FIFTH DAY--IVINGHOE TO WATLINGTON, ON THE LOWER ICKNIELD WAY, BY ASTON
CLINTON, WESTON TURVILLE, CHINNOR, AND LEWKNOR
I had to go back to the forking of the Icknield Way and follow the
Lower road from Ivinghoe. St. Mary’s Church at Ivinghoe stands
pleasantly among sycamores and beeches, and next door to a small
creeper-covered brewery which is next door to a decent creeper-covered
house with round-topped windows and a most cool and comfortable
expression. Some stout and red-faced men stood talking outside the
brewery in cheerful mood. On the opposite side of the road was a green
enclosed by a low railing. The village was a straggling one, and there
were many newish houses, of pale brick here and there, as well as old
timbered cottages. I went into a grocer’s shop at the moment when they
were killing a pig on the other side of the wall. Neither the shrieking
nor the end of it disturbed the stout proprietor cutting up lard and
the women talking of the coronation.
[Illustration: Grand Junction Canal.]
The road was a dull, straight one going south-westwards over the London
and North Western Railway a mile north of the Upper road, and two and
a half miles north-west of Tring station. It passed allotment gardens
and had the company of heavy-laden telegraph-posts, whose wires cut
across the terraces or “linces” of Southend Hill on the right. But if
the corn-bunting sang its curst dry monotony on the telegraph-wire a
blackbird also sang in an oak. Beyond the railway the road was better
and had level green edges up to the roses of the high hedge on the
right and the low one on the left, over which I could see across the
oats to the Chilterns lying dark under the sun. On the other side of
the barley, which was a cold and bluish green, rose Marsworth Church
tower to the right. The reservoirs beyond the turning to Marsworth were
broad and rough-edged, and with some trimmed poplars at a corner, a
straight rank of trimmed elm trees near the further edge, and the line
of telegraph-wires on this side, they made a foreign scene, against the
background of the Chilterns, of a fascinating dreariness; one man was
fishing from the bank. Crossing the canal I was in Hertfordshire, which
I left at the far side of the last reservoir. These dreary waters had
attracted some thickets which the sedge-warbler loved and sang in, as
by the Wilstone Reservoir. The inns (where they provide for anglers)
and the houses near the locks had the look of canalside and wharfside
settlements, a certain squalor more than redeemed by the individuality.
The unpopulated hills on the left of it, and the Vale of Aylesbury on
the right, emphasized this half-urban, half-marine character. The road
here was very much broken into sharp turns not always by a crossing.
Immediately after the last reservoir, before the turning to Drayton
Beauchamp, the road was at its best, winding between not too level
green edges of unequal breadth, and hedges of thorns and roses and a
few ash trees; and on the edges the grass had been cut and was lying
across the low clover. Doves cooed and a lark overhead sang “as if he
never would be old.” Then, at a bend where a ditch came in and had a
willow above it and some meadow-sweet round about, a sedge-warbler was
singing, the soul of a little world ten yards across. The crossing of
the road to Drayton was one I shall not forget. The signpost pointed
back to Ivinghoe, forward to Aylesbury, Buckland, and Aston Clinton,
on the right to Puttenham, on the left to Drayton. There was a small
crook to the left before my road went forward again. In the midst of
the meeting ways the signpost had a green triangle to stand on. Also,
each road had green borders which all widened to the crossing; some of
the borders had rushes. The road to Puttenham swelled up a little and
fell, and over the rim showed the trees of the vale. Ahead and to the
left were the wooded downs. As I left the signpost I had a very sweet,
gentle-spoken “Good morning” from a traveller coming towards me, a
little and rickety dark foreign man, cheerful and old, carrying a thick
satchel on his back and looking neither to the right nor to the left.
Instead of going on into Akeman Street and then turning at right angles
along it for a mile, I took a path half a mile on this side of it which
led towards Buckland Church. Where the path crossed the first hedge, a
narrow, low embankment went off to the left along the hedge, followed
by the path to the church and entering at last an elmy and nettly lane.
Buckland village has many elm trees, plain little houses, twisting
lanes, and a “Buck’s Head” in a dim corner of them. Its church is of
alternating flints and freestone, but the tower all of stone. It was a
very cool place with a slow, muffled, beating clock and a carpet of sun
lying across the floor from the netted open door. One of the tablets on
the wall was to Judith ----. High on the wall under the tower was an
inscription saying:--
“Near this place, together with those of an infant daughter, lie the
earthly remains of Frances Russell, relict of William Russell of Great
Missenden, daughter of Edward and Frances Horwood of this place. She
died October 8, 1793, aged 73 years.
“The fleeting moments of Prosperity, the tedious hours of Adversity,
and the lingering illness which Providence allotted, she bore with
equanimity and Christian resignation.
“Reader! Go and do likewise.”
It was a rusty and dusty inscription read mostly by the bellringers
standing under the tower, and one of the most dismal certificates of
life, marriage, motherhood, religion, death and the philosophy of
relatives that I have seen. It was cheerful afterwards to read the name
of Peter Parrot on a tombstone out in the sun.
[Illustration: Aston Clinton.]
Past Buckland Church, I turned to the right and almost at once to the
left along a road which went through a hayfield and then became a
borderless hedged road, but with parallel marks as of traffic on the
left. It came out opposite Aston Clinton Church into Akeman Street,
a main road of elms, chestnuts, and telegraph-poles, going through
a typical “peaceful” village street, with a smithy and a “Rose and
Crown,” “Swan,” and “Palm in Hand,” an advertisement of petrol, a
horse’s brass trappings gleaming under a tree, and in the park on
the left hand a peacock proclaiming the neighbourhood of a large
house. I had to turn to the right along Akeman Street for a quarter
mile before turning out to the left into a road with houses facing
the park. They were poor cottages, a little sordid and all jammed in
a row, and three public houses amongst them. Past these houses the
road was a dull, straight one under elms, with a clear view over a
level beanfield to the Downs and their trees, with bright tops and
dark, misty shadows below. Presently a brooklet appeared alongside
the road among willow-herb and overhung by alder, elder, and willow,
and at the beginning of Weston Turville it provided entertainment for
half a hundred ducklings. The road went through the midst of Weston
Turville and among inns on both sides and down the turnings, a “Vine,”
a “Chequers,” a “Plough,” a “Six Bells,” a “Black Horse,” a “Chandos,”
and a “Crown,” followed not much beyond the church by a “Marquis of
Granby” and a “Swan”--but these were at World’s End. It was a village
with here a house and there two or three round a square of streets,
with the manor-house and elmy church tower outside it to the south;
and between the houses there were intervals of garden. I noticed a
little house lost between the great bare trunks of half a forest of
trees in a timber merchant’s yard. I found an inn which had a straight
settle facing a curved one of elm with a sloping back and reasonable
arm-rests. There were quoits on pegs under the ceiling, and above the
usual circular target for darts; the open fireplace had a kitchen range
placed in it. The floor was composed of bluish-black and red tiles
alternating.
I did not make certain how the Icknield Way went through Weston
Turville, though a possible course seemed to turn left on entering
the village and go by Brook Farm and Malthouse Row, and a little west
of the old manor-house and by the “Vine.” Unless it took some such
course, it could hardly have got to Terrick and Little Kimble, but must
rather have gone straight on through Stoke Mandeville, Kimblewick, and
Owlswick and into the road now marked “Lower Icknield Way” at Pitch
Green. I went past the Weston reservoir to World’s End, and then over
the Wendover and Aylesbury road only a mile north of Wendover, having
clearly in view the obelisk on Coombe Hill, and a little later the
towered Ellesborough Church looking ghostly in the sunlight under
Beacon Hill. The hay was cut on both sides, and the road wound between
broad borders of thistles and nettles. Near Terrick I saw the first
meadow crane’s-bill of that season and that country--the purple flower
whose purple is the emblem of a rich inward burning passion. At the
very edges of the roadside turf the white clover grew. In the hawthorns
a blackbird sang.
Soon I came to Kimble station on the Aylesbury branch of the Great
Western and Great Central Junction Railway, and some new houses, one
of them named “Beware of the Dogs.” Under the railway I turned left
to Risborough and Longwick, not right to Hartwell. And now the road
settled down to a fairly straight course for about ten miles, with
meadow-sweet and rose in its low hedges and a view over the wheat to
the Chilterns. It was usually about a hundred feet lower than the
Upper way, and from one to two miles north of it. It was crossed by
hardly any road more important than itself, except that from Thame to
Princes Risborough. At this crossing, outside “The Duke of Wellington”
or “Sportsman’s Arms,” a street organ played “Beside the Seaside”
and other national anthems. Little more than a mile beyond I entered
Oxfordshire. I left the road to see Chinnor Church, half a mile south,
which looks southward on the juniper-dotted hills skirted by the Upper
way. The most notable thing in the church was an oval tablet near the
screen inscribed with the words:--
Beneath
lie
the remains of
William Turner
Esq^{re}
who died 23^{rd} March
1797 aged 61
“Here the wicked cease
from troubling and
the weary are
at rest.”
The word “here” my fancy took quite literally, and I saw a skeleton
cramped behind the tablet protesting to the living that there, inside
the wall, denuded of flesh and of all organs, nerves, and desires, a
wicked man ceased from troubling and a weary one could be at rest; the
teeth of the skeleton shook in their dry sockets as it, now a hundred
and ten years old, uttered those sweet words: “Here the wicked cease
from troubling and the weary are at rest.” Some of the dead outside
bore formidable monosyllabic names, such as Wall, Crook, Saw, and
Cocks. At the “Royal Oak” I listened for half an hour to information
and complaints about the heat, which was at the time about ninety
degrees in the shade, and then went out to make the most of the heat
itself, which I could well do, having myself, as a good critic has
pronounced, an unvarying temperature of about forty-five degrees
(Fahr.).
I left the “Bird in Hand” and a squat, white windmill on the left and
entered a fine green road going straight south-west. One of the hedges
was high enough for shade, in the other some young chestnut trees were
growing up. After some distance the left half of the road was rough and
had a ditch along it; then a tiny stream flowed across, and the way
lost its left hedge and went slightly raised between wheat and oats,
poppy and tall, pale scabious. After that I had clover and bird’s-foot
trefoil and bedstraw and rest-harrow underfoot--corn on the left as far
as elms in masses, and behind these the Chilterns--corn on the right
and ridges of elms beyond. Then another rillet traversed the road and
cooled the feet. In places the grass was very long. Crossing the road
to Kingston Blount the way was more used and rougher; as before it
had corn on both hands--barley and oats speckled like a partridge.
Then a third rillet, and then wheat, barley, oats, and beans in turn;
on the other side of the way wych-elms. There were always elms, and
here and there a farm under them, beyond the corn on the left. Aston
Rowant lay near on my left, with a towered church, a big house, and
men upon a rick, at the edge of the elms. To cross the Aston road my
way made a slight crook to the left and then skirted the hay of Aston
Rowant park, with elms and sweet limes amidst the hay: it was a good
grass and clover track, not deeply rutted. Presently in the mowed and
cleared fields on both sides cattle were walking out from milking.
With another slight crook to the left the way crossed the High Wycombe
and Stokenchurch and Oxford road, where yellow-hammers were singing
in the beeches alongside the telegraph-posts. My way was now a hard
road bordered by beeches and firs, through which I could see the tower
of Lewknor Church across a hayfield. A willow-wren, with a voice like
the sweet voice of someone a thousand years away, was singing among
the tops of the trees. Below, briers and thorns were interwoven, and
silver-weed grew at the edge of the dust. Some country people say
that silver-weed is good for the feet, a belief which might well have
no better foundation than the fact that it grows commonly close to
the road which is cruel to the feet. On the right I passed a little
deserted lodge with pointed windows and doorway gaping blank, and on
the left a wood of beech, elm, and chestnut shadowing a wall in which
there was a door barricaded almost to the lintel by nettles. This cool
wood was full of the chiding of blackbirds and one thrush’s singing.
Near the end this piece of road turns decidedly to the left; but over
the wall on the right are some signs of a track which had not this
southward bend. At the end of the present road, but a little way to the
right along the road to Wheatfield, which it enters, is Moor Court, a
small old house of bricks and tiles, with wings at each side, and a
massive stone chimney at the road end; and it has a range of thatched
farm buildings and a line of Lombardy poplars all enclosed in a wet
moat. A little farther up, a farm road, which might have continued the
track on the right of the road just quitted, turns out to the left and
with a short break leads to Pyrton and Cuxham and Brightwell Baldwin
and so to Wallingford; or from Pyrton the route might be to Watcombe
Manor, Britwell, and Ewelme. But the Lower Icknield Way is, to judge
from the map, supposed to give up its individuality at Moor Court and
make straight away through Lewknor and by Sheepcote Lane to join the
Upper road. There seems no good reason why this connection between the
two, if it were such, should have been more than a convenience for
a few travellers, unless we suppose that the very hilly and uneven
portion of the Upper road, between the beginning of the separation and
Chinnor Hill, so frequently became impassable that it was abandoned
for short or long periods or altogether. But as a road close to Ewelme
was known in the seventeenth century as the Lower Icknield Way, I was
determined to go by Ewelme. From Moor Court I went down to the pretty
group of a smithy, a “Leather Bottle,” and Lewknor’s towered church
at the crossing, where I entered the high road, making past Shirburn
Castle to Watlington. At Watlington the road bends sharp to the right,
and so comes into line with the Lower Icknield Way, as it was near Moor
Court.
This road between the Chilterns and the corn was followed by a single
line of telegraph wire. It had a slightly raised green edge on the
right, marked by footpaths. It went within a few yards of the moated
castle of Shirburn. Here, says the marvelling countryside, the
drawbridge is nightly drawn up, presumably with the philanthropic
motive of giving work to somebody. I wished to see the castle as the
home of a library which has lately given to the world a collection of
ballads from manuscript of the early sixteenth century--“The Shirburn
Ballads.” But a great length of eight-foot wall alongside the road shut
off the view. It was a bad wall too, and could not be liked or admired
for its own sake. I succeeded only in seeing one new battlemented
tower, which, I was told, supplied water for the castle laundry. The
best thing at Shirburn was almost opposite the castle entrance--a
narrow strip of land raised above the road, and protected from it by
a row of goodly elm trees, so that I walked between a high hedge and
them in a private coolness and green gloom as of an airy church about
a hundred yards long. On the hedge side of this strip there was a
depression which might have been the old road: or perhaps at one time
the elms stood in the middle of the road like those yonder on the Upper
Icknield Way under Watlington Hill. Hereby they have set up the reputed
remains of one of Queen Eleanor’s funeral crosses.
[Illustration: Watlington.]
Watlington is a big square village of no great beauty or extraordinary
antiquity, all of a piece and rustic, but urban in its compression of
house against house. A castle stood at the north edge near the present
church. The Oxford road bounds the town on its garden side, where
farm-houses begin and cottages with gardens of monkshood and roses.
Near this road there was a “pleasure fair,” where the roundabouts and
swings of some travelling company were putting in time on their way
to a bigger town and a regular engagement. There must be great wisdom
in the men of Watlington, to be able to harmonize their grave, rustic
streets with the town-bred music as of a steam-engine in pain. It was
a feat I could not accomplish. The most I could do was to go into a
taproom, where the music did not penetrate and the weary were at rest.
It was a most beautiful evening, and the swifts were shrieking low down
along the deserted streets at nine o’clock. I should like to see them
crowded with sheep from Ilsley, and the old drover wearing a thistle
in his cap, or with Welsh ponies going to Stokenchurch Fair over the
Chilterns. But there is no market at Watlington, and nothing but a
“pleasure” fair; a cheap week-end railway ticket to London pleases the
country people by making them feel near London, whether they go or
not; and it may encourage new residents. This was what my host wanted;
his taproom was much too peaceful for living men, though he liked well
enough to smoke his last pipe there, sitting in his shirt sleeves
until the silent room was quite dark and his children came home from
the roundabouts. A man came heavily down the street wheeling a barrow,
stopped outside and called for a pint; while he waited he ruminated,
looking down the street to the first stars and whistling “Beside the
seaside, beside the sea,” then he tipped up his tankard, emptied it,
and went off in a determined manner.
When I went up to bed I was astonished to find a bedroom that was not
at all new to me, though I had never before, to my knowledge, stopped
at this inn. If it was an illusion, the pictures created it. I had
certainly seen them before, in Wales, in Cornwall, in Wiltshire, and
in Kent. What first caught my eye was a beauteous female of a far from
slender type kneeling unharmed in the midst of roaring waters. She
had on a snowy night-dress, over which her curls flowed far down in
admirable disorder. The foam of the sea flew all over and round her
without wetting her night-dress or taking the gloss out of her curls.
Her face also seemed unaffected by her extraordinary position on a
small, isolated rock in the sea, and wore an expression that would have
been better suited to an afflicted lady in her own apartment. She was
suffering, but not from exposure to cold and wet, and what was more
extraordinary still was, that on this solitary rock she had found a
quantity of thick, velvety stuff, and on this, as was natural, she was
kneeling to save her tender knees from the unaccustomed rock.
On the opposite wall hung a similar picture, I suppose by the same
artist, for surely there could be only one man who had these marvellous
visions--visions they must have been, since no one could invent things
so improbable and, without their visionary character, so ridiculous.
Here also the scene was a wild sea and a rock in the midst. One
beauteous girl of the same type as in the other picture was in the
water, another had apparently just clambered up on to the rock. I say
apparently, but her night-dress was dry, snow-white, and untorn. I
say apparently, because I could only imagine that the two had been
swimming together and one had got first to the rock; for it was not
likely that one should find herself on a rock in this position and then
by mere chance see a fellow-mortal of the same sex, age, beauty, and
costume struggling with the waves close by. Her struggle was nearly
over, for the beauty on the rock, kneeling on the velvet carpet which,
by a fortunate accident, almost covered it, bent over in an attitude
of much grace and caught her unhappy sister by one of her fair hands.
The face of the swimmer was upturned and exquisitely sad, but, as in
the other picture, it was not the sadness of a swimmer in stormy and
dark waters, but rather of a lady inwardly tormented by some difficulty
of the “heart” or of the “spirit,” to use a popular physiology. Her
sadness was great, and naturally so; but I should have expected to
see astonishment mingled with it, because what could be seen of her
night-dress was dry as it had ever been in the linen cupboard at her
stately home; and her hair, though loose, was not untidy and would have
pleased a lover, had she confessed one and had he, instead of another
lady, been aiding her in distress. I had last seen these two pictures
at Tregaron, and I sighed with a serene and pleasant recollection of
the place, the season, and the company.
I was glad also to see a third work of the same artist, or at least of
the same school. It belonged to a different period, geological rather
than marine; and again it must be insisted that the work was visionary
because no one capable of a mere invention so ridiculous is likely to
have the power and the patience to execute it with such completeness
and finish. The scene was midnight in a valley of rocks and of high,
precipitous, rocky sides, wide enough apart to have admitted a mountain
torrent of some size. But it was dry, and over the sharp rocks went
a most beautiful lady. She was dressed in thin and clinging garments
from her shoulders down to her ankles. To meet a woman so beautiful
and so suitably and yet unusually dressed all alone in the mountains
would be at least as surprising as to see her on a little rock in the
sea as one was passing in a storm. I could imagine her easily upon the
velvet-covered rock. Her arms were bare, and with one she clasped a
book to her left breast, while with the other she felt her way along
the precipitous wall of the valley and steadied herself over the cruel
rocks. It was to be noticed that there was no velvet over these rocks,
and this is another proof of the genuineness of the artist’s vision,
unless it should be suspected that he disliked the appearance of a long
strip of carpet all down a valley. A fierce and extravagant vision,
you will say. But the gentleness which had somehow ensured the carpet
in the marine vision had not been eclipsed in the geological. From
the edge of the farther wall of the valley shone a light. Someone was
up there with a lantern and was turning its beams down on to the spot
under the fair traveller’s feet. There could be little doubt that he
was following her along with the light, but he could not be seen. The
lantern would have been more _natural_ in a narrow alley in a town,
but there was no question here of mere nature. If it comes to nature,
was there ever a period when a woman of such beauty, and of very great
refinement, strayed out with a book among inhospitable mountains,
clad in a dress that was fitted rather to suggest and even display
the form of limbs and bosom than to protect them from rocks, thorns,
and weather, not to speak of men and other wild beasts? A voluptuous
Oriental or Frenchman might of course sit down and invent an earthly
paradise with a small population of like beauties, but their object
would be as unmistakable as it would be objectionable to persons of
sensibility and discipline, except when alone or off their guard. But
an Englishman or a German could only have copied such a picture from a
vision having nothing to do with the flesh, and a charge of any such
thing would recoil upon the accuser. I believe it was by an Englishman
or a German. I should like to see some of the work of his less
visionary moods. I should like to see him with his family, talking to
his wife about the butcher’s bill and his daughter’s marriage--I should
like to know if he had a daughter or a child at all. I should like to
see him with his friends after dinner, and reading Mr. George Moore’s
_Memoirs of my Dead Life_.
I thought at one time that one of the other pictures was by the same
man, partly because it is so often to be seen with his work and appeals
to the same people, such as myself, and partly because it had a
similar detachment from modern life; but I could not feel sure that it
was the result of a vision and not of pure invention. The scene was a
summer garden sloping down to a river, and at the foot of the slope
a terrace of turf and a flight of steps to the water. On the terrace
four girls were having tea. They were much thinner than those on the
rocks; they wore white clinging dresses and their heads were bare. They
were all smiling and their faces were such that no man could imagine
a god, providence, fate, parent, lover, doctor or little boy in the
street hard-hearted enough to interrupt the smiles. Human beings like
them are not to be seen now, and no portraits or records of them in
the past have come down to us. They seemed born to eat chocolate and
drink sweet lemonade and never suffer from the consequences. There
had been five of them, but one stood on the bottom step feeding two
swans without any apparent effort. She had a hat in her hand either
because a hat is more beautiful than a hand or because it is more easy
to draw. She was hanging down her head thinking of something--or it
might be nothing--unconnected with the swans or the slow, still river.
Behind her a person whose mouth would not melt butter stood looking
at her back. He was dressed in pretty breeches and buckled shoes, and
was interesting chiefly as making the observer marvel what witty power
had added a creature so appropriate to such a company. As marvellous
must have been the artist’s invention. If it could be imagined that
dresses should, out of their own spirit, magically produce beings to
wear them they would be like these five ladies; and if dainty breeches,
silk stockings, and buckled shoes should have the same power they would
unfold a man like the lover. The effect of the whole was to suggest
summer, a lovely and harmless place (for the artist’s fresh water
would not drown, any more than his sea water would wet a night-dress),
wealth, luxury, happiness, youth, frivolity, innocence, benevolence--to
suggest them, especially to those who know very little of these things.
There were several pictures of scenery. One showed a steep and very
romantic forest road. It was deep in snow, and enormous trees, whose
roots were nourished in Hades, towered up above on either hand, but let
in the light of a full moon that shone straight down the road. Towards
the moon and up the road went a tall, mantled traveller, leaning on
a staff and turning his head to look into the wood. The picture had
no name, text, or explanation. It was a nameless man and a nameless
traveller, both unknown to history. Nothing was happening. It was
simply a combination of four or five grand, simple elements; a mighty
forest--a moon--snow--a solitary road--a tall traveller.
One of the other pictures was the same, except that a foaming river
took the place of the snowy road. The forest and the moon were the
same. The traveller was not there, and to one who had seen the last
picture there was a touch of tragedy in his absence which atoned for
it; he might have been surprised at the very moment when the snowy
road was being changed into a foaming river. Those who had not seen the
other had to be content with a moon, a romantic forest, a river running
down through it, and foam instead of snow. It hardly seemed to me to
be enough--lacking the human interest. A small flock of sheep among
the trees, with or even without a shepherd, would have made a vital
difference, and the picture could then also have been recognized by
purchasers and recipients of Christmas cards. And this picture was one
which would appeal to those who knew the kind of thing depicted. Rough
woodlanders and their wives, people who have suffered in snow, poor men
who have travelled alone and leaned on their staffs, would gladly put
both pictures on their walls. There were photographs of such people on
the mantelpiece, people whom no best clothes or photographer’s polish
could turn into poetic heroes or cigar-box beauties; men with queer
hairy faces, legs bent like oak branches, and eyes squinting at the
photographer; women their equals, but if anything more hardened, more
tortured, more smiling upon the occasion of being photographed.
Between photographs of a gamekeeper, whose face was like a furze bush
with eyes in it, and a card of mourning for Jane Mary Sims, aged
seventy-three, hung a picture seeming to have little to do with either.
It was of a high-born and well-dressed lady with regular features and
graceful, mature figure sitting beside a cradled child. She was bending
over towards the child, and her face, though composed, was sorrowful.
Had she looked up she would have seen an unusual sight, and it was a
mercy that she did not, for it would have certainly upset her composure
through astonishment and fear. For not many feet from her was the head
of a human being who was coming towards her head foremost through the
window, or more probably the ceiling. I say a human being because her
body--it was a mature and athletic, slender lady--was of the same
general form, size, and proportions as those of our own species, and
she wore the clinging night-dress so much favoured by the visionary
artist. But she had wings attached to her shoulders, not large enough
to be of any use, supposing her to have learned their management, but
sufficient to make part of a becoming fancy dress or fairy dancing
costume. She had apparently dived from some height, and in a bewitching
attitude was making straight for the cradle. As she was no Ariel’s
sister capable of playing “i’ th’ plighted clouds,” the danger both to
her and to the cradle was great. She faced it with no sign of fear,
her soft eyes and her even and not too full lips expressing a mind
in tranquillity and scarcely, if at all, stirred by expectation or
surmise. There was no sequel to this daring but painful picture, nor,
of course, any explanation. It was, I should say, the fancy of a genius
who had mingled the common and the improbable in dreams produced by
opium or other drug.