Written on an expedition to Wales with his parents.
_Train between Edinburgh and Chester, August 8, 1874._
My father and mother reading. I think I shall talk to you for a moment
or two. This morning at Swanston, the birds, poor creatures, had the
most troubled hour or two; evidently there was a hawk in the
neighbourhood; not one sang; and the whole garden thrilled with little
notes of warning and terror. I did not know before that the voice of
birds could be so tragically expressive. I had always heard them before
express their trivial satisfaction with the blue sky and the return of
daylight. Really, they almost frightened me; I could hear mothers and
wives in terror for those who were dear to them; it was easy to
translate, I wish it were as easy to write; but it is very hard in this
flying train, or I would write you more.
_Chester._--I like this place much; but somehow I feel glad when I get
among the quiet eighteenth century buildings, in cosy places with some
elbow room about them, after the older architecture. This other is
bedevilled and furtive; it seems to stoop; I am afraid of trap-doors,
and could not go pleasantly into such houses. I don't know how much of
this is legitimately the effect of the architecture; little enough
possibly; possibly far the most part of it comes from bad historical
novels and the disquieting statuary that garnishes some facades.
On the way, to-day, I passed through my dear Cumberland country. Nowhere
to as great a degree can one find the combination of lowland and
highland beauties; the outline of the blue hills is broken by the
outline of many tumultuous tree-clumps; and the broad spaces of moorland
are balanced by a network of deep hedgerows that might rival Suffolk, in
the foreground.--How a railway journey shakes and discomposes one, mind
and body! I grow blacker and blacker in humour as the day goes on; and
when at last I am let out, and have the fresh air about me, it is as
though I were born again, and the sick fancies flee away from my mind
like swans in spring.
I want to come back on what I have said about eighteenth century and
middle-age houses: I do not know if I have yet explained to you the sort
of loyalty, of urbanity, that there is about the one to my mind; the
spirit of a country orderly and prosperous, a flavour of the presence of
magistrates and well-to-do merchants in bag-wigs, the clink of glasses
at night in fire-lit parlours, something certain and civic and domestic,
is all about these quiet, staid, shapely houses, with no character but
their exceeding shapeliness, and the comely external utterance that they
make of their internal comfort. Now the others are, as I have said, both
furtive and bedevilled; they are sly and grotesque; they combine their
sort of feverish grandeur with their sort of secretive baseness, after
the manner of a Charles the Ninth. They are peopled for me with persons
of the same fashion. Dwarfs and sinister people in cloaks are about
them; and I seem to divine crypts, and, as I said, trap-doors. O God be
praised that we live in this good daylight and this good peace.
_Barmouth, August 9th._--To-day we saw the cathedral at Chester; and,
far more delightful, saw and heard a certain inimitable verger who took
us round. He was full of a certain recondite, far-away humour that did
not quite make you laugh at the time, but was somehow laughable to
recollect. Moreover, he had so far a just imagination, and could put one
in the right humour for seeing an old place, very much as, according to
my favourite text, Scott's novels and poems do for one. His account of
the monks in the Scriptorium, with their cowls over their heads, in a
certain sheltered angle of the cloister where the big cathedral building
kept the sun off the parchments, was all that could be wished; and so
too was what he added of the others pacing solemnly behind them and
dropping, ever and again, on their knees before a little shrine there is
in the wall, "to keep 'em in the frame of mind." You will begin to think
me unduly biassed in this verger's favour if I go on to tell you his
opinion of me. We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear
the choir children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to
them, with, I dare say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful
to me. "Ah," says he, "you're _very_ fond of music." I said I was. "Yes,
I could tell that by your head," he answered. "There's a deal in that
head." And he shook his own solemnly. I said it might be so, but I found
it hard, at least, to get it out. Then my father cut in brutally, said
anyway I had no ear, and left the verger so distressed and shaken in the
foundations of his creed that, I hear, he got my father aside afterwards
and said he was sure there was something in my face, and wanted to know
what it was, if not music. He was relieved when he heard that I occupied
myself with literature (which word, note here, I do now spell
correctly). Good-night, and here's the verger's health!
_Friday._--Yesterday received the letter you know of. I have finished my
Portfolio paper, not very good but with things in it: I don't know if
they will take it; and I have got a good start made with my _John Knox_
articles. The weather here is rainy and miserable and windy: it is warm
and not over boisterous for a certain sort of pleasure. This place, as
I have made my first real inquisition into it to-night is curious
enough; all the days I have been here, I have been at work, and so I was
quite new to it.
_Saturday._--A most beautiful day. We took a most beautiful drive, also
up the banks of the river. The heather and furze are in flower at once
and make up a splendid richness of colour on the hills; the trees were
beautiful; there was a bit of winding road with larches on one hand and
oaks on the other; the oaks were in shadow and printed themselves off at
every corner on the sunlit background of the larches. We passed a little
family of children by the roadside. The youngest of all sat a good way
apart from the others on the summit of a knoll; it was ensconced in an
old tea-box, out of which issued its head and shoulders in a blue cloak
and scarlet hat. O if you could have seen its dignity! It was
deliciously humorous: and this little piece of comic self-satisfaction
was framed in wonderfully by the hills and the sunlit estuary. We saw
another child in a cottage garden. She had been sick, it seemed, and was
taking the air quietly for health's sake. Over her pale face, she had
decorated herself with all available flowers and weeds; and she was
driving one chair as a horse, sitting in another by way of carriage. We
cheered her as we passed, and she acknowledged the compliment like a
queen. I like children better every day, I think, and most other things
less. _John Knox_ goes on, and a horrible story of a nurse which I think
almost too cruel to go on with: I wonder why my stories are always so
nasty.[18] I am still well, and in good spirits. I say, by the way, have
you any means of finding Madame Garschine's address. If you have,
communicate with me. I fear my last letter has been too late to catch
her at Franzensbad; and so I shall have to go without my visit
altogether, which would vex me.