the red disc of the sun was low, its nether half obliterated by a
long, misty cloud. The levels on my right, and their dark, moss-like
corrugations, were misted over, not so densely that a white river of
train smoke could not be seen flowing through it; and Brent Knoll far
off towered over it like an islet of crag, dark and distinct; nor was
the prostrate mass of Brean Down invisible on the seaward side of Brent
Knoll. Not a sound emerged from that side beyond the bleat of a few
lambs. On the left was the misty country of Athelney, and a solitary
dark tower raised well above the midst of the level. The most delicate
scene of all my journey was nearer. The Poldens have on this side
several foothills, and at the turning to Righton’s Grave one of these
confronted me; I had it in full view for a mile and could hardly look
at anything else. This was Ball Hill. It is a smooth island lifted up
out of an ever so faintly undulating land of hedged meadows and sparse
elm trees. It rose very gradually, parallel to my road and about half
a mile from it, so as to make a long, nascent curve, up to a comb of
trees; and its flank was divided downwards and lengthwise amongst rosy
ploughland and pale green corn in large hedgeless squares and oblongs,
beautifully contrasted in size and colour. Next to Ball Hill is another
one, as distinct, but steeper and wooded, called Pendon Hill. In the
dip between the two lay the church tower and cottages of Stawell, and
a dim orchard rose behind them with trees that were like smoke. Though
the lines of these hills and their decorated slopes are definitely
beautiful, during the dusk on that silver road in the first Spring
innocence they were a miraculous birth, to match the Spring innocence
and the tranquillity of the dusk as I slid quietly on that road of
silver.
Then came two shams. The first was a towered residence close to the
road, with Gothic features. The second, black against the sky, three
miles ahead, was a tower and many ruinous arches on top of the wooded
hill at Knowle. It is hard to show how not very experienced eyes begin
to suspect a sham of this sort. But they did, and yet were able to
dally a little with the kind of feeling which the real thing would
have produced. For, when I saw the ruins most clearly, at the turn to
Woolavington, Highbridge, and Burnham, twilight was half spent.
The road was descending. Bridgwater’s tower, spire, and chimneys, and
smoke mingling with trees, were visible down on the left, and past
them the dim Quantocks fading down to the sea. I was soon at the level
of the railway, and Bawdrip behind the embankment showed me a pretty
jumble of roofs, chimneys, a church tower, and a green thorn tree over
the rim. The high slope of Knowle and its rookery beeches--where the
ruin is--hung upon the right very darkly over the small pale “Knowle
Inn” and the white scattered blackthorn blossom and myself slipping
by. The road went on to Puriton and Pawlett, and down it under the
trees two lovers were walking slowly, but opposite Knowle I had to
turn sharp to the left. Those green trees in the last of the twilight
seemed exceptionally benign. After the turning I immediately crossed
the deep-cut King’s Sedgemoor drain--with a flowering orchard betwixt
it and the road I had left--and in a few yards the single line of
the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway. Two miles of flat field and
white-painted orchard, and I was in a street of flat, dull, brick
cottages and foul smoke, but possessing an extraordinarily haughty
white hart chained over an inn porch of that name. Then the river
Parrett; and a dark ship drawn up under the line of tall inns and
stores with glimmering windows. I crossed the bridge and walked up
Corn Hill between the shops to where the roads fork, one for Taunton,
one for Minehead, to left and right of Robert Blake’s statue and the
pillared dome of the market. I took the Minehead road, the right-hand
one, past the banks, the post office, the “Royal Clarence” hotel, and
by half-past seven I was eating supper, listening to children outside
in the still, dark street, laughing, chattering, teasing, disputing. I
read a page or two of the “History of Prince Lee Boo,” and fell asleep.
IX.
BRIDGWATER TO THE SEA.
The night at Bridgwater was still. I heard little after ten except the
clear deep bells of St. Mary’s telling the quarters. They woke me with
the first light, and I was glad to be out of the hotel early because
the three other guests (I think, commercial travellers) not only did
not talk--which may have been a blessing--but took no notice of “Good
evening” or “Good morning.” It was a clean, new, and unfriendly place,
that caused a sensation as of having slept in linoleum. The charge for
supper, bed, and breakfast was the usual one, a few pence over four
shillings.
I wandered about the western half of the town. This being built on a
slight hill above the river, was older and better worth looking at
than the flat eastern half, though it was lacking in trees, as may be
guessed from the fact that some rooks had had to nest in horse-chestnut
trees, which they avoid if possible. Castle Street is the pleasantest
in the town, a wide, straight old street of three-storey brick houses,
rising almost imperceptibly away from the quay. The houses, all
private, have round-topped windows and are flat-fronted, except for
two at the bottom which have bays. Across the upper end a big, sunlit,
ivied house, taller than the others and of mellower brick, with a
chestnut tree, projects somewhat, and on the pavement below it is a red
pillar box.
The quay itself is good enough to recall Bideford. The river is
straight for a distance, and separated from the quayside buildings
only by the roadway. These buildings, ship-brokers’ and contractors’,
port authority’s and customs and excise offices, a steam sawmill,
and the “Fountain,” “Dolphin,” and “King’s Head,” are plain enough,
mostly with tall flat fronts with scant lettering and no decoration,
all in a block, looking over at the low level of the Castle Field
north-eastward, where cattle grazed in the neighbourhood of
chimney-stacks and railway signals. The _Arthur_ was waiting for a
cargo. The _Emma_ was unloading coal. But for the rest the quay was
quiet, and a long greyhound lay stretched out across the roadway, every
inch of him content in the warm sun.
The next best thing to the quay was the broad sandstone Church of St.
Mary and its tall spire, standing on a daisied, cropped turf among
thorns and a few tombstones, and walled in on three sides by houses,
shops, and the “White Lion” and “Golden Ball.” The walls inside provide
recesses for many tombs. The most memorable tomb in the church is that
of an Irish soldier named Kingsmill. He is a fine fellow, albeit of
stone, leaning on his elbow and looking at the world or nothing as
if satisfied with his position. He “sleeps well”--no man, I should
say, better. This and his features reminded me of a man still living,
a man of brawn and spirit, a despiser of beastly foreigners, and a
good sleeper. I have seen him looking like old Kingsmill, with this
one difference--that when he was in that stage of wakingness he had
a cigarette between his lips invariably. He awoke, smiling at the
goodness of sleep and of the world, and lay back, whoever called him,
to sleep again. Resurrected at length, or partly so, he would sigh, but
not in sorrow, and then swear, and turn over to reach a cigarette from
beside the bed. The lighted cigarette regilded the world: he envied
no man, any more than Kingsmill does, and certainly no woman. The
cigarette, though enchanted, came to an end, even so; and he did what
Kingsmill perhaps never did, took a cold bath, but in a manner which
Kingsmill would have admired. The bath being filled to within an inch
or two of overflowing, he let himself slowly in until he was completely
under water, where he lay in a state apparently of bliss lasting many
seconds, for beneficent providence had ordained that he should be
almost as much aquatic as he was earthly, worldly, and territorial.
Then out he came like Mars rising from the foam. After drying himself
for ten minutes he lit another cigarette and rambled about his room
without artificial covering until he had smoked it. Next he began
dressing, an operation not to be described in my style in less than
two volumes octavo, and worthy of something incomparably more godlike,
for he was as a god and his dressing was godlike.... After Kingsmill’s
effigy the chief spectacle of St. Mary’s is the unexpected, big
Italianate picture of Christ’s descent from the cross, which forms an
altar-piece. The story is that it was taken from a Spanish vessel--some
add that it was one of the Great Armada; that it reached Bridgwater
after a long seclusion at Plymouth, and was claimed by Plymouth when
Bridgwater was seen to have it, but that Bridgwater kept it in a
packing case for two years.
With the quay and the church ranks the statue of Robert Blake, if only
for the inscription,--
“Born in this town, 1598.
Died at sea, 1657.”
I am told that there is also a passage quoted from one Edmund Spencer,
but I did not see it; nor is it so great an error as the inscription
about Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and they have less time in
Bridgwater market-place than in Salisbury Cathedral for literary
accuracy.
It was half-past ten on a beautiful morning when I rode out of the town
by a very suburban suburb of villas, elms, and a cemetery. My road
carried me at first along a low ridge, so that over the stone walls I
looked down east and northward to the vale of the Parrett; a misty,
not quite flat expanse of green, alternating with reddish and already
crumbling ploughland, which was interrupted a mile away by the red
walls, elms, and orchard of Chilton Trinity, and farther off, by the
pale church tower of Cannington. Two horses were drawing a scarifier
across the furrows of a field by the roadside. On my left or westward
I looked beyond a more broken country, with white linen blowing on
cottage garden bushes, to the dim Quantocks still far off. The sun
was hot, but the wind blew from behind me, and the dust was not an
offence when a motor car was not passing me. A chiff-chaff was singing
at Wembdon. Larks crowded their songs into a maze in every quarter.
Overhead a single telegraph wire sizzled.
Three miles out of Bridgwater my road had dropped to the level, and
proceeded over it to Cannington, but instead of sticking to it I turned
at a smithy on my left into a by-road, which wound between low hedges
of thorn and maple mounted either on ivied walls or on banks covered
with celandines. It passed Bradley Green’s few cottages, the “Malt
Shovel” inn, an oak copse with a chiff-chaff in it, and here a robin on
a wall, and there a linnet on a thorn tip, in a slightly up and down
country of grass, ploughland, and orchard. In a mile the road twisted
at right angles to cross the Cannington brook and rejoin the main road;
and at this angle, by a green bowered lane, was a stone house and
chapel in one. This was Blackmoor Manor Farm, a group that no longer
has anything stately or sacred save what it owes to its antiquity and
continuous human occupation.
The main road, when I rejoined it, was rising once more between banks
of gorse. So bright was the blossom of the gorse that its branches were
shadowy and nearly invisible in the brightness. For the sun was now
as warm as ever it need be for a man who can move himself from place
to place. On both hands the undulating land was warm and misty, but
particularly on the right. There, as I approached Swang Farm, at the
third milestone from Nether Stowey, a hill, almost as graceful as Ball
Hill near Stawell, rose parallel to the road, its long-curving ridge
about a third of a mile away. Its smooth flank was apportioned by
hedgerows and a few elms among bare ploughland and young corn above,
and drabby grass with sheep on it below. Near by, on the other side,
was another such hill, a nameless one above Halsey Cross Farm, which
I first took notice of when it was cut in two perpendicularly by the
signpost pointing to Spaxton. It was but a blunt, conical hillside
of green corn, rosy ploughland, sheep-fed pasture, and a few elms in
the partitions; and behind it the dim Quantocks. Between these two
hills, at a spot where the road twists again at right angles, a brick
summer-house perched on the walled roadside bank, at the very corner.
Here, as I heard, a few generations ago, ladies from the house near by
used to sit to watch for the coaches. I was now two hundred feet up in
the foothills of the Quantocks. Three or four miles in front bulked the
moorlands of the main ridge.
Nether Stowey begins with a church and a farm and farmyard in a group.
Then follows a street of cottages without front gardens, dominated by
a smooth green “castle” rampart a third of a mile away. The street
ends in a “First and Last Inn” on one side, and a cottage on the other,
announced as formerly Coleridge’s by an inscription and a stone wreath
of dull reddish brown. Altogether Nether Stowey offered no temptations
to be compared with those of the road leading out of it. Immediately
outside the village it was walled by deep banks, and on these grew
arum, celandine, and nettle, with bushes of new-leaved blackthorn and
spindle. Here I saw the first starry, white stitchworts or milkmaids.
And henceforward I was always walking steeply up or steeply down one
of the medley of lesser hills. Below on the right was chiefly red
ploughland; above on the left wilder and wilder heights of sheep-fed
moorland. The road was visible ahead, looping half way up the slopes.
Honeysuckle ramped on the banks of the deep-worn road in such profusion
as I had never before seen. The sky had clouded softly, and the
sun-warmed misty woods of the coombs, the noise of slender waters
threading them, the exuberant young herbage, the pure flowers such
as stitchwort and the pink and “silver white” cuckoo flowers, but
above all the abounding honeysuckle, produced an effect of wildness
and richness, purity and softness, so vivid that the association
of Nether Stowey was hardly needed to summon up Coleridge. The mere
imagination of what these banks would be like when the honeysuckle
was in flower was enough to suggest the poet. I became fantastic, and
said to myself that the honeysuckle was worthy to provide the honeydew
for nourishing his genius; even that its magic might have touched
that genius to life--which is absurd. And yet magic alone could have
led Coleridge safely through the style of his age, the style of the
author of Jolliffe’s epitaph at Kilmersdon, the style of Stephen Duck
and his benefactors, the style of his own boyish effusions, where he
personified Misfortune, Love, Wisdom, Virtue, Fortune, and Content with
the aid of capitals. He fell again when weary into lines like,--
“Thro’ vales irriguous, and thro’ green retreats;”
he rose and fell once more, until finally the conventions had either
slipped away or been adopted or subdued. Perhaps it was not in vain,
or so fatuous as it seems to us, that he personified, like any lady or
gentleman of the day,--
“The hideous offspring of Disease,
Swoln Dropsy ignorant of Rest,
And Fever garb’d in scarlet vest;
Consumption driving the quick hearse,
And Gout that howls the frequent curse;
With Apoplex of heavy head
That surely aims his dart of lead.”
Whether we can follow him or not into intimacy with those “beings of
higher class than man,” Fire, Famine, Slaughter, Woes, and Young-eyed
Joys, the more or less than fleshly creatures of his later poems may
owe something to that early dressing up, as well as to the honeydew-fed
raptures of Nether Stowey.
Some of the early poems reveal underneath the dismal tawdry vesture of
contemporary diction the beginnings of what we now know as Coleridge.
It is to be seen in the sonnet, “To the Autumnal Moon,” written in 1788
when he was sixteen, which begins,--
“Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night,
Mother of Wildly-working visions hail;”
and then again more subtly in 1795, when he is looking for a
Pantisocratic dell,--
“Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,
And dancing to the moonlight roundelay,
The Wizard Passions weave an holy spell” ...
though it is impossible to say that the collocation of calm and
careless, wizard and holy, would have arrested us had Coleridge made
no advance from it, had he remained a minor poet. The combination of
mild and wild is a characteristic one, partly instinctive, partly an
intellectual desire, as he shows by speaking of a “soft impassioned
voice, correctly wild.” The two come quaintly together in his image
of,--
“Affection meek
(Her bosom bare, and wildly pale her cheek),”
and nobly in the picture of Joan of Arc,--
“Bold her mien,
And like a haughty huntress of the woods
She moved: yet sure she was a gentle maid.”
Coleridge loved equally mildness and wildness, as I saw them on the
one hand in the warm red fields, the gorse smouldering with bloom, the
soft delicious greenery of the banks; and on the other hand in the
stag’s home, the dark, bleak ridges of heather or pine, the deep-carved
coombs. Mildness, meekness, gentleness, softness, made appeals both
sensuous and spiritual to the poet’s chaste and voluptuous affections
and to something homely in him, while his spirituality, responding to
the wildness, branched forth into metaphysics and natural magic. Some
time passed before the combining was complete. There was, for example,
a tendency to _naiveté_ and plainness, to the uninspired accuracy of
“pinky-silver skin” (of a birch tree), and to the matter of fact--
“The Mariners gave it biscuit worms--”
which he cut out of “The Ancient Mariner.” He cut out of “This
Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” a phrase informing us that he was kept
prisoner by a burn. At first he called “the grand old ballad of Sir
Patrick Spens” the “dear old ballad,” and the lines,--
“Yon crescent Moon is fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue”
were followed by--
“A boat becalm’d, a lovely sky-canoe”
It was natural to him at first to address Wordsworth as
“O Friend! O Teacher! God’s great gift to me!”
and it became natural to him to cut out the last phrase. Formerly
Geraldine said to Christabel, “I’m better now”; and instead of lying
entranced she lay “in fits.” The poem still includes the phrase
describing Christabel’s eyes,--
“Each about to have a tear;”
while “Frost at Midnight” retains the allusion to the “fluttering
stranger” in the fire, the filmy blue flame, as a note instructs us,
“supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend.” There is, too,
a whole class of homely poems, on receiving the news of his child’s
birth, on being warned not to bathe in the sea: “God be with thee,
gladsome Ocean,” it begins.
The mildness, meekness, gentleness, beloved of Coleridge’s tender and
effusive nature, appear with such diverse company as in “Poverty’s meek
woe,” “mild and manliest melancholy,” and “mild moon-mellow’d foliage,”
and repeated with variations four times in one verse of the lines
written at Shurton Bars, near Bridgwater,--
“I felt it prompt the tender Dream,
When slowly sank the Day’s last gleam;
You rous’d each gentler sense,
As sighing o’er the Blossom’s bloom
Meek Evening wakes its soft perfume
With viewless influence.”
Sometimes the mildness expands to conscious luxury, as in the poem
“Composed during Illness, and in Absence,” beginning,--
“Dim Hour, that sleep’st on pillowing clouds afar,
O rise and yoke the Turtles to thy car!
Bend o’er the traces, blame each lingering Dove,
And give me to the bosom of my Love!
My gentle Love, caressing and carest,
With heaving heart shall carol me to rest!
Shed the warm tear-drop from her smiling eyes--
Lull with fond woe, and medicine me with sighs,
While finely-flushing float her kisses meek,
Like melted rubies o’er my pallid cheek.”
Here he is half laughing at his own tendency, but he had only
transitory thoughts of checking it. In “Reflections on having left a
Place of Retirement,” he speaks of dreaming,--
“On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart
With feelings all too delicate for use.”
He is in revolt against the tendency, but only with his intellect.
The honeysuckle intoxicates his heart too surely under the “indulgent
skies” of that summer with Wordsworth.
A marked variety of his luxury is disclosed by his many references to
the maiden’s bosom and the swelling of it with emotion. I choose the
following example because it includes so much that is characteristic
besides,--
“Oft will I tell thee, Minstrel of the Moon,
‘Most musical, most melancholy’ Bird!
That all thy soft diversities of tune,
Tho’ sweeter far than the delicious airs
That vibrate from a white-armed Lady’s harp,
What time the languishment of lonely love
Melts in her eye, and heaves her breast of snow,
Are not so sweet as is the voice of her,
My Sara--best beloved of human kind!
When breathing the pure soul of tenderness,
She thrills me with the Husband’s promised name!”
This quality is more effective in company with the other quality and
relieved by it. I mean the quality which responds to ghostliness and to
the wildness of Nature. “The Keepsake” has it perfect, in this picture
of a girl,--
“In the cool morning twilight, early waked
By her full bosom’s joyous restlessness,
Softly she rose, and lightly stole along,
Down the slope coppice to the woodbine bower,
Whose rich flowers, swinging in the morning breeze,
Over their dim, fast-moving shadows hung,
Making a quiet image of disquiet
In the smooth, scarcely-moving river-pool.”
It is perfect again, differently combined, in part of “The Æolian
Harp,”--
“The long sequacious notes
Over delicious surges sink and rise,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam’d wing!”
The work of this best period, the Quantock sojourn, shows this uniting
of richness and delicacy, of sweetness and freshness, of sensuousness
and wildness, of spirit and sense, irresistibly intruding on “Religious
Musings,” as here,--
“When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massy gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies
And odours snatched from beds of Amaranth,
And they, that from the crystal river of life
Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales;”
or, as in “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner,” both written in
the Quantocks, raised again and again to a peculiar harmony from the
innermost parts of our poetry’s holy of holies.
Except for Coleridge, I had the road to myself between Nether Stowey
and Holford. Sheep were feeding on some of the slopes, and in one
coomb woodmen were trimming cordwood among prostrate regiments of oak
trees; but these eaters of grass, or of bread and cheese and bacon,
were ghosts by comparison with the man who wrote “The Ancient Mariner;”
the very hills, their chasms and processions of beeches, were made
unforgettable by his May opium dream of--
“That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.”
Then the sea. At a mile past Holford the road bent sharp to the left
and west, to get between the sea and the Quantocks. A sign-board
pointed to the right to Stringston’s red-roofed white church. On the
left two converging hillsides framed a wedge of sea, divided into
parallel bands of gray and blue. It came as if it were a reward, an
achievement, the unsuspected aim of my meanderings. A long drift of
smoke lay over it from the seaward edge of the hills. The bottom of the
wedge held the village of Kilve, and, a little apart, the cube of Kilve
Court. As if to a goal I raced downhill to Kilve and its brook.
I had lunch at the “Hood Arms,” and made up my mind to stay there
for that night. Two o’clock had not long passed when I left the inn
and the main road and went north to Kilve Church and the sea. The
by-road accompanied the brook, and skirted its apple orchards and tall
poplars wagging myriads of wine-red catkins. Having passed a mill, a
farm, and a cottage or two, the road took me to the church and its
big, short-boughed yew tree, and became a farm track only. The small
towered church is a poor place, clean and newly repointed outside,
the arches filled in which had apparently communicated with a side
chapel, and all its possible crosses lacking. Inside it has a cheap
rickety gallery at the tower end, and was being stripped of its plaster
to show the wood carving at the cornice. Tablets hang on the wall
in memory of people named Cunditt and Sweeting, and of Norah Muriel
Sweet-Escott, aged twenty, who died in South Africa of yellow fever.
As I was leaving the church, entered the Other Man. Laughing nervously
at the encounter, he explained that he had come to Kilve to see if it
really had a weather-cock. He reminded me of Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for
Fathers,” where the poet pesters his son of five to give his reason for
preferring Liswyn to Kilve, until, a broad, gilded vane catching his
eye, the child gives the inspired answer,--
“At Kilve there is no weather-cock;
And that’s the reason why.”