, and looked over
a number of second-hand books, Spectators, sermons that were
dead, theology that had never been alive, recent novels preparing
for their last sleep, books about Wells, “Clarissa Harlowe,” Mr. Le
Gallienne’s “English Poems,” “The Marvels of the Polar World,” and
hundreds of others. A cat slept in the sun amongst them, curled
superbly, as if she had to see justice done to the soporific powers of
the cathedral city and the books that nobody wanted. For the sake
of appearances, I bought “The History of Prince Lee Boo” for
twopence. I thought to read this book over my lunch, but there was
better provender. The restaurant was full of farmers, district
councillors and their relatives, and several school children. The
loudest voice, the longest tongue, and the face best worth looking
at, belonged to a girl. She was a tomboy of fifteen, black-haired,
pale, strong-featured, with bold though not very bright eyes. Her
companion was a boy perhaps a little younger than herself, and she
was talking in a quick, decided manner.
“I like a girl that sticks to a chap,” she began suddenly.
The boy mumbled something. She looked sharply at him, as if
to make sure that he did exist, though he had not the gift of speech;
then directed her eyes out into the street. Having been silent for half
a minute, she stood up, pressing her face to the window to see
better, and exclaimed,—
“Look, look! There’s lovely hair.”
The boy got up obediently.
“There’s lovely hair,” she repeated, indicating some one passing;
“she isn’t good-looking to it, but it is lovely now. Look! isn’t it?”
The boy, I think, agreed before sitting down. What impressed
him most was the girl’s frank enthusiasm. She remained standing
and looking out. But in a moment something else had pleased her.
She beckoned to the boy, still with her eyes on the street, and
said,—
“There’s a nice little boy.” As she said this she tapped the glass
and smiled animatedly. So in half a minute up came another boy of
about the same age as the first, and took a seat at the next table,
smiling but not speaking. Only when he had half eaten a cake did he
begin to talk casually about what had been passing at school—how
an unpopular master had been ragged, but dared not complain,
though nobody did any work. The girl listened intently, but when he
had done, merely asked,—
“Have you ever been caned?”
“Lots of times,” he answered.
“Have you?” she asked the boy at her own table.
“Once,” he laughed.
 “Have you?” she mused. “I haven’t. My mother told them they
were to cane me at one school, and they did try once, but I never
went back again after.” ... On finishing her lunch, she got up and
strode out of the room silently, without a farewell. She was shorter
than I had guessed, but more unforgettable than Prince Lee Boo. I
put the book away unopened. Even what passes for a good book is
troublesome to read after a few days out of doors, and the highest
power of most of them is to convey an invitation to sleep. And yet I
thought of one writer at Wells, and that was Mr. W. H. Hudson, who
has written of it more than once. He says that it is the only city
where the green woodpecker is to be heard. It comes into his new
book, “Adventures among Birds,” because it was here that he first
satisfied his wish to be in a belfry during the bell-ringing and hear “a
symphony from the days of the giants, composed (when insane) by
a giant Tschaikovsky to be performed on ‘instruments of unknown
form’ and gigantic size.” But the book is really all about birds and his
journeys in search of them, chiefly in the southern half of England.
It is one of his best country books. It is, in fact, the best book
entirely about birds that is known to me. The naturalist may hesitate
to admit it, though he knows that no such descriptions of birds’
songs and calls are to be found elsewhere, and he cannot deny that
no other pages reveal English birds in a wild state so vividly, so
happily, so beautifully. Mr. Hudson is in no need of recommendation
among naturalists. This particular claim of his is mentioned only in
order to impress a class of readers who might confuse him with the
fancy dramatic naturalists, and the other class who will appreciate
the substantial miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative artist in
one and in harmony.
Were men to disappear they might be reconstructed from the
Bible and the Russian novelists; and, to put it briefly, Mr. Hudson so
writes of birds that if ever, in spite of his practical work, his warnings
and indignant scorn, they should cease to exist, and should leave us
to ourselves on a benighted planet, we should have to learn from
him what birds were.
 Many people, even “lovers of Nature,” would be inclined to look
for small beer in a book with the title of “Adventures among Birds.”
If they are ignorant of Mr. Hudson’s writings, they are not to blame,
since bird books are, as a rule, small beer. Most writers condescend
to birds or have not the genius to keep them alive in print, whether
or not they have the eternal desire “to convey to others,” as Mr.
Hudson says, “some faint sense or suggestion of the wonder and
delight which may be found in Nature.” He does not condescend to
birds, “these loveliest of our fellow-beings,” as he calls them, “these
which give greatest beauty and lustre to the world.” He travels “from
county to county viewing many towns and villages, conversing with
persons of all ages and conditions,” and when these persons are his
theme he writes like a master, like an old master perhaps, as
everybody knows, who has read his “Green Mansions,” “The Purple
Land,” and “South American Sketches.” It might, therefore, be taken
for granted that such an artist would not be likely to handle birds
unless he could do so with the same reality and vitality as men. And
this is what he does.
His chief pleasure from his childhood on the Pampas has been in
wild birds; he has delighted in their voices above all sounds.
“Relations,” he calls the birds, “with knowing, emotional, and
thinking brains like ours in their heads, and with senses like ours,
only brighter. Their beauty and grace so much beyond ours, and
their faculty of flight which enables them to return to us each year
from such remote, outlandish places, their winged, swift souls in
winged bodies, do not make them uncanny, but only fairy-like.”
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.
GLASTONBURY TOR.
 “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.”
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