I have been spending a week in Somerset. The right June weather put me
in the mind for rambling, and my thoughts turned to the Severn Sea. I
went to Glastonbury and Wells, and on to Cheddar, and so to the shore of
the Channel at Clevedon, remembering my holiday of fifteen years ago, and
too often losing myself in a contrast of the man I was then and what I am
now. Beautiful beyond all words of description that nook of oldest
England; but that I feared the moist and misty winter climate, I should
have chosen some spot below the Mendips for my home and resting-place.
Unspeakable the charm to my ear of those old names; exquisite the quiet
of those little towns, lost amid tilth and pasture, untouched as yet by
the fury of modern life, their ancient sanctuaries guarded, as it were,
by noble trees and hedges overrun with flowers. In all England there is
no sweeter and more varied prospect than that from the hill of the Holy
Thorn at Glastonbury; in all England there is no lovelier musing place
than the leafy walk beside the Palace Moat at Wells. As I think of the
golden hours I spent there, a passion to which I can give no name takes
hold upon me; my heart trembles with an indefinable ecstasy.
There was a time of my life when I was consumed with a desire for foreign
travel; an impatience of everything familiar fretted me through all the
changing year. If I had not at length found the opportunity to escape,
if I had not seen the landscapes for which my soul longed, I think I must
have moped to death. Few men, assuredly, have enjoyed such wanderings
more than I, and few men revive them in memory with a richer delight or
deeper longing. But--whatever temptation comes to me in mellow autumn,
when I think of the grape and of the olive--I do not believe I shall ever
again cross the sea. What remains to me of life and of energy is far too
little for the enjoyment of all I know, and all I wish to know, of this
dear island.
As a child I used to sleep in a room hung round with prints after English
landscape painters--those steel engravings so common half a century ago,
which bore the legend, "From the picture in the Vernon Gallery." Far
more than I knew at the time, these pictures impressed me; I gazed and
gazed at them, with that fixed attention of a child which is half
curiosity, half reverie, till every line of them was fixed in my mind; at
this moment I see the black-and-white landscapes as if they were hanging
on the wall before me, and I have often thought that this early training
of the imagination--for such it was--has much to do with the passionate
love of rural scenery which lurked within me even when I did not
recognize it, and which now for many a year has been one of the emotions
directing my life. Perhaps, too, that early memory explains why I love a
good black-and-white print even more than a good painting. And--to draw
yet another inference--here may be a reason for the fact that, through my
youth and early manhood, I found more pleasure in Nature as represented
by art than in Nature herself. Even during that strange time when
hardships and passions held me captive far from any glimpse of the
flowering earth, I could be moved, and moved deeply, by a picture of the
simplest rustic scene. At rare moments, when a happy chance led me into
the National Gallery, I used to stand long before such pictures as "The
Valley Farm," "The Cornfield," "Mousehold Heath." In the murk confusion
of my heart these visions of the world of peace and beauty from which I
was excluded--to which, indeed, I hardly ever gave a thought--touched me
to deep emotion. But it did not need--nor does it now--the magic of a
master to awake that mood in me. Let me but come upon the poorest little
woodcut, the cheapest "process" illustration, representing a thatched
cottage, a lane, a field, and I hear that music begin to murmur. It is a
passion--Heaven be thanked--that grows with my advancing years. The last
thought of my brain as I lie dying will be that of sunshine upon an
English meadow.