gentle Elizabethan poet, Samuel Daniel, nor would we stay our journey
for trips to the places of varied interest on either side. A little to
the southwest is Wellington, which gave The Iron Duke his title. Going
north from there one would come soon to Milverton, the birthplace of
Dr. Thomas Young, that ingenious linguist who first began to read the
riddle of the Sphinx; for he had deciphered some half dozen of the
Egyptian hieroglyphics in advance of Champollion's great announcement.
A few miles further to the north is Combe Flory, the pleasant
parsonage which Sidney Smith made so gay, even binding his books, and
theological books at that, in brightest colours. To get a tropical
effect, and to hoax his guests, he hung oranges from his garden
shrubs, and to gratify a lady who hinted that deer would ornament the
little park, he fitted out his two donkeys--who doubtless had their
opinion of him and of his doings--with branching antlers, and
stationed them before the windows for a pastoral effect. Well away to
the east of Taunton is Ilchester, the birthplace of that illustrious
thirteenth-century friar, Roger Bacon, a necromancer to his own
generation, and a pioneer in scientific method to ours; and near by
Ilchester is Odcombe, where Tom Coryatt, stoutest-soled of travellers,
was born. He claimed to have walked, between May and October of 1608,
no less than nineteen hundred and seventy-five miles over the
continent of Europe, and had just achieved a pilgrimage to Jerusalem
and a call on the Great Mogul when, under the eastern stars, he died.
England profited by his travels in the entertaining volume commonly
known as Coryatt's "Crudities," as well as in that foreign elegance of
table-forks which he is said to have introduced.
A mightier spell than any of these was upon us, the spell of
Glastonbury, but I do not know why we did not give a few hours to
Athelney, which lay directly in our route. It was here, on an
alder-forested island in a waste of fens and marshes, at the
confluence of the Parrett and the Tone, that King Alfred took shelter
when the Danes had overrun the land. Here he lost that "Alfred's
Jewel" which is now the treasure of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford;
here this otherwise impeccable monarch burned the cakes; and from here
he made such successful sallies against the enemy that he delivered
England and regained his throne.
The county of Somerset, a land of broad, green valleys enclosed by
rugged ranges of hill and upland, has been compared in form to an arm
slightly bent about the eastern and southern shores of Bristol
Channel. The river Parrett crosses it at the elbow, dividing it into a
southern section,--moors, bogs, mountains, with the deep vale of the
river Tone--and a northern part, larger and more populous, but hardly
less broken. Above the Parrett, and almost parallel with it, runs the
river Brue, draining that once vast peat swamp known as the Brent
Marshes. Glastonbury now stands on the north bank of the Brue, but at
some remote period was islanded in the midst of the river. The
Britons--if the wise say true--called it The Appletree Isle, or
Avalon,--a name caught up in the golden meshes of Arthurian romance.
The wounded king but
"passes to the Isle Avilion,
He passes and is heal'd and cannot die."
The Britons in their heathen days had dreamed of a fairyland where
death and sorrow entered not, the Celtic Tir-na-n'Og, an Island of
Immortal Youth hid somewhere in the flushed, mysterious west, and the
Christian faith, that came so early to Glastonbury, did not destroy
but gathered to itself the wistful hope, so that the site of one of
the earliest churches in England became the centre of strangely
blended legends. It was in the Isle of Avalon, according to Geoffrey
of Monmouth, that the sword Excalibur was forged, and after Arthur had
passed from mortal ken, he was not dead, but still, through the
waiting centuries,
"Mythic Uther's deeply wounded son
In some fair space of sloping greens
Lay, dozing, in the vale of Avalon,
And watched by weeping queens."
Yet the mediæval voices, that we would gladly believe more simply than
we may, tell us that Arthur was buried at Glastonbury in a sarcophagus
hollowed out of the trunk of an oak, that the penitent Guinevere was
laid at his feet, that the skeletons were uncovered and removed to the
church in the reign of Henry II, and were seen by so sane a witness as
Leland so late as the middle of the sixteenth century. But in King
Arthur, death is life, and not his reputed grave, nor the giant bones
folk wondered at, nor the golden lock of Guinevere that crumbled at a
monk's too eager clutch, could shake the faith in his second coming.
Malory, writing in the fifteenth century, illustrates even in his
half denial the persistency of that expectation:
"Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur
is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into
another place, and men say that he shall come again, and he
shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but
rather, I will say,--here in this world he changed his life,
but many men say that there is written upon his tomb this
verse: _Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quondam Rexque futurus_."
Arthurian legends are attached to other places in Somersetshire,
notably to Cadbury, whose earlier name was Camelot, and to its
adjacent village of Queen's Camel. Here on the river Camel cluster
Arthurian names,--King Arthur's Palace, a moated mound; King Arthur's
Well, a spring of magic virtues; King Arthur's Hunting Causeway, an
old track across the fields; and here the tradition of a great battle
lingers. But Glastonbury is not only an Arthurian shrine; it was once,
in purer days than ours, the keeper of the Holy Grail.
"To whom the monk: 'The Holy Grail! ...
... What is it?
The phantom of a cup that comes and goes?'
"'Nay, monk, what phantom?' answer'd Percivale.
'The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with his own.
This, from the blessed land of Aromat--
After the day of darkness, when the dead
Went wandering o'er Moriah--the good saint,
Arimathæan Joseph, journeying brought
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.
And there awhile it bode; and if a man
Could touch or see it, he was healed at once,
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times
Grew to such evil that the holy cup
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear'd.'
"To whom the monk: 'From our old books I know
That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury,
And there the heathen prince, Arviragus,
Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build;
And there he built with wattles from the marsh
A little lonely church.'"[9]
Dreamy hours were those we spent under the shadow of Glastonbury Tor,
among the tranquil ruins of that once so glorious abbey, strolling
about with a motley company of sheep, chickens, and tourists over what
is perhaps the most ancient consecrated ground in England. Hither came
St. Joseph of Arimathæa with his eleven companions and here the staff
of the saint, as he thrust it into the ground, put forth leaf and
blossom as a signal that the resting-place was reached. The little
wattled oratory that the Archangel Gabriel commanded and the pagan
king permitted them to build on a waste island of the marsh was
succeeded, in course of time, by a primitive form of monastery, where
St. Patrick, his mission to Ireland accomplished, dwelt many years and
died. Here in a later century great St. Dunstan held the post of abbot
and waged at his forge stern warfare against the Devil. And it is
sober history that here a Christian church and brotherhood lived on in
unbroken peace from British times to English. "What Glastonbury has to
itself, alone and without rival," says Freeman, "is its historical
position as the tie, at once national and religious, which binds the
history and memories of our race to those of the race which we
supplanted."
The after-story of Glastonbury is as tragic as that of Whalley. A
mitred abbey, enlarged and enriched from generation to generation, it
became a court whither the sons of noblemen and gentlemen were sent
for nurture in gracious manners; a school of learning whose library
was one of the most precious in the realm; a seat of princely
hospitalities and lavish charities. When the storm burst, Abbot
Whiting strove to hide from the spoilers some of the abbey plate. He
was forthwith arrested at his manor of Sharpham--the very house where
Fielding the novelist was afterwards born,--sentenced at Wells,
dragged on a hurdle to the top of Glastonbury Tor, and there hanged
and butchered, his head being spiked above the abbey gate. The
magnificent church and extensive conventual buildings, stripped and
abandoned, long served the neighbourhood as a quarry. Richly
sculptured blocks were built into barns and garden-walls and even
broken up for making a road over the marshes. Little is left for the
gazer now save a few weed-crowned columns, an exquisite Early English
chapel on the site of St. Joseph's wattled church, a gabled
tithe-barn, an old pilgrim inn, and the Abbot's Kitchen, a witchcap
structure whose four vast fireplaces must all have roared with jollity
when Abbot Whiting chanced to be entertaining five hundred "persons of
fashion" at a single dinner-party. As we wandered over the daisied
pastureland from one grey fragment to another, we realised the
invisible Glastonbury all the more in the peace that has come with the
perishing of the visible. "Time the Shadow" has but softened the
splendour. More than ever is this
"the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows."
It is only six miles from Glastonbury to Wells, one of the loveliest
cathedral cities of England, not a place to hurry through, but to
settle in and quietly enjoy. Lodgings in Vicar's Close, leisurely
strolls through the gardens of the Bishop's Palace, hours of revery in
choir and chapter-house and Lady Chapel,--it is so that one is taken
to the heart of all this holy beauty. The foundation dates back to the
beginning of the eighth century, but Saxon church melted into Norman,
and Norman into Early English,--substantially the cathedral of to-day,
with that wonderful façade of which Fuller truly said: "England
affordeth not the like." The story of the city is the story of the
church, and the story of the church is one of honour and untroubled
peace. Not being a monastery, it was untouched by the blow that smote
Glastonbury down. The rage of war has passed it by. Its bishops have
left saintly memories. Above this matchless group of ecclesiastical
buildings tender benignities brood like outspread wings. There is
blessing in the very air.
Wells lies in a basin at the foot of the Mendip Hills, which offer
tempting points for excursions. Our most uncanny trip was to Wookey
Hole, where, according to a ballad in Percy's "Reliques," "a
blear-eyed hag" used to dwell. A farmer, groaning with rheumatism,
guided us along a rocky footpath to the cavern entrance, where an
impish boy met us, gave us lighted tapers and himself literally blazed
the way with a can of some lurid-burning oil. After scrambling up and
scrambling down, frequently abjured by our little leader to "mind yer
'eads," we left Hell's Ladder behind us and came out into an open
space known as the Witch's Kitchen. Here was the Witch herself, a
sphinx-like figure made by the petrifaction of the water dripping from
the roof. She received us with a stolid stare, the graceless urchin
threw a pebble at her flat nose, and we gladly scrambled back to upper
day.
I have a pleasanter recollection of Cox's Cave at Cheddar, with its
clearly defined pillars and pinnacles, some amber, some olive, some
transparent, some musical. It requires but little imagination to
distinguish in this fantastic world the queer assortment of "Hindoo
Temple," "Mummy," "Bat's Wings," "Eagle's Wings," "Loaf of Bread,"
"Hanging Goose," "Rat running up a Rock," "Turkeys," "Carrots," and
the splendid "Draperies." There is a place where stalagmite and
stalactite nearly touch,--only one drop wanting, yet in all these
years since Mr. Cox, while prosaically digging for a coach-house,
discovered this elfin grotto, in 1837, that drop has not
crystallised,--so slow is the underground sculptor.
All this region of the Mendip Hills, whose limestone cliffs rise
sheer, terrace above terrace, is full of fascination. Traces of
prehistoric man, as well as of extinct animal species, have been found
in its deep caverns. In the Hyæna Den, when disclosed in 1852, the
eyes of geologists could discern the very places where our shaggy
forbears had lighted their fires and cooked their food. It seems a far
cry from those low-browed cave-folk to Lord Macaulay, who loved this
West Country so well, and to John Locke, who was born in the village
of Wrington,--a village which furthermore prides itself on one of the
noblest church-towers in Somerset and on the decorous grave of Hannah
More.
All manner of literary associations jostle one another in the town of
Bath, to which at home I have heard English visitors liken our Boston.
They meant it as a compliment, for Bath is a handsome city, even
ranked by Landor, one of its most loyal residents, above the cities of
Italy for purity and consistent dignity of architecture. To reach Bath
we have journeyed east from the Mendip Hills into the valley of the
Lesser Avon. Here "the Queen of all the Spas" holds her court, the
tiers of pale stone terraces and crescents climbing up the steep sides
of the valley to a height of some eight hundred feet.
Of the sights of Bath, the Abbey is most disappointing, and well it
may be, for it was despoiled not only of its glass but even of its
iron and lead by Henry VIII, and only a bleak framework left to pass
through a series of purchasers to the citizens. The west front wears a
curious design of ladders on which battered angels clamber up and
down. The interior has no "dim religious light," but gilt and colour
and such a throng of gaudy monuments that the wits have made merry at
the expense of the vaunted mineral springs.
"These walls, adorned with monument and bust,
Show how Bath waters serve to lay the dust."
The healing quality of the waters is attributed, by the veracious
Geoffrey of Monmouth, to the British king Bladud, father of King Lear.
This Bladud, being skilled in sorcery, placed in the gushing spring a
cunning stone that made the water hot and curative. The wizard met an
untimely end in a flight on wings of his own devising. He rode the air
safely from Bath to London, but there fell and was dashed in pieces on
the roof of the temple of Apollo. The Romans knew the virtue of these
waters, and modern excavation has disclosed, with other remnants of a
perished splendour, elaborate Roman baths, arched and columned and
beautifully paved. It is so long since the hour when I went wandering
down into those buried chambers that I but dimly recall a large
central basin, where languid gold-fish circled in a green pool, begirt
by a stone platform, old and mossy. This was set about with pilasters
and capitals and all manner of classic fragments, among which were
mingled bits of mediæval carving. For a Saxon monastery was founded
here, where, according to the Exeter Book, still stood "courts of
stone," and the baths were known and frequented throughout the Middle
Ages and in Tudor and Stuart times. But the Bath of the
eighteenth-century society-novel, the Bath of which Miss Burney and
Miss Austen, Fielding and Smollet have drawn such graphic pictures,
owed its being chiefly to Beau Nash. The city to which this gallant
Oxonian came in 1703 was a mean, rough place enough. The baths were
"unseemly ponds," open to the weather and to the view of the
passersby, who found it amusing to pelt the invalid bathers with dead
cats--poor pussies!--and frogs. But Nash secured a band of music for
the Pump Room, set orderly balls on foot, and soon won the title of
King of Bath, which he made such a focus of fashion that the place
grew during his lifetime from its poor estate into the comely city of
to-day. This arbiter of elegance maintained a mimicry of royal pomp.
His dress glistened with lace and embroidery and he travelled in a
chaise drawn by six grey horses, with a full complement of outriders,
footmen, and French horns.
The Pump Room is worth a visit. It is an oblong saloon, with a
semicircular recess at either end. At the west end is a music gallery,
and at the east a statue of Beau Nash. A three-fourths square of
cushioned seats occupies the middle of the room and opens toward a
counter. Here a white-capped maid dispenses, at twopence a glass, the
yellow fluid which hisses up hot from a fountain just behind her and
falls murmuring into a marble vase. And all about, a part of the
spectacle, sit the health-seekers, sipping the magic water from
glasses in decorated saucers and looking a trifle foolish.
Here, or in steering one's course among the Bath chairs that claim a
native's right of way in park and promenade, fancy may choose almost
any companion she will. Pope hated Bath, to be sure, and called it
"the sulphurous pit," but not even Pope kept out of it; Beckford, the
author of "Vathek," lived here; Butler, author of the "Analogy," died
here; Pepys scribbled a page of his "Diary" here; Herschel the
astronomer played a chapel-organ here; Lord Chesterfield's manners and
Sheridan's wit found here an apt field of exercise; but for my
part--and it was a scandalous choice, with the ghosts of Pitt and
Burke, Wolfe and Nelson, Cowper and Scott and Goldsmith and Moore
ready to do escort duty--I wished for the company of Chaucer's Wife of
Bath, for such a piquant gossip could not have failed to add some
entertaining items to the story of the town.
Our final pilgrimage of last summer was made to Clevedon, a lonely
village which has within half a century become a popular summer
resort. It lies
"By that broad water of the west,"
where the Severn merges into the Bristol Channel. Here is Myrtle
Cottage, where Coleridge and his bride had their brief season of joy.
"Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rose
Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn
The sea's faint murmur. In the open air
Our myrtle blossomed; and across the porch
Thick jasmines twined."
It was here that this poet of boundless promise,
"The rapt one of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature,"
wrote his "Æolian Harp," his "Frost at Midnight," and other lyrics
touched with an unwonted serenity and sweetness, and here that Hartley
Coleridge was born.
[Illustration: ST. PETER'S CHURCH, CLEVEDON]
But our first walk took us by the beach and across the fields to that
"obscure and solitary church" where lies Tennyson's Arthur, son of
Henry Hallam the historian, and himself a poet. He was in Vienna when
"God's finger touch'd him and he slept,"
and Tennyson linked the Austrian and the English rivers in his elegy.
"The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken'd heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
"There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills."
The ancient church, now but seldom opened for service, was locked, and
we had to hunt for the sexton. It was dusk when he arrived, but we
groped our way to the south transept and, by the light of a lifted
taper, made out the pathetic farewell:
VALE DULCISSIME
VALE DILECTISSIME
DESIDERATISSIME
REQUIESCAS IN PACE
It was this tablet that haunted the restlessness of Tennyson's grief
as, on moonlight nights, he would seem to see that lustre which fell
across his bed slipping into the transept window and becoming "a glory
on the walls."
"The marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.
"The mystic glory swims away;
From off my bed the moonlight dies;
And closing eaves of wearied eyes
I sleep till dusk is dipt in grey:
"And then I know the mist is drawn
A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn."
From Clevedon, from Bath, from Cheddar, from Wells, the roads lead to
Bristol, which must not, if only for the sake of poor Chatterton, be
ignored. This worn, dignified old city has had something of a vagrant
career. Before the Norman Conquest, and for long after, Bristol stood
north of the Avon and was a Gloucestershire town. In course of time it
stretched across the river and lay partly in Somerset. And in the
fourteenth century, when for wealth and consequence it ranked second
only to London, Edward III created it a county by itself. From the
dawn of its history it was a trading-mart. Nothing came amiss to it,
even kidnapping, so that among its gains it gained the title
"Stepmother of all England." The merchants and the mariners of Bristol
stood in the front of English enterprise. Even in the time of Stephen
it was deemed wellnigh the richest city of the kingdom. When a foreign
war was in hand, Bristol could be counted on for a large contingent
of ships and men. Its merchants lived in towered mansions, with
capacious cellars for the storage of their goods, warehouses and shops
on the street floor, the family parlours and bedrooms above, and
attics for the prentices in the sharp-pitched gables. The
banquet-halls, at the rear of these spacious dwellings, were splendid
with carven roofs, rich tapestries, and plate that would have graced a
royal board. Even the critical Pepys, who visited Bristol after its
Spanish and West Indian trades were well established, found its quay
"a most large and noble place."
Bristol sailors bear no small part in the tales of English sea-daring
and records of discovery. As early as 1480, Bristol merchants were
sending out tall ships to search west of Ireland for "the Island of
Brazil and the Seven Cities." Sixteen years later the Venetian mariner,
John Cabot, probably accompanied by his son Sebastian--"shadow-seekers,"
the old Bristol tars would call them--had touched the coast of North
America. On his return the "Great Admiral" clad himself in silk and was
a notable figure in the Bristol streets. Phantasmal though it all seems
in a retrospect of centuries, many are the men who have drawn the gaze
in these ever-moving thoroughfares,--William Canynges, "Merchant Royal,"
whose trade with the north of Europe probably exceeded that of any other
merchant in England; Thomas Norton, fifteenth-century alchemist and
dreamer, who believed that he had discovered both the Philosopher's
Stone and the Elixir of Life; Captain Thomas James, for whom James's Bay
is named, he whose search for the Northwest Passage is one of the heroic
chapters in the annals of the sea; the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, always
deep in talk with some grizzled seaman; Captain Martin Pring, proud of
the load of sassafras he had brought back from Cape Cod; Colston the
philanthropist, the local saint. Mere literary folk would have been
embarrassed by little enough attention as they went their quiet ways.
What was Chatterton to the trading, shipbuilding, ship-lading town but a
bright-eyed Blue-Coat boy? And how those hard-headed merchants would
have chuckled over the eager scheme of three penniless young poets,
Coleridge, Southey, and Lovell, for founding a community on the
Susquehanna--a river of melodious name and delightfully far away--where
no one should labour more than two hours out of the twenty-four!