woods and placid fertile fields; thatched cottages here and there,
sheltered and embowered in green; far away on the shore, the village of
East Quantockshead; beyond that the broad, tossing waters of the
Bristol Channel; and beyond that again, thirty miles away, the silver
coast of Wales and the blue mountains fading into the sky. Ships were
sailing in and out, toy-like in the distance. Far to the north-west, we
could see the cliffs of the Devonshire coast; to the north-east the
islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm rose from the Severn Sea; and
around the point beyond them, in the little churchyard of Clevedon, I
knew that the dust of Arthur Henry Hallam, whose friendship Tennyson
has immortalized in "In Memoriam," was sleeping
"By the pleasant shore
And in the hearing of the wave."
High overhead the great white clouds were loitering across the
deep-blue heaven. White butterflies wavered above the road. Tall
foxglove spires lit the woodland shadows with rosy gleams. Bluebells
and golden ragwort fringed the hedge-rows. A family of young wrens
fluttered in and out of the hawthorns. A yellow-hammer, with cap of
gold, warbled his sweet, common little song. The colour of the earth
was warm and red; the grass was of a green so living that it seemed to
be full of conscious gladness. It was a day and a scene to calm and
satisfy the heart.
At Kilve, a straggling village along the road-side, I remembered
Wordsworth's poem called "An Anecdote for Fathers." The little boy in
the poem says that he would rather be at Kilve than at Liswyn. When his
father foolishly presses him to give a reason for his preference, he
invents one:
"At Kilve there was no weather-cock,
And that's the reason why."
Naturally, I looked around the village to see whether it would still
answer to the little boy's description. Sure enough, there was no
weather-cock in sight, not even on the church-tower.
Not far beyond Kilve we saw a white house, a mile or so away, standing
among the trees to the south, at the foot of the high-rolling Quantock
Hills. Our post-boy told us that it was Alfoxton, "where Muster
Wudswuth used to live," but just how to get to it he did not know. So
we drove into the next village of Holford and made inquiry at the
"Giles' Plough Inn," a most quaint and rustic tavern with a huge
ancient sign-board on the wall, representing Giles with his white horse
and his brown horse and his plough. Turning right and left and right
again, through narrow lanes, between cottages gay with flowers, we came
to a wicket-gate beside an old stone building, and above the gate a
notice warning all persons not to trespass on the grounds of Alfoxton.
But the gate was on the latch, and a cottager, passing by, told us that
there was a "right of way" which could not be closed--"goä straight on,
and nivver feär, nubbody 'll harm ye."
[Illustration: Tannery Combe, Holford.]
A few steps brought us into the thick woods, and to the edge of a deep
glen, spanned by a bridge made of a single long tree-trunk, with a
hand-rail at one side. Down below us, as we stood on the swaying
bridge, a stream dashed and danced and sang through the shade, among
the ferns and mosses and wild flowers. The steep sides of the glen
glistened with hollies and laurels, tangled and confused with
blackberry bushes. Overhead was the interwoven roof of oaks and ashes
and beeches. Here it was that Wordsworth, in the year 1797, when he was
feeling his way back from the despair of mind which followed the
shipwreck of his early revolutionary dreams, used to wander alone or
with his dear sister Dorothy. And here he composed the "Lines Written
in Early Spring"--almost the first notes of his new poetic power:
"I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sat reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
"Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its leaves;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes."
Climbing up to the drive, we followed a long curving avenue toward the
house. It led along the breast of the hill, with a fine view under the
spreading arms of the great beeches, across the water to the Welsh
mountains. On the left the woods were thick. Huge old hollies showed
the ravages of age and storm. A riotous undergrowth of bushes and
bracken filled the spaces between the taller trees. Doves were
murmuring in the shade. Rabbits scampered across the road. In an open
park at the edge of the wood, a herd of twenty or thirty fallow deer
with pale spotted sides and twinkling tails trotted slowly up the
slope.
Alfoxton House is a long, two-story building of white stucco, with a
pillared porch facing the hills. The back looks out over a walled
garden, with velvet turf and brilliant flowers and pretty evergreens,
toward the sea-shore. The house has been much changed and enlarged
since the days when young William Wordsworth rented it, (hardly more
than a good farmhouse), for twenty-three pounds a year, and lived in it
with his sister from 1797 to 1798, in order to be near his friend
Coleridge at Nether Stowey. There is not a room that remains the same,
though the present owner has wisely brought together as much of the old
wood-work as possible into one chamber, which is known as Wordsworth's
study. But the poet's real study was out of doors; and it was there
that we looked for the things that he loved.
In a field beyond the house there were two splendid old ash-trees,
which must have been full-grown in Wordsworth's day. We stretched
ourselves among the gnarled roots, my little Dorothy and I, and fed our
eyes upon the view that must have often refreshed him, while his
Dorothy was leading his heart back with gentle touches toward the
recovery of joy. There was the soft, dimpled landscape, in tones of
silvery verdure, blue in distance, green near at hand, sloping down to
the shining sea. The sky was delicate and friendly, bending close above
us, with long lines of snowy clouds. There was hardly a breath of wind.
Far to the east we saw the rich plain rolling away to Bridgewater and
the bare line of the distant Mendip Hills. Shadows of clouds swept
slowly across the land. Colours shifted and blended. On the steep hill
behind us a row of trees stood out clear against the blue.
"With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh."
What induced Wordsworth to leave a place so beautiful? A most prosaic
reason. He was practically driven out by the suspicion and mistrust of
his country neighbours. A poet was a creature that they could not
understand. His long rambles among the hills by day and night,
regardless of the weather; his habit of talking to himself; his
intimacy and his constant conferences on unknown subjects with
Coleridge, whose radical ideas were no secret; his friendship with
Thelwall the republican, who came to reside in the neighbourhood; the
rumour that the poet had lived in France and sympathized with the
Revolution--all these were dark and damning evidences to the rustic
mind that there was something wrong about this long-legged,
sober-faced, feckless young man. Probably he was a conspirator,
plotting the overthrow of the English Government, or at least of the
Tory party. So ran the talk of the country-side; and the lady who owned
Alfoxton was so alarmed by it that she declined to harbour such a
dangerous tenant any longer. Wordsworth went with his sister to Germany
in 1798; and in the following year they found a new home at Dove
Cottage, in Grasmere, among the English lakes.
On our way out to the place where we had left our equipage, we met the
owner of the estate, walking with his dogs. He was much less fierce
than his placard. It may have been something in Dorothea's way that
mollified him, but at all events he turned and walked with us to show
us the way up the "Hareknap"--the war-path of ancient armies--to a
famous point of view. There we saw the Quantock Hills, rolling all
around us. They were like long smooth steep billows of earth, covered
with bracken, and gorse, and heather just coming into bloom. Thick
woodlands hung on their sides, but above their purple shoulders the
ridges were bare. They looked more than a thousand feet high. Among
their cloven combes, deep-thicketed and watered with cool springs, the
wild red deer still find a home. And it was here (not in Cardiganshire
as the poem puts it) that Wordsworth's old huntsman, "Simon Lee,"
followed the chase of the stag.
It was a three-mile drive from Holford to Nether Stowey. Dorothea
remarked that Coleridge and the Wordsworths must have been great
walkers if this was their idea of living close together. And so they
were, for that bit of road seemed to them only a prelude to a real walk
of twenty or thirty miles. The exercise put them in tune for poetry,
and their best thoughts came to them when they were afoot.
"The George" at Nether Stowey is a very modest inn, the entrance paved
with flag-stones, the only public room a low-ceiled parlour; but its
merits are far beyond its pretensions. We lunched there most
comfortably on roast duck and green peas, cherry tart and cheese, and
then set out to explore the village, which is closely built along the
roads whose junction is marked by a little clock-tower. The
market-street is paved with cobble-stones, and down one side of it runs
a small brook, partly built in and covered over, but making a merry
noise all the way. Coleridge speaks of it in his letters as "the dear
gutter of Stowey."
Just outside of the town is the Castle Mound, a steep, grassy hill, to
the top of which we climbed. There was the distinct outline of the
foundations of the old castle, built in the Norman times; we could
trace the moat, and the court, and all the separate rooms; but not a
stone of the walls remained--only a ground-plan drawn in the turf of
the hill-top. All the pride and power of the Norman barons had passed
like the clouds that were sailing over the smooth ridges of the
Quantocks.
Coleridge was twenty-four years old when he came to Nether Stowey with
his young wife and a boy baby. Troubles had begun to gather around him;
he was very poor, tormented with neuralgia, unable to find regular
occupation, and estranged by a quarrel from his friend and
brother-in-law, Robert Southey. Thomas Poole, a well-to-do tanner at
Nether Stowey, a man of good education and noble character, a great
lover of poetry and liberty, had befriended Coleridge and won his deep
regard and affection. Nothing would do but that Poole should find a
cottage near to his own house, where the poet could live in quietude
and congenial companionship.
The cottage was found; and, in spite of Poole's misgivings about its
size, and his warnings in regard to the tedium and depression of
village life, Coleridge took it and moved in with his little family on
the last day of the year 1796--a cold season for a "flitting!" We can
imagine the young people coming down the Bridgewater road through the
wintry weather with their few household goods in a cart.
The cottage was at the western end of the village; and there it stands
yet, a poor, ugly house, close on the street. We went in, and after
making clear to the good woman who owned it that we were not looking
for lodgings, we saw all that there was to see of the dwelling. There
were four rooms, two downstairs and two above. All were bare and
disorderly, because, as the woman explained, house-cleaning was in
progress. It was needed. She showed us a winding stair, hardly better
than a ladder, which led from the lower to the upper rooms. There was
no view, no garden. But in Coleridge's day there was a small plot of
ground belonging to the house and running back to the large and
pleasant place of his friend Poole. It was upon this little garden that
the imagination of the new tenant was fixed, and there he saw, in his
dream, the corn and the cabbages and the potatoes growing luxuriantly
under his watchful and happy care; enough, he hoped, to feed himself
and his family, and to keep a couple of what he called "snouted and
grunting cousins" on the surplus. "Literature," he wrote, "though I
shall never abandon it, will always be a secondary object with me. My
poetic vanity and my political favour have been exhaled, and I would
rather be an expert, self-maintaining gardener than a Milton, if I
could not unite them both." How amusing are men's dreams--those of
humility as well as those of ambition! There is a peculiarly Coleridgean
touch in that last hint of uniting Milton and the market-gardener.
In fact, I doubt whether the garden ever paid expenses; but, on the
other hand, the crop of poetry that sprung from Coleridge's marvellous
mind was rich and splendid. It was while he lived in this poor little
cottage that he produced "Osorio," "Fears in Solitude," "Ode to
France," the first part of "Christabel," "Frost at Midnight," "The
Nightingale," "Kubla Khan," and "The Ancient Mariner," and planned with
his friend Wordsworth "Lyrical Ballads," the most epoch-making book of
modern English poetry. Truly this year, from April, 1797, to April,
1798, was the _annus mirabilis_ of his life. Never again was he so
happy, never again did he do such good work, as when he harboured in
this cottage, and slipped through the back gate to walk in the garden
or read in the library of his good friend, Thomas Poole, or trudged
down the road to the woods of Alfoxton to talk with the Wordsworths. He
wrote lovingly of the place:
"And now, beloved Stowey, I behold
Thy Church-tower, and methinks, the four huge elms
Clustering, which mark the mansion of my friend;
And close behind them, hidden from my view,
Is my own lovely cottage, where my babe
And my babe's mother dwell in peace."
Dorothea and I were not sure that Mrs. Coleridge enjoyed the cottage as
much as he did. Greta Hall, at Keswick, with its light airy rooms and
its splendid view, was her next home; and when we saw it, a few weeks
later, we were glad that the babe and the babe's mother had lived
there.
But the afternoon was waning, and we must turn our back to the
Quantocks, and take to the road again. Past the church and the manor
house, with its odd little turreted summer-house, or _gazébo_, perched
on the corner of the garden-wall; past a row of ancient larch-trees and
a grove of Scotch pines; past smooth-rolling meadows full of cattle and
sheep; past green orchards full of fruit for the famous and potent
Somereset cider; past the old town of Cannington, where the fair
Rosamund was born, and where, on our day, we saw the whole population
in the streets, perturbed by some unknown excitement and running to and
fro like mad folks; past sleepy farms and spacious parks and snug
villas, we rolled along the high-road, into Bridgewater, a small city,
where they make "Bath bricks," and where the statue of Admiral Blake
swaggers sturdily in the market-place. There we took the train to join
our friends at dinner in Bristol; and so ended our day among the
Quantock Hills.
BETWEEN THE LUPIN AND THE LAUREL
No other time of the year, on our northern Atlantic seaboard, is so
alluring, so delicate and subtle in its charm, as that which follows
the fading of the bright blue lupins in the meadows and along the banks
of the open streams, and precedes the rosy flush of myriad laurels in
full bloom on the half-wooded hillsides, and in the forest glades, and
under the lofty shadow of the groves of yellow pine. Then, for a little
while, the spring delays to bourgeon into summer: the woodland maid
lingers at the garden gate of womanhood, reluctant to enter and leave
behind the wild sweetness of freedom and uncertainty.
Winter is gone for good and all. There is no fear that he will come
sneaking back with cold hands to fetch something that he has forgotten.
Nature is secure of another season of love, of mating, of germination,
of growth, of maturity--a fair four months in which the joyful spirit
of life may have its way and work its will. The brown earth seems to
thrill and quicken everywhere with new impulses which transform it into
springing grass and overflowing flowers. The rivers are at their best:
strong and clear and musical, the turbulence of early floods departed,
the languor of later droughts not yet appearing. The shrunken woods
expand; the stringent, sparkling wintry stars grow mild and liquid,
shining with a tremulous and tender light; the whole world seems
larger, happier, more full of untold, untried possibilities. The air
vibrates with wordless promises, calls, messages, beckonings; and
fairy-tales are told by all the whispering leaves.
Yet though the open season is now secure, it is not yet settled. No
chance of a relapse into the winter's death, but plenty of change in
the unfolding of the summer's life. There are still caprices and
wayward turns in nature's moods; cold nights when the frost-elves are
hovering in the upper air; windy mornings which shake and buffet the
tree-tassels and light embroidered leaves; sudden heats of tranquil
noon through which the sunlight pours like a flood of eager love,
pressing to create new life.
Birds are still mating; and quarrelling, too. Their songs, their cries
of agitation and expectancy, their call notes, their lyrical
outpourings of desire are more varied and more copious than ever. All
day long they are singing, and every hour on the wing, coming up from
the southward, passing on to the northward, fluttering through the
thickets, exploring secret places, choosing homes and building nests.
In every coppice there is a running to and fro, a creeping, a
scampering, and a leaping of wild creatures. At the roots of the bushes
and weeds and sedges, in the soft recesses of the moss, and through the
intricate tangle of withered grass-blades pierced with bright-green
shoots, there is a manifold stir of insect life. In the air millions of
gauzy wings are quivering, swarms of ethereal, perishable creatures
rising and falling and circling in mystical dances of joy. Fish are
leaping along the stream. The night breeze trembles with the shrill,
piercing chorus of the innumerable hylas.
Late trees, like the ash, the white oak, the butternut, are still
delaying to put forth their full foliage; veiled in tender, transparent
green, or flushed with faint pink, they stand as if they were waiting
for a set time; and the tiny round buds on the laurels, clustered in
countless umbels of bright rose among the dark green, glistening
leaves, are closed, hiding their perfect beauty until the day
appointed. It is the season of the unfulfilled desire, the eager hope,
the coming surprise. To-day the world is beautiful; but to-morrow, next
day--who knows when?--something more beautiful is coming, something
new, something perfect. This is the lure of wild nature between the
lupin and the laurel.
At such a season it is hard to stay at home. The streets all seem to
lead into the country, and one longs to follow their leading, out into
the highway, on into the winding lane, on into the wood-road, on and
on, until one comes to that mysterious and delightful ending, (told of
in the familiar saying,) where the road finally dwindles into a
squirrel track and runs up a tree--not an ending at all, you see, but
really a beginning! For there is the tree; and if you climb it, who
knows what new landscape, what lively adventure, will open before you?
At any rate, you will get away from the tyranny of the commonplace, the
conventional, the methodical, which transforms the rhythm of life into
a logarithm. Even a small variation, a taste of surprise, will give you
what you need as a spring tonic: the sense of escape, a day off.
Living in a university town, and participating with fidelity in its
principal industry, I find that my own particular nightmare of monotony
takes the form of examination papers--quires of them, reams of them,
stacks of them--a horrid incubus, always oppressive, but then most
unendurable when the book-room begins to smell musty in the morning,
and the fire is unlit upon the hearth, and last night's student-lamp is
stuccoed all over with tiny gnats, and the breath of the blossoming
grape is wafted in at the open window, and the robins, those melodious
rowdies, are whistling and piping over the lawn and through the trees
in voluble mockery of the professor's task. "Come out," they say, "come
out! Why do you look in a book? Double, double, toil and trouble! Give
it up--tup, tup, tup! Come away and play for a day. What do you know?
Let it go. You're as dry as a chip, chip, chip! Come out, won't you?
will you?"
Truly, these examination questions that I framed with such pains look
very dull and tedious now--a desiccation of the beautiful work of the
great poets. And these answers that the boys have wrought out with such
pains, on innumerable pads of sleazy white paper, how little they tell
me of what the fellows really know and feel! Examination papers are
"requisite and necessary," of course; I can't deny it--requisite
formalities and necessary absurdities. But to turn the last page of the
last pad, and mark it with a red pencil and add it to the pile of
miseries past, and slip away from books to nature, from learning to
life, between the lupin and the laurel--that is a pleasure doubled by
release from pain.
I think a prize should be offered for the discovery of good places to
take a free and natural outing within easy reach of the great city and
the routine of civilized work--just-over-the-fence retreats, to which
you can run off without much preparation, and from which you can come
back again before your little world discovers your absence. That was
the charm of Hopkinson Smith's sketch, "A Day at Laguerre's"; and an
English writer who calls himself "A Son of the Marshes" has written a
delightful book of interviews with birds and other wild things, which
bears the attractive title, "Within an Hour of London Town." But I
would make it a condition of the prize that the name of the
hiding-place should not be published, lest the careless, fad-following
crowd should flock thither and spoil it. Let the precious news be
communicated only by word of mouth, or by letter, as a confidence and
gift of friendship, so that none but the like-minded may strike the
trail to the next-door remnant of Eden.
It was thus that my four friends--Friends in creed as well as in
deed--told to me, one of "the world's people," toiling over my
benumbing examination papers, their secret find of a little river in
South Jersey, less than an hour from Philadelphia, where one could
float in a canoe through mile after mile of unbroken woodland, and camp
at night in a bit of wilderness as wildly fair as when the wigwams of
the Lenni-Lenape were hidden among its pine groves. The Friends said
that they "had a concern" to guide me to their delectable retreat, and
that they hoped the "way would open" for me to come. Canoes and tents
and camp-kit? "That will all be provided; it is well not to be anxious
concerning these sublunary things." Mosquitoes? "Concerning this, also,
thee must learn to put thy trust in Providence; yet there is a happy
interval, as it were, between the fading of the hepatica and the
blooming of the mosquito, when the woods of South Jersey are habitable
for man, and it would be most prudent to choose this season for the
exercise of providential trust regarding mosquitoes." Examination
papers? Duty? "Surely thee must do what thee thinks will do most good,
and follow the inward voice. And if it calls thee to stay with the
examination papers, or if it calls thee to go with us, whichever way,
thee will be resigned to obey." Fortunately, there was no doubt about
the inward voice; it was echoing the robins; it was calling me to go
out like Elijah and dwell under a juniper-tree. I replied to the
Friends in the words of one of their own preachers: "I am resigned to
go, or resigned to stay, but most resigned to go"; and we went.