PROSE IDYLLS, NEW AND OLD

Contents: A Charm of Birds Chalk-Stream Studies The Fens My Winter-Garden From Ocean to Sea North Devon

I. 'A CHARM OF BIRDS. ' {1}

Is it merely a fancy that we English, the educated people among us atleast, are losing that love for spring which among our oldforefathers rose almost to worship? That the perpetual miracle ofthe budding leaves and the returning song-birds awakes no longer inus the astonishment which it awoke yearly among the dwellers in theold world, when the sun was a god who was sick to death each winter, and returned in spring to life and health, and glory; when the deathof Adonis, at the autumnal equinox, was wept over by the Syrianwomen, and the death of Baldur, in the colder north, by all livingthings, even to the dripping trees, and the rocks furrowed by theautumn rains; when Freya, the goddess of youth and love, went forthover the earth each spring, while the flowers broke forth under hertread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her with song;when, according to Olaus Magnus, the Goths and South Swedes had, onthe return of spring, a mock battle between summer and winter, andwelcomed the returning splendour of the sun with dancing and mutualfeasting, rejoicing that a better season for fishing and hunting wasapproaching? To those simpler children of a simpler age, in moredirect contact with the daily and yearly facts of Nature, and moredependent on them for their bodily food and life, winter and springwere the two great facts of existence; the symbols, the one of death, the other of life; and the battle between the two--the battle of thesun with darkness, of winter with spring, of death with life, ofbereavement with love--lay at the root of all their myths and alltheir creeds. Surely a change has come over our fancies. Theseasons are little to us now. We are nearly as comfortable in winteras in summer, or in spring. Nay, we have begun, of late, to grumbleat the two latter as much as at the former, and talk (and not withoutexcuse at times) of 'the treacherous month of May, ' and of 'summerhaving set in with its usual severity. ' We work for the most part incities and towns, and the seasons pass by us unheeded. May and Juneare spent by most educated people anywhere rather than among birdsand flowers. They do not escape into the country till the elm hedgesare growing black, and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, andall the virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober andmatronly ripeness--if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our verylandscape painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their mindsthe fact that trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few butbrown autumnal scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in themiddle age no poet could say enough, our modern poets seem to beforgetting that birds ever sing. 

It was not so of old. The climate, perhaps, was more severe thannow; the transition from winter to spring more sudden, like that ofScandinavia now. Clearage of forests and drainage of land haveequalized our seasons, or rather made them more uncertain. Morebroken winters are followed by more broken springs; and May-day is nolonger a marked point to be kept as a festival by all childlikehearts. The merry month of May is merry only in stage songs. TheMay garlands and dances are all but gone: the borrowed plate, andthe milkmaids who borrowed it, gone utterly. No more does Mrs. Pepysgo to 'lie at Woolwich, in order to a little ayre and to gather May-dew' for her complexion, by Mrs. Turner's advice. The Maypole isgone likewise; and never more shall the puritan soul of a Stubbs bearoused in indignation at seeing 'against Maie, every parish, towne, and village assemble themselves together, both men, women, andchildren, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodesand groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night inpastyme, and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birchbowes and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . . They have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweetenosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these drawhome this Maypole (this stincking idol rather) which is covered allover with flowers and hearbes, with two or three hundred men, women, and children following it with great devotion. . . And then theyfall to banquet and feast, daunce and leap about it, as the heathenpeople did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this is aperfect pattern, or the thing itself. '

This, and much more, says poor Stubbs, in his 'Anatomie of Abuses, 'and had, no doubt, good reason enough for his virtuous indignation atMay-day scandals. But people may be made dull without being madegood; and the direct and only effect of putting down May games andsuch like was to cut off the dwellers in towns from all healthycommunion with Nature, and leave them to mere sottishness andbrutality. 

Yet perhaps the May games died out, partly because the feelings whichhad given rise to them died out before improved personal comforts. Of old, men and women fared hardly, and slept cold; and were thankfulto Almighty God for every beam of sunshine which roused them out oftheir long hybernation; thankful for every flower and every birdwhich reminded them that joy was stronger than sorrow, and life thandeath. With the spring came not only labour, but enjoyment:

'In the spring, the young man's fancy lightly turned to thoughts oflove, '

as lads and lasses, who had been pining for each other by theirwinter firesides, met again, like Daphnis and Chloe, by shaugh andlea; and learnt to sing from the songs of birds, and to be faithfulfrom their faithfulness. 

Then went out troops of fair damsels to seek spring garlands in theforest, as Scheffel has lately sung once more in his 'FrauAventiure;' and, while the dead leaves rattled beneath their feet, hymned 'La Regine Avrillouse' to the music of some Minnesinger, whosesong was as the song of birds; to whom the birds were friends, fellow-lovers, teachers, mirrors of all which he felt within himselfof joyful and tender, true and pure; friends to be fed hereafter (asWalther von der Vogelweide had them fed) with crumbs upon his grave. 

True melody, it must be remembered, is unknown, at least at present, in the tropics, and peculiar to the races of those temperate climes, into which the song-birds come in spring. It is hard to say why. Exquisite songsters, and those, strangely, of an European type, maybe heard anywhere in tropical American forests: but native raceswhose hearts their song can touch, are either extinct or yet to come. Some of the old German Minnelieder, on the other hand, seem actuallycopied from the songs of birds. 'Tanderadei' does not merely ask thenightingale to tell no tales; it repeats, in its cadences, thenightingale's song, as the old Minnesinger heard it when he nestledbeneath the lime-tree with his love. They are often almost asinarticulate, these old singers, as the birds from whom they copiedtheir notes; the thinnest chain of thought links together some bird-like refrain: but they make up for their want of logic andreflection by the depth of their passion, the perfectness of theirharmony with nature. The inspired Swabian, wandering in the pine-forest, listens to the blackbird's voice till it becomes his ownvoice; and he breaks out, with the very carol of the blackbird

'Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell. Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein, wo wird mein Schatze sein?Vogele im Tannenwald pfeitet so hell. '

And he has nothing more to say. That is his whole soul for the timebeing; and, like a bird, he sings it over and over again, and nevertires. 

Another, a Nieder-Rheinischer, watches the moon rise over theLowenburg, and thinks upon his love within the castle hall, till hebreaks out in a strange, sad, tender melody--not without statelinessand manly confidence in himself and in his beloved--in the truestrain of the nightingale:

'Verstohlen geht der Mond auf, Blau, blau, Blumelein, Durch Silberwolkchen fuhrt sein Lauf. Rosen im Thal, Madel im Saal, O schonste Rosa!* * *Und siehst du mich, Und siehst du sie, Blau, blau, Blumelein, Zwei treu're Herzen sah'st du nie;Rosen im Thal u. S. W. '

There is little sense in the words, doubtless, according to ourmodern notions of poetry; but they are like enough to the long, plaintive notes of the nightingale to say all that the poet has tosay, again and again through all his stanzas. 

Thus the birds were, to the mediaeval singers, their orchestra, orrather their chorus; from the birds they caught their melodies; thesounds which the birds gave them they rendered into words. 

And the same bird keynote surely is to be traced in the early Englishand Scotch songs and ballads, with their often meaningless refrains, sung for the mere pleasure of singing:

'Binnorie, O Binnorie. 

Or -

'With a hey lillelu and a how lo lan, And the birk and the broom blooms bonnie. '

Or -

'She sat down below a thorn, Fine flowers in the valley, And there has she her sweet babe born, And the green leaves they grow rarely. '

Or even those 'fal-la-las, ' and other nonsense refrains, which, ifthey were not meant to imitate bird-notes, for what were they meant?

In the old ballads, too, one may hear the bird keynote. He who wrote(and a great rhymer he was)

'As I was walking all alane, I heard twa corbies making a mane, '

had surely the 'mane' of the 'corbies' in his ears before it shapeditself into words in his mind: and he had listened to many a'woodwele' who first thrummed on harp, or fiddled on crowd, how -

'In summer, when the shawes be shene, And leaves be large and long, It is full merry in fair forest To hear the fowles' song. 

'The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease, Sitting upon the spray;So loud, it wakened Robin Hood In the greenwood where he lay. '

And Shakespeare--are not his scraps of song saturated with these samebird-notes? 'Where the bee sucks, ' 'When daisies pied, ' 'Under thegreenwood tree, ' 'It was a lover and his lass, ' 'When daffodils beginto peer, ' 'Ye spotted snakes, ' have all a ring in them which wascaught not in the roar of London, or the babble of the Globe theatre, but in the woods of Charlecote, and along the banks of Avon, from

'The ouzel-cock so black of hue, With orange-tawny bill;The throstle with his note so true: The wren with little quill;The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, The plain-song cuckoo gray' -

and all the rest of the birds of the air. 

Why is it, again, that so few of our modern songs are truly songful, and fit to be set to music? Is it not that the writers of them--persons often of much taste and poetic imagination--have gone fortheir inspiration to the intellect, rather than to the ear? That (asShelley does by the skylark, and Wordsworth by the cuckoo), insteadof trying to sing like the birds, they only think and talk about thebirds, and therefore, however beautiful and true the thoughts andwords may be, they are not song? Surely they have not, like themediaeval songsters, studied the speech of the birds, the primaevalteachers of melody; nor even melodies already extant, round which, asround a framework of pure music, their thoughts and images mightcrystallize themselves, certain thereby of becoming musical likewise. The best modern song writers, Burns and Moore, were inspired by theirold national airs; and followed them, Moore at least, with a reverentfidelity, which has had its full reward. They wrote words to musicand not, as modern poets are wont, wrote the words first, and leftothers to set music to the words. They were right; and we are wrong. As long as song is to be the expression of pure emotion, so long itmust take its key from music, --which is already pure emotion, untranslated into the grosser medium of thought and speech--often (asin the case of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words) not to betranslated into it at all. 

And so it may be, that in some simpler age, poets may go back, likethe old Minnesingers, to the birds of the forest, and learn of themto sing. 

And little do most of them know how much there is to learn; whatvariety of character, as well as variety of emotion, may bedistinguished by the practised ear, in a 'charm of birds' (to use theold southern phrase), from the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringingfrom afar in the first bright days of March, a passage of one or twobars repeated three or four times, and then another and another, clear and sweet, and yet defiant--for the great 'stormcock' loves tosing when rain and wind is coming on, and faces the elements asboldly as he faces hawk and crow--down to the delicate warble of thewren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank, where he hashuddled through the frost with wife and children, all folded in eachother's arms like human beings, for the sake of warmth, --which, alas!does not always suffice; for many a lump of wrens may be found, frozen and shrivelled, after a severe winter. Yet even he, sittingat his house-door in the low sunlight, says grace for all mercies (asa little child once worded it) in a song so rapid, so shrill, soloud, and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amountof soul within that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, as a childwho has said its lesson, or got to the end of the sermon, gives aself-satisfied flirt of his tail, and goes in again to sleep. 

Character? I know not how much variety of character there may bebetween birds of the same species but between species and species thevariety is endless, and is shown--as I fondly believe--in thedifference of their notes. Each has its own speech, inarticulate, expressing not thought but hereditary feeling; save a few birds who, like those little dumb darlings, the spotted flycatchers, seem tohave absolutely nothing to say, and accordingly have the wit to holdtheir tongues; and devote the whole of their small intellect tositting on the iron rails, flitting off them a yard or two to catch abutterfly in air, and flitting back with it to their nest. 

But listen to the charm of birds in any sequestered woodland, on abright forenoon in June. As you try to disentangle the medley ofsounds, the first, perhaps, which will strike your ear will be theloud, harsh, monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch; and themetallic clinking of two or three sorts of titmice. But above thetree-tops, rising, hovering, sinking, the woodlark is fluting, tenderand low. Above the pastures outside the skylark sings--as he alonecan sing; and close by, from the hollies rings out the blackbird'stenor--rollicking, audacious, humorous, all but articulate. From thetree above him rises the treble of the thrush, pure as the song ofangels: more pure, perhaps, in tone, though neither so varied nor sorich, as the song of the nightingale. And there, in the next holly, is the nightingale himself: now croaking like a frog; now talkingaside to his wife on the nest below; and now bursting out into thatsong, or cycle of songs, in which if any man finds sorrow, he himselfsurely finds none. All the morning he will sing; and again atevening, till the small hours, and the chill before the dawn: but ifhis voice sounds melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only mockedby the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in the bright morning thatwhich it is, the fulness of joy and love. Milton's

'Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy, '

is untrue to fact. So far from shunning the noise of folly, thenightingale sings as boldly as anywhere close to a stage-coach road, or a public path, as anyone will testify who recollects the'Wrangler's Walk' from Cambridge to Trumpington forty years ago, whenthe covert, which has now become hollow and shelterless, held, atevery twenty yards, an unabashed and jubilant nightingale. 

Coleridge surely was not far wrong when he guessed that -

'Some night-wandering man, whose heart was piercedWith the remembrance of a grievous wrong, Or slow distemper, or neglected love(And so, poor wretch, filled all things with himself, And made all gentle sounds tell back the taleOf his own sorrow)--he, and such as he, First named these sounds a melancholy strain, And many a poet echoes the conceit. '

That the old Greek poets were right, and had some grounds for themyth of Philomela, I do not dispute; though Sophocles, speaking ofthe nightingales of Colonos, certainly does not represent them aslamenting. The Elizabethan poets, however, when they talked ofPhilomel, 'her breast against a thorn, ' were unaware that they andthe Greeks were talking of two different birds; that our EnglishLusciola Luscinia is not Lusciola Philomela, one of the various birdscalled Bulbul in the East. The true Philomel hardly enters Venetia, hardly crosses the Swiss Alps, ventures not into the Rhineland andDenmark, but penetrates (strangely enough) further into South Swedenthan our own Luscinia: ranging meanwhile over all Central Europe, Persia, and the East, even to Egypt. Whether his song be really sad, let those who have heard him say. But as for our own Luscinia, whowinters not in Egypt and Arabia, but in Morocco and Algeria, the onlynote of his which can be mistaken for sorrow, is rather one of toogreat joy; that cry, which is his highest feat of art; which hecannot utter when he first comes to our shores, but practisescarefully, slowly, gradually, till he has it perfect by the beginningof June; that cry, long, repeated, loudening and sharpening in theintensity of rising passion, till it stops suddenly, exhausted at thepoint where pleasure, from very keenness, turns to pain; and -

'In the topmost height of joyHis passion clasps a secret grief. '

How different in character from his song is that of the gallantlittle black-cap in the tree above him. A gentleman he is of a mostancient house, perhaps the oldest of European singing birds. Howperfect must have been the special organization which has spreadseemingly without need of alteration or improvement, from Norway tothe Cape of Good Hope, from Japan to the Azores. How many ages musthave passed since his forefathers first got their black caps. Andhow intense and fruitful must have been the original vitality which, after so many generations, can still fill that little body with sostrong a soul, and make him sing as Milton's new-created birds sangto Milton's Eve in Milton's Paradise. Sweet he is, and various, rich, and strong, beyond all English warblers, save the nightingale:but his speciality is his force, his rush, his overflow, not so muchof love as of happiness. The spirit carries him away. He riots upand down the gamut till he cannot stop himself; his notes tumble overeach other; he chuckles, laughs, shrieks with delight, throws backhis head, droops his tail, sets up his back, and sings with everyfibre of his body: and yet he never forgets his good manners. He isnever coarse, never harsh, for a single note. Always graceful, always sweet, he keeps perfect delicacy in his most uttercarelessness. 

And why should we overlook, common though he be, yon hedge-sparrow, who is singing so modestly, and yet so firmly and so true? Or cock-robin himself, who is here, as everywhere, honest, self-confident, and cheerful? Most people are not aware, one sometimes fancies, howfine a singer is cock-robin now in the spring-time, when his song isdrowned by, or at least confounded with, a dozen other songs. Weknow him and love him best in winter, when he takes up (as he doessometimes in cold wet summer days) that sudden wistful warble, struggling to be happy, half in vain, which surely contradictsColeridge's verse:-

'In Nature there is nothing melancholy. '

But he who will listen carefully to the robin's breeding song on abright day in May, will agree, I think, that he is no mean musician;and that for force, variety and character of melody, he is surpassedonly by black-cap, thrush, and nightingale. 

And what is that song, sudden, loud, sweet, yet faltering, as if halfashamed? Is it the willow wren or the garden warbler? The twobirds, though very remotely allied to each other, are so alike invoice, that it is often difficult to distinguish them, unless weattend carefully to the expression. For the garden warbler, beginning in high and loud notes, runs down in cadence, lower andsofter, till joy seems conquered by very weariness; while the willowwren, with a sudden outbreak of cheerfulness, though not quite sure(it is impossible to describe bird-songs without attributing to thebirds human passions and frailties) that he is not doing a sillything, struggles on to the end of his story with a hesitatinghilarity, in feeble imitation of the black-cap's bacchanaliandactyls. 

And now, again--is it true that

'In Nature there is nothing melancholy'

Mark that slender, graceful, yellow warbler, running along the highoak boughs like a perturbed spirit, seeking restlessly, anxiously, something which he seems never to find; and uttering every now andthen a long anxious cry, four or five times repeated, which would bea squeal, were it not so sweet. Suddenly he flits away, and fluttersround the pendant tips of the beech-sprays like a great yellowbutterfly, picking the insects from the leaves; then flits back to abare bough, and sings, with heaving breast and quivering wings, ashort, shrill, feeble, tremulous song; and then returns to his oldsadness, wandering and complaining all day long. 

Is there no melancholy in that cry? It sounds sad: why should itnot be meant to be sad? We recognize joyful notes, angry notes, fearful notes. They are very similar (strangely enough) in allbirds. They are very similar (more strangely still) to the cries ofhuman beings, especially children, when influenced by the samepassions. And when we hear a note which to us expresses sadness, whyshould not the bird be sad? Yon wood wren has had enough to make himsad, if only he recollects it; and if he can recollect his road fromMorocco hither, he may be recollects likewise what happened on theroad--the long weary journey up the Portuguese coast, and through thegap between the Pyrenees and the Jaysquivel, and up the Landes ofBordeaux, and across Brittany, flitting by night, and hiding andfeeding as he could by day; and how his mates flew against thelighthouses, and were killed by hundreds; and how he essayed theBritish Channel, and was blown back, shrivelled up by bitter blasts;and how he felt, nevertheless, that 'that wan water he must cross, 'he knew not why: but something told him that his mother had done itbefore him, and he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and hadinherited her 'instinct'--as we call hereditary memory, in order toavoid the trouble of finding out what it is, and how it comes. Aduty was laid on him to go back to the place where he was bred; andhe must do it: and now it is done; and he is weary, and sad, andlonely; and, for aught we know, thinking already that when the leavesbegin to turn yellow, he must go back again, over the Channel, overthe Landes, over the Pyrenees, to Morocco once more. Why should henot be sad? He is a very delicate bird, as both his shape and hisnote testify. He can hardly keep up his race here in England; and isaccordingly very uncommon, while his two cousins, the willow wren andthe chiffchaff, who, like him, build for some mysterious reason domednests upon the ground, are stout, and busy, and numerous, andthriving everywhere. And what he has gone through may be too muchfor the poor wood wren's nerves; and he gives way; while willow wren, black-cap, nightingale, who have gone by the same road and sufferedthe same dangers, have stoutness of heart enough to throw off thepast, and give themselves up to present pleasure. Why not?--whoknows? There is labour, danger, bereavement, death in nature; andwhy should not some, at least, of the so-called dumb things know it, and grieve at it as well as we?

Why not?--Unless we yield to the assumption (for it is nothing more)that these birds act by some unknown thing called instinct, as itmight be called x or y; and are, in fact, just like the singing birdswhich spring out of snuff-boxes, only so much better made, that theycan eat, grow, and propagate their species. The imputation of actingby instinct cuts both ways. We, too, are creatures of instinct. Webreathe and eat by instinct: but we talk and build houses by reason. And so may the birds. It is more philosophical, surely, to attributeactions in them to the same causes to which we attribute them (fromexperience) in ourselves. 'But if so, ' some will say, 'birds musthave souls. ' We must define what our own souls are, before we candefine what kind of soul or no-soul a bird may or may not have. Thetruth is, that we want to set up some 'dignity of human nature;' someinnate superiority to the animals, on which we may pride ourselves asour own possession, and not return thanks with fear and trembling forit, as the special gift of Almighty God. So we have given the pooranimals over to the mechanical philosophy, and allowed them to beconsidered as only mere cunningly devised pieces of watch-work, ifphilosophy would only spare us, and our fine human souls, of which weare so proud, though they are doing all the wrong and folly they canfrom one week's end to the other. And now our self-conceit hasbrought its own Nemesis; the mechanical philosophy is turning on us, and saying, 'The bird's "nature" and your "human nature" differ onlyin degree, but not in kind. If they are machines, so are you. Theyhave no souls, you confess. You have none either. '

But there are those who neither yield to the mechanical philosophynor desire to stifle it. While it is honest and industrious, as itis now, it can do nought but good, because it can do nought butdiscover facts. It will only help to divide the light from thedarkness, truth from dreams, health from disease. Let it claim foritself all that it can prove to be of the flesh, fleshly. That whichis spiritual will stand out more clearly as of the Spirit. Let itthrust scalpel and microscope into the most sacred penetralia ofbrain and nerve. It will only find everywhere beneath brain andbeneath nerve, that substance and form which is not matter norphenomenon, but the Divine cause thereof; and while it helps, withruthless but wholesome severity, to purge our minds from idols of thecave and idols of the fane, it will leave untouched, more clearlydefined, and therefore more sacred and important than ever -

 'Those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet the master light of all our seeing;Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the beingOf the eternal silence; truths that wake To perish never;Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor man nor boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy. * * *Then sing, ye birds, sing out with joyous sound, as the poet-philosopher bids you. Victorious analysis will neitherabolish you, nor the miraculous and unfathomable in you and in yoursong, which has stirred the hearts of poets since first man was man. And if anyone shall hint to us that we and the birds may have sprungoriginally from the same type; that the difference between ourintellect and theirs is one of degree, and not of kind, we maybelieve or doubt: but in either case we shall not be greatly moved. 'So much the better for the birds, ' we will say, 'and none the worsefor us. You raise the birds towards us: but you do not lower ustowards them. What we are, we are by the grace of God. Our ownpowers and the burden of them we know full well. It does not lessentheir dignity or their beauty in our eyes to hear that the birds ofthe air partake, even a little, of the same gifts of God as we. Ofold said St. Guthlac in Crowland, as the swallows sat upon his knee, "He who leads his life according to the will of God, to him the wilddeer and the wild birds draw more near;" and this new theory of yoursmay prove St. Guthlac right. St. Francis, too--he called the birdshis brothers. Whether he was correct, either theologically orzoologically, he was plainly free from that fear of being mistakenfor an ape, which haunts so many in these modern times. Perfectlysure that he himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at leastpossible that birds might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnatelike himself in mortal flesh; and saw no degradation to the dignityof human nature in claiming kindred lovingly with creatures sobeautiful, so wonderful, who (as he fancied in his old-fashioned way)praised God in the forest, even as angels did in heaven. In a word, the saint, though he was an ascetic, and certainly no man of science, was yet a poet, and somewhat of a philosopher; and would havepossibly--so do extremes meet--have hailed as orthodox, while we hailas truly scientific, Wordsworth's great saying -

 'Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woodsAnd mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye and ear--both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognizeIn Nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being. '

II. CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. {29}

Fishing is generally associated in men's minds with wild mountainscenery; if not with the alps and cataracts of Norway, still with themoors and lochs of Scotland, or at least with the rocky rivers, thewooded crags, the crumbling abbeys of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Hereford, or the Lowlands. And it cannot be denied that much of thecharm which angling exercises over cultivated minds, is due to thebeauty and novelty of the landscapes which surround him; to the senseof freedom, the exhilarating upland air. Who would prefer thecertainty of taking trout out of some sluggish preserve, to thechance of a brace out of Edno or Llyn Dulyn? The pleasure lies notin the prize itself, but in the pains which it has cost; in theupward climbs through the dark plantations, beside the rock-walledstream; the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay flower-bed ofblue and purple butter-wort; the steady breathless climb up thecrags, which looked but one mile from you when you started, so clearagainst the sky stood out every knoll and slab; the first stars ofthe white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropt, as if a fairy hadpricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon some green cushion ofwet moss, in a dripping crack of the cliff; the first grey tufts ofthe Alpine club-moss, the first shrub of crowberry, or sea-greenrose-root, with its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark thetwo-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning of the Alpine world; thescramble over the arid waves of the porphyry sea aloft, as you beatround and round like a weary pointer dog in search of the hiddenlake; the last despairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramidon Moel Meirch; the hasty gaze around, far away into the green valeof Ffestiniog, and over wooded flats, and long silver river-reaches, and yellow sands, and blue sea flecked with flying clouds, and islesand capes, and wildernesses of mountain peaks, east, west, south, andnorth; one glance at the purple gulf out of which Snowdon rises, thence only seen in full majesty from base to peak: and then thejoyful run, springing over bank and boulder, to the sad tarn beneathyour feet: the loosening of the limbs, as you toss yourself, bathedin perspiration, on the turf; the almost awed pause as you recollectthat you are alone on the mountain-tops, by the side of the desolatepool, out of all hope of speech or help of man; and, if you breakyour leg among those rocks, may lie there till the ravens pick yourbones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish aremoving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess whatthey will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, andyellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monsterfrom Amboyna or Brazil--may tempt those sulkiest and most capriciousof trout to cease for once their life-long business of pickingleeches from among those Syenite cubes which will twist your anklesand break your shins for the next three hours. What matter (to aminute philosopher, at least) if, after two hours of such enjoymentas that, he goes down again into the world of man with empty creel, or with a dozen pounders and two-pounders, shorter, gamer, andredder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or Kennet? What matter?If he has not caught them, he might have caught them; he has beencatching them in imagination all the way up; and if he be a minutephilosopher, he holds that there is no falser proverb than thatdevil's beatitude--'Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shallnot be disappointed. '

Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoyseverything once at least: and if it falls out true, twice also. 

Yes. Pleasant enough is mountain fishing. But there is oneobjection against it, that it is hard work to get to it; and that theangler, often enough half-tired before he arrives at his stream orlake, has left for his day's work only the lees of his nervousenergy. 

Another objection, more important perhaps to a minute philosopherthan to the multitude, is, that there is in mountain-fishing anelement of excitement: an element which is wholesome enough at timesfor every one; most wholesome at all times for the man pent up inLondon air and London work; but which takes away from the angler'smost delicate enjoyment, that dreamy contemplative repose, broken byjust enough amusement to keep his body active, while his mind isquietly taking in every sight and sound of nature. Let the Londonerhave his six weeks every year among crag and heather, and return withlungs expanded and muscles braced to his nine months' prison. Thecountryman, who needs no such change of air and scene, will prefermore homelike, though more homely, pleasures. Dearer than wildcataracts or Alpine glens are the still hidden streams which Bewickhas immortalized in his vignettes, and Creswick in his pictures; thelong glassy shallow, paved with yellow gravel, where he wades upbetween low walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut, and oak, andalder, to the low bar over which the stream comes swirling anddimpling, as the water-ouzel flits piping before him, and the murmurof the ringdove comes soft and sleepy through the wood. There, as hewades, he sees a hundred sights and hears a hundred tones, which arehidden from the traveller on the dusty highway above. The travellerfancies that he has seen the country. So he has; the outside of it, at least: but the angler only sees the inside. The angler only isbrought close face to face with the flower, and bird, and insect lifeof the rich river banks, the only part of the landscape where thehand of man has never interfered, and the only part in general whichnever feels the drought of summer, 'the trees planted by thewaterside whose leaf shall not wither. '

Pleasant are those hidden waterways: but yet are they the morepleasant because the hand of man has not interfered with them?

It is a question, and one which the older one grows the less one isinclined to answer in the affirmative. The older one grows, the morethere grows on one the sense of waste and incompleteness in allscenery where man has not fulfilled the commission of Eden, 'to dressit and to keep it;' and with that, a sense of loneliness which makesone long for home, and cultivation, and the speech of fellow men. 

Surely the influence of mountain scenery is exaggerated now-a-days. In spite of the reverend name of Wordsworth (whose poetry, be itremembered, too often wants that element of hardihood and manlinesswhich is supposed to be the birthright of mountaineers), one cannothelp, as a lowlander, hoping that there is a little truth in thethrenodes of a certain peevish friend who literally hates a mountain, and justifies his hatred in this fashion:-

'I do hate mountains. I would not live among them for ten thousand ayear. If they look like paradise for three months in the summer, they are a veritable inferno for the other nine; and I should like tocondemn my mountain-worshipping friends to pass a whole year underthe shadow of Snowdon, with that great black head of his shutting outthe sunlight, staring down into their garden, overlooking all they doin the most impertinent way, sneezing and spitting at them with rain, hail, snow, and bitter freezing blasts, even in the hottest sunshine. A mountain? He is a great stupid giant, with a perpetual cold in hishead, whose highest ambition is to give you one also. As for hisbeauty, no natural object has so little of its own; he owes it to theearthquakes that reared him up, to the rains and storms which havefurrowed him, to every gleam and cloud which pass over him. Inhimself he is a mere helpless stone-heap. Our old Scandinavianforefathers were right when they held the mountain Yotuns to behelpless pudding-headed giants, the sport of gods and men: and theirEnglish descendant, in spite of all his second-hand sentiment, holdsthe same opinion at his heart; for his first instinct, jolly honestfellow that he is, on seeing a snow alp, is to scramble up it andsmoke his cigar upon the top. And this great stupid braggart, pretending to be a personage and an entity, which, like Pope'smonument on Fish-street hill, "Like a tall bully, lifts the head and lies, "

I am called upon now-a-days to worship, as my better, my teacher. Shall I, the son of Odin and Thor, worship Hrymir the frost giant, and his cows the waterfalls? Shall I bow down to the stock of astone? My better? I have done an honest thing or two in my life, but I never saw a mountain do one yet. As for his superiority to me, in what does it consist? His strength? If he be stronger than I, let him cut stones out of my ribs, as I can out of his. His size?Am I to respect a mountain the more for being 10, 000 feet high? Aswell ask me to respect Daniel Lambert for weighing five-and-twentystone. His cunning construction? There is not a child which playsat his foot, not an insect which basks on his crags, which is notmore fearfully and wonderfully made; while as for his grandeur ofform, any college youth who scrambles up him, peel him out of hisshooting jacket and trousers, is a hundred times more beautiful, andmore grand too, by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurientprudery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore the trulydivine, element in art, and look for inspiration, not to living menand women, but to leaves and straws, stocks and stones. It is anidolatry baser than that of the old Canaanites; for they had thecourage to go up to the mountain tops, and thence worship the host ofheaven: but we are to stay at the bottom, and worship the mountainsthemselves. Byron began the folly with his misanthropic "ChildeHarold. " Sermons in stones? I don't believe in them. I have seen abetter sermon in an old peasant woman's face than in all the Alps andApennines of Europe. Did you ever see any one who was the better formountains? Have the Alps made * * * a whit honester, or * * * a whitmore good-natured, or Lady * * * a whit cleverer? Do they alter onehair's breadth for the better the characters of the ten thousand maleand female noodles who travel forth to stare at them every year? Domountains make them lofty-minded and generous-hearted? No. Caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt. Don't talk to me of themoral and physical superiority of mountain races, for I tell you itis a dream. Civilization, art, poetry, belong to the lowlands. Arethe English mountaineers, pray, or the French, or the Germans? Werethe Egyptians mountaineers, or the Romans, or the Assyrians, as soonas they became a people? The Greeks lived among mountains, but theytook care to inhabit the plains; and it was the sea and not the hillswhich made them the people which they were. Does Scotland owe herlife to the highlander, or to the lowlander? If you want anexperimentum crucis, there is one. As for poetry, will you mentionto me one mountain race which has written great poetry? You willquote the Hebrews. I answer that the life of Palestine always keptto the comparatively low lands to the west of Jordan, while thebarbarous mountaineers of the eastern range never did anything, --hadbut one Elijah to show among them. Shakspeare never saw a hillhigher than Malvern Beacon; and yet I suppose you will call him apoet? Mountaineers look well enough at a distance; seen close athand you find their chief distinctions to be starvation andignorance, fleas and goitre, with an utter unconsciousness--unlesstravellers put it into their heads--of the "soul-elevating glories"by which they have been surrounded all their lives. '

He was gently reminded of the existence of the Tyrolese. 

'You may just as wisely remind me of the Circassians. What can provemy theory more completely than the fact that in them you have the twofinest races of the world, utterly unable to do anything forhumanity, utterly unable to develop themselves, because, to theireternal misfortune, they have got caged among those abominablestoneheaps, and have not yet been able to escape?'

It was suggested that if mountain races were generally inferior ones, it was because they were the remnants of conquered tribes driven upinto the highlands by invaders. 

'And what does that prove but that the stronger and cunninger racesinstinctively seize the lowlands, because they half know (andProvidence knows altogether) that there alone they can becomenations, and fulfil the primaeval mission--to replenish the earth andsubdue it? No, no, my good sir. Mountains are very well when theyare doing their only duty--that of making rain and soil for thelowlands: but as for this newfangled admiration of them, it is aproof that our senses are dulled by luxury and books, and that werequire to excite our palled organ of marvellousness by signs andwonders, aesthetic brandy and cayenne. No. I have remarked oftenthat the most unimaginative people, who can see no beauty in acultivated English field or in the features of a new-born babe, arethe loudest ravers about glorious sunsets and Alpine panoramas; justas the man with no music in his soul, to whom a fugue of SebastianBach, or one of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words, means nothing, andis nothing thinks a monster concert of drums and trumpets uncommonlyfine. '

This is certainly a sufficiently one-sided diatribe. Still it isone-sided: and we have heard so much of the other side of late, thatit may be worth while to give this side also a fair and patienthearing. 

At least he who writes wishes that it may have a fair hearing. Hehas a sort of sympathy with Lord Macaulay's traveller of a hundredand fifty years since, who amid the 'horrible desolation' of theScotch highlands, sighs for 'the true mountain scenery of Richmond-hill. ' The most beautiful landscape he has ever seen, or cares tosee, is the vale of Thames from Taplow or from Cliefden, looking downtowards Windsor, and up toward Reading; to him Bramshill, looking outfar and wide over the rich lowland from its eyrie of dark pines, orLittlecote nestling between deer-spotted upland and rich water-meadow, is a finer sight than any robber castle of the Rhine. Hewould not complain, of course, were either of the views backed, likethose glorious ones of Turin or Venice, by the white saw-edge of thedistant Alps: but chiefly because the perpetual sight of that Alp-wall would increase the sense of home, of guarded security, which notthe mountain, but the sea, or the very thought of the sea, gives toall true Englishmen. 

Let others therefore (to come back to angling) tell of moor and loch. But let it be always remembered that the men who have told of thembest have not been mountaineers, but lowlanders who carried up to themountain the taste and knowledge which they had gained below. Letthem remember that the great Sutherlandshire sportsman and sportingwriter, the late Mr. St. John, was once a fine gentleman about town;that Christopher North was an Edinburgh Professor, a man of citylearning and city cultivation; and, as one more plea for our cockneychalk-streams of the south, that Mr. Scrope (who passed many pleasantyears respected and beloved by Kennet side, with Purdy at his heels)enjoyed, they say, the killing of a Littlecote trout as heartily ashe did that of a Tweed salmon. 

Come, then, you who want pleasant fishing-days without the waste oftime and trouble and expense involved in two hundred miles of railwayjourney, and perhaps fifty more of highland road; and try what youcan see and do among the fish not sixty miles from town. Come topleasant country inns, where you can always get a good dinner; or, better still, to pleasant country houses, where you can always getgood society; to rivers which will always fish, brimfull in thelongest droughts of summer, instead of being, as those mountain onesare, very like a turnpike-road for three weeks, and then like bottledporter for three days; to streams on which you have strong south-westbreezes for a week together on a clear fishing water, instead ofhaving, as on those mountain ones, foul rain spate as long as thewind is south-west, and clearing water when the wind chops up to thenorth, and the chill blast of 'Clarus Aquio' sends all the fishshivering to the bottom; streams, in a word, where you may kill fish(and large ones) four days out of five from April to October, insteadof having, as you will most probably in the mountain, just one day'ssport in the whole of your month's holiday. Deluded friend, whosuffered in Scotland last year a month of Tantalus his torments, furnished by art and nature with rods, flies, whisky, scenery, keepers, salmon innumerable, and all that man can want, except waterto fish in; and who returned, having hooked accidentally by the tailone salmon--which broke all and ween to sea--why did you not stay athome and take your two-pounders and three-pounders out of the quietchalk brook which never sank an inch through all that drought, sodeep in the caverns of the hills are hidden its mysterious wells?Truly, wise men bide at home, with George Riddler, while 'a fool'seyes are in the ends of the earth. '

Repent, then; and come with me, at least in fancy, at six o'clockupon some breezy morning in June, not by roaring railway nor bysmoking steamer, but in the cosy four-wheel, along brown heathermoors, down into green clay woodlands, over white chalk downs, pastRoman camps and scattered blocks of Sarsden stone, till we descendinto the long green vale where, among groves of poplar and abele, winds silver Whit. Come and breakfast at the neat white inn, of yorea posting-house of fame. The stables are now turned into cottages;and instead of a dozen spruce ostlers and helpers, the last of thepostboys totters sadly about the yard and looks up eagerly at therare sight of a horse to feed. But the house keeps up enough of itsancient virtue to give us a breakfast worthy of Pantagruel's self;and after it, while we are looking out our flies, you can go and chatwith the old postboy, and hear his tales, told with a sort ofchivalrous pride, of the noble lords and fair ladies before whom hehas ridden in the good old times gone by--even, so he darkly hints, before 'His Royal Highness the Prince' himself. Poor old fellow, herecollects not, and he need not recollect, that these great posting-houses were centres of corruption, from whence the newest vices ofthe metropolis were poured into the too-willing ears of village ladsand lasses; and that not even the New Poor Law itself has done morefor the morality of the South of England than the substitution of therail for coaches. 

Now we will walk down through the meadows some half mile, While all the land in flowery squares, Beneath a broad and equal-blowing windSmells of the coming summer, '

to a scene which, as we may find its antitype anywhere for milesround, we may boldly invent for ourselves. 

A red brick mill (not new red brick, of course) shall hum for everbelow giant poplar-spires, which bend and shiver in the steadybreeze. On its lawn laburnums shall feather down like dropping wellsof gold, and from under them the stream shall hurry leaping andlaughing into the light, and spread at our feet into a broad brightshallow, in which the kine are standing knee-deep already: a hint, alas! that the day means heat. And there, to the initiated eye, isanother and a darker hint of glaring skies, perspiring limbs, andempty creels. Small fish are dimpling in the central eddies: buthere, in six inches of water, on the very edge of the ford road, great tails and back-fins are showing above the surface, and swirlingsuddenly among the tufts of grass, sure sign that the large fish arepicking up a minnow-breakfast at the same time that they warm theirbacks, and do not mean to look at a fly for many an hour to come. 

Yet courage; for on the rail of yonder wooden bridge sits, chattingwith a sun-browned nymph, her bonnet pushed over her face, herhayrake in her hand, a river-god in coat of velveteen, elbow on kneeand pipe in mouth, who, rising when he sees us, lifts his wide-awake, and halloas back a roar of comfort to our mystic adjuration, -

'Keeper! Is the fly up?'

'Mortial strong last night, gentlemen. '

Wherewith he shall lounge up to us, landing-net in hand, and we willwander up stream and away. 

We will wander--for though the sun be bright, here are good fish tobe picked out of sharps and stop-holes--into the water-tables, ridgedup centuries since into furrows forty feet broad and five feet high, over which the crystal water sparkles among the roots of the richgrass, and hurries down innumerable drains to find its parent streambetween tufts of great blue geranium, and spires of purpleloosestrife, and the delicate white and pink comfrey-bells, and theavens--fairest and most modest of all the waterside nymphs, who hangsher head all day long in pretty shame, with a soft blush upon hertawny check. But at the mouth of each of those drains, if we can getour flies in, and keep ourselves unseen, we will have one cast atleast. For at each of them, in some sharp-rippling spot, lies agreat trout or two, waiting for beetle, caterpillar, and whatsoeverelse may be washed from among the long grass above. Thence, and frombrimming feeders, which slip along, weed-choked, under white hawthornhedges, and beneath the great roots of oak and elm, shall we pick outfull many a goodly trout. There, in yon stop-hole underneath thattree, not ten feet broad or twenty long, where just enough watertrickles through the hatches to make a ripple, are a brace of noblefish, no doubt; and one of them you may be sure of, if you will gothe proper way to work, and fish scientifically with the brace offlies I have put on for you--a governor and a black alder. In thefirst place, you must throw up into the little pool, not down. Ifyou throw down, they will see you in an instant; and besides, youwill never get your fly close under the shade of the brickwork, wherealone you have a chance. What use in throwing into the still shallowtail, shining like oil in the full glare of the sun?

'But I cannot get below the pool without--'

Without crawling through that stiff stubbed hedge, well set withtrees, and leaping that ten-foot feeder afterwards. Very well. Itis this sort of thing which makes the stay-at-home cultivated chalk-fishing as much harder work than mountain angling, as a gallop over astiffly enclosed country is harder than one over an open moor. Youcan do it or not, as you like: but if you wish to catch large trouton a bright day, I should advise you to employ the only method yetdiscovered. 

There--you are through; and the keeper shall hand you your rod. Youhave torn your trousers, and got a couple of thorns in your shins. The one can be mended, the other pulled out. Now, jump the feeder. There is no run to it, so--you have jumped in. Never mind: but keepthe point of your rod up. You are at least saved the lingeringtorture of getting wet inch by inch; and as for cold water hurtingany one--Credat Judaeus. 

Now make a circuit through the meadow forty yards away. Stoop downwhen you are on the ridge of each table. A trout may be basking atthe lower end of the pool, who will see you, rush up, and tell allhis neighbours. Take off that absurd black chimney-pot, which youare wearing, I suppose, for the same reason as Homer's heroes woretheir koruthous and phalerous, to make yourself look taller and moreterrible to your foes. Crawl up on three legs; and when you are inposition, kneel down. So. 

Shorten your line all you can--you cannot fish with too short a lineup-stream; and throw, not into the oil-basin near you, but right upinto the darkest corner. Make your fly strike the brickwork and dropin. --So? No rise? Then don't work or draw it, or your deceit isdiscovered instantly. Lift it out, and repeat the throw. 

What? You have hooked your fly in the hatches? Very good. Pull atit till the casting-line breaks; put on a fresh one, and to workagain. There! you have him. Don't rise! fight him kneeling; holdhim hard, and give him no line, but shorten up anyhow. Tear and haulhim down to you before he can make to his home, while the keeper runsround with the net . . . There, he is on shore. Two pounds, goodweight. Creep back more cautiously than ever, and try again. . . . There. A second fish, over a pound weight. Now we will go andrecover the flies off the hatches; and you will agree that there ismore cunning, more science, and therefore more pleasant excitement, in 'foxing' a great fish out of a stop-hole, than in whipping far andwide over an open stream, where a half-pounder is a wonder and atriumph. As for physical exertion, you will be able to compute foryourself how much your back, knees, and fore-arm will ache by nineo'clock to-night, after some ten hours of this scrambling, splashing, leaping, and kneeling upon a hot June day. This item in the day'swork will of course be put to the side of loss or of gain, accordingto your temperament: but it will cure you of an inclination to laughat us Wessex chalk-fishers as Cockneys. 

So we will wander up the streams, taking a fish here and a fishthere, till--Really it is very hot. We have the whole day before us;the fly will not be up till five o'clock at least; and then the realfishing will begin. Why tire ourselves beforehand? The squire willsend us luncheon in the afternoon, and after that expect us to fishas long as we can see, and come up to the hall to sleep, regardlessof the ceremony of dressing. For is not the green drake on? Andwhile he reigns, all hours, meals, decencies, and respectabilitiesmust yield to his caprice. See, here he sits, or rather tens ofthousands of him, one on each stalk of grass--green drake, yellowdrake, brown drake, white drake, each with his gauzy wings foldedover his back, waiting for some unknown change of temperature, orsomething else, in the afternoon, to wake him from his sleep, andsend him fluttering over the stream; while overhead the black drake, who has changed his skin and reproduced his species, dances in thesunshine, empty, hard, and happy, like Festus Bailey's Great BlackCrow, who all his life sings 'Ho, ho, ho, '

'For no one will eat him, ' he well doth know. 

However, as we have insides, and he has actually none, and what ismore strange, not even a mouth wherewith to fill the said insides, wehad better copy his brothers and sisters below whose insides arestill left, and settle with them upon the grass awhile beneath yougoodly elm. 

Comfort yourself with a glass of sherry and a biscuit, and give thekeeper one, and likewise a cigar. He will value it at five times itsworth, not merely for the pleasure of it, but because it raises himin the social scale. 'Any cad, ' so he holds, 'smokes pipes; but agood cigar is the mark of the quality, ' and of them who 'keep companywith the quality, ' as keepers do. He puts it in his hat-crown, tosmoke this evening in presence of his compeers at the public-house, retires modestly ten yards, lies down on his back in a dry feeder, under the shade of the long grass, and instantly falls fast asleep. Poor fellow! he was up all last night in the covers, and will beagain to-night. Let him sleep while he may, and we will chat overchalk-fishing. 

The first thing, probably, on which you will be inclined to askquestions, is the size of the fish in these streams. We have killedthis morning four fish averaging a pound weight each. All below thatweight we throw in, as is our rule here; but you may have remarkedthat none of them exceeded half a pound; that they were almost allabout herring size. The smaller ones I believe to be year-old fish, hatched last spring twelvemonth; the pound fish two-year-olds. Atwhat rate these last would have increased depends very much, Isuspect, on their chance of food. The limit of life and growth incold-blooded animals seems to depend very much on their amount offood. The boa, alligator, shark, pike, and I suppose the trout also, will live to a great age, and attain an enormous size, give them butrange enough; and the only cause why there are trout of ten poundsand more in the Thames lashers, while one of four pounds is rarehere, is simply that the Thames fish has more to eat. Here, were thefish not sufficiently thinned out every year by anglers, they wouldsoon become large-headed, brown, and flabby, and cease to grow. Manya good stream has been spoilt in this way, when a squire has unwiselypreferred quantity to quality of fish. 

And if it be not the quantity of feed, I know no clear reason whychalk and limestone trout should be so much larger and betterflavoured than any others. The cause is not the greater swiftness ofthe streams; for (paradoxical as it may seem to many) a trout likesswift water no more than a pike does, except when spawning orcleaning afterwards. At those times his blood seems to require avery rapid oxygenation, and he goes to the 'sharps' to obtain it:but when he is feeding and fattening, the water cannot be too stillfor him. Streams which are rapid throughout never produce largefish; and a hand-long trout transferred from his native torrent to astill pond, will increase in size at a ten times faster rate. Inchalk streams the largest fish are found oftener in the mill-headsthan in the mill tails. It is a mistake, though a common one, tofancy that the giant trout of the Thames lashers lie in swift water. On the contrary, they lie in the very stillest spot of the wholepool, which is just under the hatches. There the rush of the watershoots over their heads, and they look up through it for everyeatable which may be swept down. At night they run down to the fanof the pool, to hunt minnow round the shallows; but their home by dayis the still deep; and their preference of the lasher pool to thequiet water above is due merely to the greater abundance of food. Chalk trout, then, are large not merely because the water is swift. 

Whether trout have not a specific fondness for lime; whether water ofsome dozen degrees of hardness is not necessary for theirdevelopment? are questions which may be fairly asked. Yet is not thetrue reason this; that the soil on the banks of a chalk or limestonestream is almost always rich--red loam, carrying an abundantvegetation, and therefore an abundant crop of animal life, both inand out of the water? The countless insects which haunt a rich haymeadow, all know who have eyes to see; and if they will look into thestream they will find that the water-world is even richer than theair-world. 

Every still spot in a chalk stream becomes so choked with weed as torequire moving at least thrice a year, to supply the mills withwater. Grass, milfoil, water crowfoot, hornwort, starwort, horsetail, and a dozen other delicate plants, form one tangledforest, denser than those of the Amazon, and more densely peopledlikewise. 

To this list will soon be added our Transatlantic curse, Babingtoniadiabolica, alias Anacharis alsin astrum. It has already ascended theThames as high as Reading; and a few years more, owing to the presentaqua-vivarium mania, will see it filling every mill-head in England, to the torment of all millers. Young ladies are assured that theonly plant for their vivariums is a sprig of anacharis, for whichthey pay sixpence--the market value being that of a wasp, flea, orother scourge of the human race; and when the vivarium fails, itscontents, Anacharis and all, are tost into the nearest ditch; forwhich the said young lady ought to be fined five pounds; and wouldbe, if Governments governed. What an 'if'. 

But come; for the sun burns bright, and fishing is impossible: liedown upon the bank, above this stop. There is a campshutting (aboarding in English) on which you can put your elbows. Lie down onyour face, and look down through two or three feet of water clear asair into the water forest where the great trout feed. 

Here; look into this opening in the milfoil and crowfoot bed. Do yousee a grey film around that sprig? Examine it through the pocketlens. It is a forest of glass bells, on branching stalks. They areVorticellae; and every one of those bells, by the ciliary current onits rim, is scavenging the water--till a tadpole comes by andscavenges it. How many millions of living creatures are there onthat one sprig? Look here!--a brown polype, with long waving arms--agigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long. He is Hydra fusca, most famous, and earliest described (I think by Trembley). Ere we gohome I may show you perhaps Hydra viridis, with long pea-green arms;and rosea, most beautiful in form and colour of all the strangefamily. You see that lump, just where his stalk joins his bell-head?That is a budding baby. Ignorant of the joys and cares of wedlock, he increases by gemmation. See! here is another, with a full-sizedyoung one growing on his back. You may tear it off if you will--hecares not. You may cut him into a dozen pieces, they say, and eachone will grow, as a potato does. I suppose, however, that he alsosends out of his mouth little free ova--medusoids--call them what youwill, swimming by ciliae, which afterwards, unless the water beetlesstop them on the way, will settle down as stalked polypes, and intheir turn practise some mystery of Owenian parthenogenesis, orSteenstruppian alternation of generations, in which all traditionaldistinctions of plant and animal, male and female, are laughed toscorn by the magnificent fecundity of the Divine imaginations. 

That dusty cloud which shakes off in the water as you move the weed, under the microscope would be one mass of exquisite forms--Desmidiaeand Diatomaceae, and what not? Instead of running over long names, take home a little in a bottle, put it under your microscope, and ifyou think good verify the species from Hassall, Ehrenberg, or otherwise book; but without doing that, one glance through the lens willshow you why the chalk trout grow fat. 

Do they, then, eat these infusoria?

That is not clear. But minnows and small fry eat them by millions;and so do tadpoles, and perhaps caddis baits and water crickets. 

What are they?

Look on the soft muddy bottom. You see numberless bits of stick. Watch awhile, and those sticks are alive, crawling and tumbling overeach other. The weed, too, is full of smaller ones. Those livesticks are the larva-cases of the Caperers--Phryganeae--of which onefamily nearly two hundred species have been already found in GreatBritain. Fish up one, and you find, amid sticks and pebbles, acomfortable silk case, tenanted by a goodly grub. Six legs he has, like all insects, and tufts of white horns on each ring of hisabdomen, which are his gills. A goodly pair of jaws he has too, anddoes good service with them: for he is the great water scavenger. Decaying vegetable matter is his food, and with those jaws he willbark a dead stick as neatly as you will with a penknife. But he doesnot refuse animal matter. A dead brother (his, not yours) makes asavoury meal for him; and a party of those Vorticellae would stand apoor chance if he came across them. You may count these caddis baitsby hundreds of thousands; whether the trout eat them case and all, isa question in these streams. In some rivers the trout do so; andwhat is curious, during the spring, have a regular gizzard, atemporary thickening of the coats of the stomach, to enable them togrind the pebbly cases of the caddises. See! here is one whose houseis closed at both ends--'grille, ' as Pictet calls it, in hisunrivalled monograph of the Genevese Phryganeae, on which he spentfour years of untiring labour. The grub has stopped the mouth of hiscase by an open network of silk, defended by small pebbles, throughwhich the water may pass freely, while he changes into his nymphstate. Open the case; you find within not a grub, but a strangebird-beaked creature, with long legs and horns laid flat by itssides, and miniature wings on its back. Observe that the sides ofthe tail, and one pair of legs, are fringed with dark hairs. After afortnight's rest in this prison this 'nymph' will gnaw her way outand swim through the water on her back, by means of that fringed tailand paddles, till she reaches the bank and the upper air. There, under the genial light of day, her skin will burst, and a four-wingedfly emerge, to buzz over the water as a fawn-coloured Caperer--deadliest of trout flies; if she be not snapped up beforehand underwater by some spotted monarch in search of supper. 

But look again among this tangled mass of weed. Here are more larvaeof water-flies. Some have the sides fringed with what look likepaddles, but are gills. Of these one part have whisks at the tail, and swim freely. They will change into ephemerae, cock-winged'duns, ' with long whisked tails. The larvae of the famous greendrake (Ephemera vulgata) are like these: but we shall not find them. They are all changed by now into the perfect fly; and if not, theyburrow about the banks, and haunt the crayfish-holes, and are noteasily found. 

Some, again, have the gills on their sides larger and broader, and nowhisks at the tail. These are the larvae of Sialis, the black alder, Lord Stowell's fly, shorm fly, hunch-back of the Welsh, with which wehave caught our best fish to-day. 

And here is one of a delicate yellow-green, whose tail is furnishedwith three broad paddle-blades. These, I believe, are gills again. The larva is probably that of the Yellow Sally--Chrysoperla viridis--a famous fly on hot days in May and June. Among the pebbles there, below the fall, we should have found, a month since, a similar butmuch larger grub, with two paddles at his tail. He is the 'creeper'of the northern streams, and changes to the great crawling stone fly(May-fly of Tweed), Perla bicaudata, an ugly creature, which runs onstones and posts, and kills right well on stormy days, when he isbeaten into the stream. 

There. Now we have the larvae of the four great trout-fly families, Phryganeae, Ephemerae, Sialidae, Perlidae; so you have no excuse fortelling--as not only Cockneys, but really good sportsmen who write onfishing, have done--such fibs as that the green drake comes out of acaddis-bait, or giving such vague generalities as, 'this fly comesfrom a water-larva. '

These are, surely, in their imperfect and perfect states, food enoughto fatten many a good trout: but they are not all. See thesetransparent brown snails, Limneae and Succinae, climbing about theposts; and these other pretty ones, coil laid within coil as flat asa shilling, Planorbis. Many a million of these do the trout pick offthe weed day by day; and no food, not even the leech, which swarmshere, is more fattening. The finest trout of the high Snowdon lakesfeed almost entirely on leech and snail--baits they have none--andfatten till they cut as red as a salmon. 

Look here too, once more. You see a grey moving cloud about thatpebble bed, and underneath that bank. It is a countless swarm of'sug, ' or water-shrimp; a bad food, but devoured greedily by thegreat trout in certain overstocked preserves. 

Add to these plenty of minnow, stone-loach, and miller's thumbs, asecond course of young crayfish, and for one gormandizing week ofbliss, thousands of the great green-drake fly: and you have foodenough for a stock of trout which surprise, by their size and number, an angler fresh from the mountain districts of the north and west. To such a fisherman, the tale of Mr. ** *, of Ramsbury, who is saidto have killed in one day in his own streams on Kennet, seventy-sixtrout, all above a pound, sounds like a traveller's imagination: yetthe fact is, I believe, accurately true. 

This, however, is an extraordinary case upon an extraordinary stream. In general, if a man shall bring home (beside small fish) a couple ofbrace of from one to three pounds apiece, he may consider himself asa happy man, and that the heavens have not shone, but frowned, uponhim very propitiously. 

And now comes another and an important question. For which of allthese dainty eatables, if for any, do the trout take our flies? andfrom that arises another. Why are the flies with which we have beenfishing this morning so large--of the size which is usually employedon a Scotch lake? You are a North-country fisher, and are wont, uponyour clear streams, to fish with nothing but the smallest gnats. Andyet our streams are as clear as yours: what can be clearer?

Whether fish really mistake our artificial flies for differentspecies of natural ones, as Englishmen hold; or merely for somethinggood to eat, the colour whereof strikes their fancy, as Scotchmenthink--a theory which has been stated in detail, and with greatsemblance of truth, in Mr. Stewart's admirable 'Practical Angler, '--is a matter about which much good sense has been written on bothsides. 

Whosoever will, may find the great controversy fully discussed in thepages of Ephemera. Perhaps (as in most cases) the truth lies betweenthe two extremes; at least, in a chalk-stream. 

Ephemera's list of flies may be very excellent, but it is about tentimes as long as would be required for any of our southern streams. Six or seven sort of flies ought to suffice for any fisherman; ifthey will not kill, the thing which will kill is yet to seek. 

To name them:-

1. The caperer. 

2. The March-brown. 

3. The governor. 

4. The black alder. 

And two or three large palmers, red, grizzled, and coch-a-bonddhu, each with a tuft of red floss silk at the tail. These are enough toshow sport from March to October; and also like enough to certainnatural flies to satisfy the somewhat dull memory of a trout. 

But beyond this list there is little use in roaming, as far as myexperience goes. A yellow dun kills sometimes marvellously on chalk-streams, and always upon rocky ones. A Turkey-brown ephemera, thewing made of the bright brown tail of the cock partridge, will, evenjust after the May-fly is off, show good sport in the forenoon, whenhe is on the water; and so will in the evening the claret spinner, towhich he turns. Excellent patterns of these flies may be found inRonalds: but, after all, they are uncertain flies; and, as HarryVerney used to say, 'they casualty flies be all havers;' whichsentence the reader, if he understands good Wessex, can doubtlesstranslate for himself. 

And there are evenings on which the fish take greedily smalltransparent ephemerae. But, did you ever see large fish rise atthese ephemerae? And even if you did, can you imitate the naturalfly? And after all, would it not be waste of time? For theexperience of many good fishers is, that trout rise at these delicateduns, black gnats, and other microscopic trash, simply faute demieux. They are hungry, as trout are six days in the week, just atsunset. A supper they must have, and they take what comes; but ifyou can give them anything better than the minute fairy, compact ofequal parts of glass and wind, which naturalists call an Ephemera orBaetis, it will be most thankfully received, if there be rippleenough on the water (which there seldom is on a fine evening) to hidethe line: and even though the water be still, take boldly yourcaperer or your white moth (either of them ten times as large as whatthe trout are rising at), hurl it boldly into a likely place, and letit lie quiet and sink, not attempting to draw or work it; and if youdo not catch anything by that means, comfort yourself with thethought that there are others who can. 

And now to go through our list, beginning with -

1. The caperer. 

This perhaps is the best of all flies; it is certainly the one whichwill kill earliest and latest in the year; and though I would hardlygo as far as a friend of mine, who boasts of never fishing withanything else, I believe it will, from March to October, take moretrout, and possibly more grayling, than any other fly. Its basis isthe woodcock wing; red hackle legs, which should be long and pale;and a thin mohair body, of different shades of red-brown, from a darkclaret to a pale sandy. It may thus, tied of different sizes, doduty for half-a-dozen of the commonest flies; for the early claret(red-brown of Ronalds; a Nemoura, according to him), which is thefirst spring-fly; for the red spinner, or perfect form of the March-brown ephemera; for the soldier, the soft-winged reddish beetle whichhaunts the umbelliferous flowers, and being as soft in spirit as inflesh, perpetually falls into the water, and comes to grief therein;and last but not least, for the true caperers, or whole tribe ofPhryganidae, of which a sketch was given just now. As a copy ofthem, the body should be of a pale red brown, all but sandy (butnever snuff-coloured, as shop-girls often tie it), and its best houris always in the evening. It kills well when fish are gorged withtheir morning meal of green drakes; and after the green drake is off, it is almost the only fly at which large trout care to look; a factnot to be wondered at when one considers that nearly two hundredspecies of English Phryganidae have been already described, and thatat least half of them are of the fawn-tint of the caperer. Under thetitle of flame-brown, cinnamon, or red-hackle and rail's wing, asimilar fly kills well in Ireland, and in Scotland also; and issometimes the best sea-trout fly which can be laid on the water. Letthis suffice for the caperer. 

2. Of the March-brown ephemera there is little to be said, save tonotice Ronalds' and Ephemera's excellent description, and Ephemera'sgood hint of fishing with more than one March-brown at once, viz. , with a sandy-bodied male, and a greenish-bodied female. The fly is aworthy fly, and being easily imitated, gives great sport, in numberrather than in size; for when the March-brown is out, the two orthree pound fish are seldom on the move, preferring leeches, tom-toddies, and caddis-bait in the nether deeps, to slim ephemerae atthe top; and if you should (as you may) get hold of a big fish on thefly, 'you'd best hit him in again, ' as we say in Wessex; for he willbe, like the Ancient Mariner -

'Long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand. '

3. The 'governor. '--In most sandy banks, and dry poor lawns, will befound numberless burrows of ground bees who have a great trick oftumbling into the water. Perhaps, like the honey bee, they arethirsty souls, and must needs go down to the river and drink;perhaps, like the honey bee, they rise into the air with somedifficulty, and so in crossing a stream are apt to strike the furtherbank, and fall in. Be that as it may, an imitation of these littleground bees is a deadly fly the whole year round; and if workedwithin six inches of the shore, will sometimes fill a basket whenthere is not a fly on the water or a fish rising. There are thosewho never put up a cast of flies without one; and those, too, whohave killed large salmon on him in the north of Scotland, when thestreams are low. 

His tie is simple enough. A pale partridge or woodcock wing, shortred hackle legs, a peacock-herl body, and a tail--on which too muchartistic skill can hardly be expended--of yellow floss silk, and goldtwist or tinsel. The orange-tailed governors 'of ye shops, ' as theold drug-books would say, are all 'havers;' for the proper colour isa honey yellow. The mystery of this all-conquering tail seems to be, that it represents the yellow pollen, or 'bee bread' in the thighs orabdomen of the bee; whereof the bright colour, and perhaps the strongmusky flavour, makes him an attractive and savoury morsel. Be thatas it may, there is no better rule for a chalk stream than this--whenyou don't know what to fish with, try the governor. 

4. The black alder (Sialis nigra, or Lutaria). 

What shall be said, or not be said, of this queen of flies? And whatof Ephemera, who never mentions her? His alder fly is--I know notwhat; certainly not that black alder, shorm fly, Lord Stowell's fly, or hunch-back, which kills the monsters of the deep, surpassed onlyby the green drake for one fortnight; but surpassing him in this, that she will kill on till September, from that happy day on which

'You find her out on every stalkWhene'er you take a river walk, When swifts at eve begin to hawk. '

O thou beloved member of the brute creation! Songs have been writtenin praise of thee; statues would ere now have been erected to thee, had that hunch back and those flabby wings of thine been 'susceptibleof artistic treatment. ' But ugly thou art in the eyes of theuninitiated vulgar; a little stumpy old maid toddling about the worldin a black bonnet and a brown cloak, laughed at by naughty boys, butdoing good wherever thou comest, and leaving sweet memories behindthee; so sweet that the trout will rise at the ghost or sham of thee, for pure love of thy past kindnesses to them, months after thou hastdeparted from this sublunary sphere. What hours of bliss do I notowe to thee! How have I seen, in the rich meads of Wey, afterpicking out wretched quarter-pounders all the morning on March-brownand red-hackle, the great trout rush from every hover to welcome thyfirst appearance among the sedges and buttercups! How often, late inAugust, on Thames, on Test, on Loddon heads, have I seen the threeand four pound fish prefer thy dead image to any live reality. HaveI not seen poor old Si. Wilder, king of Thames fishermen (now gonehome to his rest), shaking his huge sides with delight over thymighty deeds, as his fourteen-inch whiskers fluttered in the breezelike the horsetail standard of some great Bashaw, while crystalThames murmured over the white flints on Monkey Island shallow, andthe soft breeze sighed in the colossal poplar spires, and the greattrout rose and rose, and would not cease, at thee, my alder-fly?Have I not seen, after a day in which the earth below was iron, andthe heavens above as brass, as the three-pounders would have thee, and thee alone, in the purple August dusk, old Moody's red face growredder with excitement, half proud at having advised me to 'put on'thee, half fearful lest we should catch all my lady's pet trout inone evening? Beloved alder-fly! would that I could give thee a soul(if indeed thou hast not one already, thou, and all things whichlive), and make thee happy in all aeons to come! But as it is, suchimmortality as I can I bestow on thee here, in small return for allthe pleasant days thou hast bestowed on me. 

Bah! I am becoming poetical; let us think how to tie an alder-fly. 

The common tie is good enough. A brown mallard, or dark hen-pheasanttail for wing, a black hackle for legs, and the necessary peacock-herl body. A better still is that of Jones Jones Beddgelert, thefamous fishing clerk of Snowdonia, who makes the wing of dappledpeacock-hen, and puts the black hackle on before the wings, in orderto give the peculiar hunch-backed shape of the natural fly. Many agood fish has this tie killed. But the best pattern of all is tiedfrom the mottled wing-feather of an Indian bustard; generally used, when it can be obtained, only for salmon flies. The brown and fawncheck pattern of this feather seems to be peculiarly tempting totrout, especially to the large trout of Thames; and in every riverwhere I have tried the alder, I have found the bustard wing facileprinceps among all patterns of the fly. 

Of palmers (the hairy caterpillars) are many sorts. Ephemera givesby far the best list yet published. Ronalds has also three goodones, but whether they are really taken by trout instead of theparticular natural insects which he mentions, is not very certain. The little coch-a-bonddhu palmer, so killing upon moor streams, mayprobably be taken for young larvae of the fox and oak-egger moths, abundant on all moors, upon trefoils, and other common plants; butthe lowland caterpillars are so abundant and so various in colourthat trout must be good entomologists to distinguish them. Somedistinction they certainly make; for one palmer will kill whereanother does not: but this depends a good deal on the colour of thewater; the red palmer, being easily seen, will kill almost anywhereand any when, simply because it is easily seen; and both the grizzleand brown palmer may be made to kill by adding to the tail a tuft ofred floss silk; for red, it would seem, has the same exciting effecton fish which it has upon many quadrupeds, possibly because it is thecolour of flesh. The mackerel will often run greedily at a strip ofscarlet cloth; and the most killing pike-fly I ever used had a bodymade of remnants of the huntsman's new 'pink. ' Still, there arelocal palmers. On Thames, for instance, I have seldom failed withthe grizzled palmer, while the brown has seldom succeeded, and theusually infallible red never. There is one more palmer worth trying, which Scotsmen, I believe, call the Royal Charlie; a coch-a-bonddhuor furnace hackle, over a body of gold-coloured floss silk, ribbedwith broad gold tinsel. Both in Devonshire and in Hampshire thiswill kill great quantities of fish, wherever furzy or otherwise wildbanks or oak-woods afford food for the oak-egger and fox moths, whichchildren call 'Devil's Gold Rings, ' and Scotsmen 'Hairy Oubits. '

Two hints more about palmers. They must not be worked on the top ofthe water, but used as stretchers, and allowed to sink as livingcaterpillars do; and next, they can hardly be too large or rough, provided that you have skill enough to get them into the waterwithout a splash. I have killed well on Thames with one full threeinches long, armed of course with two small hooks. With palmers--andperhaps with all baits--the rule is, the bigger the bait the biggerthe fish. A large fish does not care to move except for a goodmouthful. The best pike-fisher I know prefers a half-pound chub whenhe goes after one of his fifteen-pound jack; and the largest pike Iever ran--and lost, alas!--who seemed of any weight above twentypounds, was hooked on a live white fish of full three-quarters of apound. Still, no good angler will despise the minute North-countryflies. In Yorkshire they are said to kill the large chalk trout ofDriffield as well as the small limestone and grit fish of Craven; ifso, the gentlemen of the Driffield Club, who are said to thinknothing of killing three-pound fish on midge flies and cobweb tackle, must be (as canny Yorkshiremen are likely enough to be) the bestanglers in England. 

In one spot only in Yorkshire, as far as I know, do our large chalkflies kill: namely, in the lofty limestone tarn of Malham. Therepalmers, caperers, and rough black flies, of the largest Thames andKennet sizes, seem the only attractive baits: and for this reason, that they are the flies of the place. The cinnamon Phryganea comesup abundantly from among the stones; and the large peat moss to thewest of the tarn abounds, as usual, in house-flies and bluebottles, and in the caterpillars of the fox and oak-egger moths: anotherproof that the most attractive flies are imitations of the realinsects. On the other hand, there are said to be times when midges, and nothing else, will rise fish on some chalk streams. The delicateblack hackle which Mr. Stewart praises so highly (and which shouldalways be tied on a square sneck-bend hook) will kill in June andJuly; and on the Itchen, at Winchester, hardly any flies but smallones are used after the green drake is off. But there is one sadobjection against these said midges--what becomes of your fish whenhooked on one in a stream full of weeds (as all chalk streams areafter June), save

'One struggle more, and I am freeFrom pangs which rend my heart in twain'?

Winchester fishers have confessed to me that they lose three goodfish out of every four in such cases; and as it seems pretty clearthat chalk fish approve of no medium between very large flies andvery small ones, I advise the young angler, whose temper is not yetschooled into perfect resignation, to spare his own feelings byfishing with a single large fly--say the governor in the forenoon, the caperer in the evening, regardless of the clearness of the water. I have seen flies large enough for April, raise fish excellently inTest and other clear streams in July and August; and, what is more, drag them up out of the weeds and into the landing-net, where midgeswould have lost them in the first scuffle. 

So much for our leading chalk flies; all copies of live insects. Ofthe entomology of mountain streams little as yet is known: but a fewscattered hints may suffice to show that in them, as well as in thechalk rivers, a little natural science might help the angler. 

The well-known fact that smaller flies are required on the moors thanin the lowlands, is easily explained by the fact that poorer soilsand swifter streams produce smaller insects. The large Phryganeae, or true caperers, whose caddis-baits love still pools and stagnantditches, are there rare; and the office of water-scavenger isfulfilled by the Rhyacophiles (torrent-lovers) and Hydropsyches, whose tiny pebble-houses are fixed to the stones to resist theviolence of the summer floods. In and out of them the tiny larvaruns to find food, making in addition, in some species, galleries ofearth along the surface of the stones, in which he takes his walksabroad in full security. In any of the brown rivulets of Windsorforest, towards the middle of summer, the pebble-houses of theselittle creatures may be seen in millions, studding every stone. Tothe Hydropsyches (species montana? or variegata? of Pictet) belongsthat curious little Welsh fly, known in Snowdon by the name of theGwynnant, whose tesselated wing is best imitated by brown mallardfeather, and who so swarms in the lower lakes of Snowdon, that it isoften necessary to use three of them on the line at once, all otherflies being useless. It is perhaps the abundance of these tesselatedHydropsyches which makes the mallard wing the most useful in mountaindistricts, as the abundance of the fawn and grey Phryganidae in thesouth of England makes the woodcock wing justly the favourite. TheRhyacophiles, on the other hand, are mostly of a shining soot-grey, or almost black. These may be seen buzzing in hundreds over thepools on a wet evening, and with them the sooty Mystacides, calledsilverhorns in Scotland, from their antennae, which are ofpreposterous length, and ringed prettily enough with black and white. These delicate fairies make moveable cases, or rather pipes, of thefinest sand, generally curved, and resembling in shape the Dentaliumshell. Guarded by these, they hang in myriads on the smooth ledgesof rock, where the water runs gently a few inches deep. These areabundant everywhere: but I never saw so many of them as in theexquisite Cother brook, near Middleham, in Yorkshire. In thatdelicious glen, while wading up beneath the ash-fringed crags oflimestone, out of which the great ring ouzel (too wild, it seemed, tobe afraid of man) hopped down fearlessly to feed upon the strand, orpast flower-banks where the golden globe-flower, and the great bluegeranium, and the giant campanula bloomed beneath the white tasselsof the bird-cherry, I could not tread upon the limestone slabswithout crushing at every step hundreds of the delicate Mystacidetubes, which literally paved the. Shallow edge of the stream, andwhich would have been metamorphosed in due time into small sootymoth-like fairies, best represented, I should say, by the soft black-hackle which Mr. Stewart recommends as the most deadly of North-country flies. Not to these, however, but to the Phryganeae (who, when sticks and pebbles fail, often make their tubes of sand, e. G. P. Flava), should I refer the red-cow fly, which is almost the onlyautumn killer in the Dartmoor streams. A red cowhair body and awoodcock wing is his type, and let those who want West-country troutremember him. 

Another fly, common on some rocky streams, but more scarce in thechalk, is the 'Yellow Sally, ' which entomologists, with truerappreciation of its colour, call Chrysoperla viridis. It may bebought at the shops; at least a yellow something of that name, butbearing no more resemblance to the delicate yellow-green natural fly, with its warm grey wings, than a Pre-Raphaelite portrait to the humanbeing for whom it is meant. Copied, like most trout flies, from sometraditional copy by the hands of Cockney maidens, who never saw a flyin their lives, the mistake of a mistake, a sham raised to its tenthpower, it stands a signal proof that anglers will never get goodflies till they learn a little entomology themselves, and then teachit to the tackle makers. But if it cannot be bought, it can at leastbe made; and I should advise everyone who fishes rocky streams in Mayand June, to dye for himself some hackles of a brilliant greenish-yellow, and in the most burning sunshine, when fish seem inclined torise at no fly whatsoever, examine the boulders for the Chrysoperla, who runs over them, her wings laid flat on her back, her yellow legsmoving as rapidly as a forest-fly's; try to imitate her, and use heron the stream, or on the nearest lake. Certain it is that in Snowdonthis fly and the Gwynnant Hydropsyche will fill a creel in the mostburning north-easter, when all other flies are useless; a sufficientdisproof of the Scotch theory--that fish do not prefer the fly whichis on the water. {74}

Another disproof may be found in the 'fern web, ' 'bracken clock' ofScotland; the tiny cockchafer, with brown wing-cases and dark-greenthorax, which abounds in some years in the hay-meadows, on the fern, or on the heads of umbelliferous flowers. The famous Loch-Awe fly, described as an alder-fly with a rail's wing, seems to be nothing butthis fat little worthy: but the best plan is to make the wings, either buzz or hackle, of the bright neck-feather of the cockpheasant, thus gaining the metallic lustre of the beetle tribe. Tiedthus, either in Devonshire or Snowdon, few flies surpass him when heis out. His fatness proves an attraction which the largest fishcannot resist. 

The Ephemerae, too, are far more important in rapid and rocky streamsthan in the deeper, stiller waters of the south. It is worth whilefor a good fish to rise at them there; the more luxurious chalk troutwill seldom waste himself upon them, unless he be lying in shallowwater, and has but to move a few inches upward. 

But these Ephemerae, like all other naiads, want working out. Thespecies which Mr. Ronalds gives, are most of them, by his ownconfession, very uncertain. Of the Phryganidae he seems to knowlittle or nothing, mentioning but two species out of the two hundredwhich are said to inhabit Britain; and his land flies and beetles arein several cases quite wrongly named. However, the professedentomologists know but little of the mountain flies; and the anglerwho would help to work them out would confer a benefit on science, aswell as on the 'gentle craft. ' As yet the only approach to such agood work which I know of, is a little book on the trout flies ofRipon, with excellent engravings of the natural fly. The author'sname is not given; but the book may be got at Ripon, and mostvaluable it must be to any North-country fisherman. 

But come, we must not waste our time in talk, for here is a cloudover the sun, and plenty more coming up behind, before a rufflingsouth-west breeze, as Shelley has it -

'Calling white clouds like flocks to feed in air. '

Let us up and onward to that long still reach, which is now curlingup fast before the breeze; there are large fish to be taken, one ortwo at least, even before the fly comes on. You need not change yourflies; the cast which you have on--governor, and black alder--willtake, if anything will. Only do not waste your time and muscle, asyou are beginning to do, by hurling your flies wildly into the middleof the stream, on the chance of a fish being there. Fish are there, no doubt, but not feeding ones. They are sailing about and enjoyingthe warmth; but nothing more. If you want to find the hungry fishand to kill them, you must stand well back from the bank--or kneeldown, if you are really in earnest about sport; and throw within afoot of the shore, above you or below (but if possible above), with aline short enough to manage easily; by which I mean short enough toenable you to lift your flies out of the water at each throw withouthooking them in the docks and comfrey which grow along the brink. You must learn to raise your hand at the end of each throw, and liftthe flies clean over the land-weeds: or you will lose time, andfrighten all the fish, by crawling to the bank to unhook them. Believe me, one of the commonest mistakes into which young anglersfall is that of fishing in 'skipjack broad;' in plain English, inmid-stream, where few fish, and those little ones, are to be caught. Those who wish for large fish work close under the banks, and seldomtake a mid-stream cast, unless they see a fish rise there. 

The reason of this is simple. Walking up the Strand in search of adinner, a reasonable man will keep to the trottoir, and look in atthe windows close to him, instead of parading up the mid-street. Andeven so do all wise and ancient trout. The banks are their shops;and thither they go for their dinners, driving their poor littlechildren tyrannously out into the mid-river to fare as hap may hap. Over these children the tyro wastes his time, flogging the streamacross and across for weary hours, while the big papas and mammas arecomfortably under the bank, close at his feet, grubbing about thesides for water crickets, and not refusing at times a leech or ayoung crayfish, but perfectly ready to take a fly if you offer onelarge and tempting enough. They do but act on experience. All thelargest surface-food--beetles, bees, and palmers--comes off theshore; and all the caperers and alders, after emerging from theirpupa-cases, swim to the shore in order to change into the perfectinsect in the open air. The perfect insects haunt sunny sedges andtree-stems--whence the one is often called the sedge, the other thealder-fly--and from thence drop into the trouts' mouths; and withinsix inches of the bank will the good angler work, all the moresedulously and even hopefully if he sees no fish rising. I haveknown good men say that they had rather NOT see fish on the rise, ifthe day be good; that they can get surer sport, and are less troubledwith small fish, by making them rise; and certain it is, that a daywhen the fish are rising all over the stream is generally one ofdisappointment. 

Another advantage of bank fishing is, that the fish sees the fly onlyfor a moment. He has no long gaze at it, as it comes to him acrossthe water. It either drops exactly over his nose, or sweeps down thestream straight upon him. He expects it to escape on shore the nextmoment, and chops at it fiercely and hastily, instead of followingand examining. Add to this the fact that when he is under the bankthere is far less chance of his seeing you; and duly consideringthese things, you will throw away no more time in drawing, at leastin chalk-streams, flies over the watery wastes, to be snapped at nowand then by herring-sized pinkeens. In rocky streams, where thequantity of bank food is far smaller, this rule will perhaps not holdgood; though who knows not that his best fish are generally takenunder some tree from which the little caterpillars, having determinedon slow and deliberate suicide are letting themselves down gently bya silken thread into the mouth of the spotted monarch, who has but tosail about and about, and pick them up one by one as they touch thestream?--A sight which makes one think--as does a herd of swinecrunching acorns, each one of which might have become a 'builderoak'--how Nature is never more magnificent than in her waste. 

The next mistake, natural enough to the laziness of fallen man, isthat of fishing down-stream, and not up. What Mr. Stewart says onthis point should be read by every tyro. By fishing up-stream, evenagainst the wind, he will on an average kill twice as many trout aswhen fishing down. If trout are out and feeding on the shallows, upor down will simply make the difference of fish or no fish; and evenin deeps, where the difference in the chance of not being seen is notso great, many more fish will be hooked by the man who fishes up-stream, simply because when he strikes he pulls the hook into thetrout's mouth instead of out of it. But he who would obey Mr. Stewart in fishing up-stream must obey him also in discarding hislight London rod, which is in three cases out of four as weak and'floppy' in the middle as a waggon whip, and get to himself a stiffand powerful rod, strong enough to spin a minnow; whereby he willobtain, after some weeks of aching muscles, two good things--a fore-arm fit for a sculptor's model, and trout hooked and killed, insteadof pricked and lost. 

Killed, as well as hooked; for how large trout are to be killed in aweedy chalk-stream without a stiff rod which will take them down, isa question yet unsolved. Even the merest Cockney will know, if hethinks, that weeds float with their points down-stream; and thattherefore if a fish is to be brought through them without entangling, he must be 'combed' through them in the same direction. But how isthis to be done, if a fish be hooked below you on a weak rod? With astrong rod indeed you can, at the chance of tearing out the hook, keep him by main force on the top of the water, till you have runpast him and below him, shortening your line anyhow in loops--thereis no time to wind it up with the reel--and then do what you mighthave done comfortably at first had you been fishing up--viz. , bringhim down-stream, and let the water run through his gills, and drownhim. But with a weak rod--Alas for the tyro! He catches one glimpseof a silver side plunging into the depths; he finds his rod double inhis hand; he finds fish and flies stop suddenly somewhere; he rushesdown to the spot, sees weeds waving around his line, and guesses fromwhat he feels and sees that the fish is grubbing up-stream throughthem, five feet under water. He tugs downwards and backwards, buttoo late; the drop-fly is fast wrapt in Ceratophyllum and Glyceria, Callitriche and Potamogeton, and half-a-dozen more horrid things withlong names and longer stems; and what remains but the fate ofCampbell's Lord Ullin? -

'The waters wild went o'er his child, And he was left lamenting. '

Unless, in fact, large fish can be got rapidly down-stream, thechance of killing them is very small; and therefore the man whofishes a willow-fringed brook downward, is worthy of no crown butOphelia's, besides being likely enough, if he attempt to get down tohis fish, to share her fate. The best fisherman, however, will cometo shame in streams bordered by pollard willows, and among queernooks, which can be only fished down-stream. I saw, but the otherday, a fish hooked cleverly enough, by throwing to an inch where heought to have been, and indeed was, and from the only point whencethe throw could be made. Out of the water he came, head and tail, the moment he felt the hook, and showed a fair side over two poundsweight . . . . And then? Instead of running away, he ran right atthe fisherman, for reasons which were but too patent. Between manand fish were ten yards of shallow, then a deep weedy shelf, and thenthe hole which was his house. And for that weedy shelf the spottedmonarch made, knowing that there he could drag himself clear of thefly, as perhaps he had done more than once before. 

What was to be done? Take him down-stream through the weed? Alas, on the man's left hand an old pollard leant into the water, barringall downward movement. Jump in and run round? He had rather to runback from the bank, from fear of a loose line; the fish was coming athim so fast that there was no time to wind up. Safe into the weedshurls the fish; the man, as soon as he finds the fish stop, jumps inmid-leg deep, and staggers up to him, in hopes of clearing; finds thedropper fast in the weeds, and the stretcher, which had been in thefish's mouth, wantoning somewhere in the depths--Quid plura? Let usdraw a veil over that man's return to shore. 

No mortal skill could have killed that fish. Mortal luck (which issometimes, as most statesmen know, very great) might have done it, ifthe fish had been irretrievably fast hooked; as, per contra, I oncesaw a fish of nearly four pounds hooked just above an alder bush, onthe same bank as the angler. The stream was swift: there was agreat weed-bed above; the man had but about ten feet square of swiftwater to kill the trout in. Not a foot down-stream could he takehim; in fact, he had to pull him hard up-stream to keep him out ofhis hover in the alder roots. Three times that fish leapt into theair nearly a yard high; and yet, so merciful is luck, and so firmlywas he hooked, in five breathless minutes he was in the landing-net;and when he was there and safe ashore, just of the shape and colourof a silver spoon, his captor lay down panting upon the bank, andwith Sir Hugh Evans, manifested 'a great disposition to cry. ' But itwas a beautiful sight. A sharper round between man and fish neversaw I fought in Merry England. 

I saw once, however, a cleverer, though not a more dashing feat. Ahandy little fellow (I wonder where he is now?) hooked a trout ofnearly three pounds with his dropper, and at the same moment a postwith his stretcher. What was to be done? To keep the fish pullingon him, and not on the post. And that, being favoured by standing ona four-foot bank, he did so well that he tired out the fish in somesix feet square of water, stopping him and turning him beautifullywhenever he tried to run, till I could get in to him with thelanding-net. That was five-and-thirty years since. If the littleman has progressed in his fishing as he ought, he should be now oneof the finest anglers in England. 

* * * * *

So. Thanks to bank fishing, we have, you see, landed three or fourmore good fish in the last two hours--And! What is here? An uglytwo-pound chub, Chevin, 'Echevin, ' or Alderman, as the French callhim. How is this, keeper? I thought you allowed no such vermin inthis water?

The keeper answers, with a grunt, that 'they allow themselves. Thatthere always were chub hereabouts, and always will be; for the morehe takes out with the net, the more come next day. '

Probably. No nets will exterminate these spawn-eating, fry-eating, all-eating pests, who devour the little trout, and starve the largeones, and, at the first sign of the net, fly to hover among the mosttangled roots. There they lie, as close as rats in a bank, and workthemselves the farther in the more they are splashed and poked by thepoles of the beaters. But the fly, well used, will--if notexterminate them--still thin them down greatly; and very good sportthey give, in my opinion, in spite of the contempt in which they arecommonly held, as chicken-hearted fish, who show no fight. True; buttheir very cowardice makes them the more difficult to catch; for nofish must you keep more out of sight, and further off. The veryshadow of the line (not to mention that of the rod) sends them flyingto hover; and they rise so cautiously and quietly, that they giveexcellent lessons in patience and nerve to a beginner. If the fly isdragged along the surface, or jerked suddenly from them, they fleefrom it in terror; and when they do, after due deliberation, take itin, their rise is so quiet, that you can seldom tell whether yourfish weighs half a pound or four pounds and a half--unless you, likemost beginners, attempt to show your quickness by that most uselessexertion, a violent strike. Then, the snapping of your footlink, or--just as likely--of the top of your rod, makes you fully aware, ifnot of the pluck, at least of the brute strength, of the burlyalderman of the waters. No fish, therefore, will better teach thebeginner the good old lesson, 'not to frighten a fish before you havetired him. '

For flies--chub will rise greedily at any large palmers, the largerand rougher the better. A red and a grizzled hackle will always takethem; but the best fly of all is an imitation of the black beetle--the 'undertaker' of the London shops. He, too, can hardly be toolarge, and should be made of a fat body of black wool, with themetallic black feather of a cock's tail wrapped loosely over it. Astill better wing is one of the neck feathers of any metallic-plumedbird, e. G. , Phlogophorus Impeyanus, the Menaul Pheasant, laid flatand whole on the back, to imitate the wing-shells of the beetle, thelegs being represented by any loose black feathers--(not hackles, which are too fine. ) Tied thus, it will kill not only every chub ina pool (if you give the survivors a quarter of an hour wherein torecover from their horror at their last friend's fate), but also, here and there, very large trout. 

Another slur upon the noble sport of chub fishing is the fact of hisnot being worth eating--a fact which, in the true sportsman's eyes, will go for nothing. But though the man who can buy fresh soles andsalmon may despise chub, there are those who do not. True, you maymake a most accurate imitation of him by taking one of Palmer'spatent candles, wick and all, stuffing it with needles and splitbristles, and then stewing the same in ditch-water. Nevertheless, strange to say, the agricultural stomach digests chub; and if, afterhaving filled your creel, or three creels (as you may too often), with them, you will distribute them on your way home to all the oldwomen you meet, you will make many poor souls happy, after havingsaved the lives of many trout. 

But here we come to a strip of thick cover, part of our Squire's homepreserves, which it is impossible to fish, so closely do the boughscover the water. We will walk on through it towards the hall, andthere get--what we begin sorely to need--something to eat. It willbe of little use fishing for some time to come; for these hot hoursof the afternoon, from three till six, are generally the 'deadesttime' of the whole day. 

And now, when we have struggled in imagination through the last bitof copse, and tumbled over the palings into the lawn, we shall see ascene quite as lovely, if you will believe it, as any alp on earth. 

What shall we see, as we look across the broad, still, clear river, where the great dark trout sail to and fro lazily in the sun? Forhaving free-warren of our fancy and our paper, we may see what wechoose. 

White chalk-fields above, quivering hazy in the heat. A park full ofmerry haymakers; gay red and blue waggons; stalwart horses switchingoff the flies; dark avenues of tall elms; groups of abele, 'tossingtheir whispering silver to the sun;' and amid them the house. Whatmanner of house shall it be? Tudor or Elizabethan, with oriels, mullioned windows, gables, and turrets of strange shape? No: thatis commonplace. Everybody builds Tudor houses now. Our house shallsmack of Inigo Jones or Christopher Wren; a great square red-brickmass, made light and cheerful though, by quoins and windows of whiteSarsden stone; with high-peaked French roofs, broken by louvres anddormers, haunted by a thousand swallows and starlings. Old walledgardens, gay with flowers, shall stretch right and left. Clipt yewalleys shall wander away into mysterious glooms: and out of theirblack arches shall come tripping children, like white fairies, tolaugh and talk with the girl who lies dreaming and reading in thehammock there, beneath the black velvet canopy of the great cedar-tree, like some fair Tropic flower hanging from its boughs. Thenthey shall wander down across the smooth-shorn lawn, where the purplerhododendrons hang double, bush and image, over the water's edge, andcall to us across the stream, 'What sport?' and the old Squire shallbeckon the keeper over the long stone bridge, and return with himbringing luncheon and good ale; and we will sit down, and eat anddrink among the burdock leaves, and then watch the quiet house, andlawn, and flowers, and fair human creatures, and shining water, allsleeping breathless in the glorious light beneath the glorious blue, till we doze off, lulled by the murmur of a thousand insects, and therich minstrelsy of nightingale and black-cap, thrush and dove. 

Peaceful, graceful, complete English country life and country houses;everywhere finish and polish; Nature perfected by the wealth and artof peaceful centuries! Why should I exchange you, even for the sightof all the Alps, for bad roads, bad carriages, bad inns, bad food, bad washing, bad beds, and fleas, fleas, fleas?

Let that last thought be enough. There may be follies, there may besorrows, there may be sins--though I know there are no very heavyones--in that fine old house opposite: but thanks to the genius ofmy native land, there are at least no fleas. 

Think of that, wandering friend; and of this also, that you will findyour warm bath ready when you go to bed to-night, and your cold onewhen you rise to-morrow morning; and in content and thankfulness, stay in England, and be clean. 

* * * *

Here, then, let us lounge a full two hours, too comfortable and tootired to care for fishing, till the hall-bell rings for that dinnerwhich we as good anglers will despise. Then we will make our way tothe broad reaches above the house. The evening breeze should beruffling them gallantly; and see, the fly is getting up. Countlessthousands are rising off the grass, and flickering to and fro abovethe stream. Stand still a moment, and you will hear the air full ofthe soft rustle of innumerable wings. Hundreds more, even moredelicate and gauzy, are rising through the water, and floatinghelplessly along the surface, as Aphrodite may have done when sherose in the AEgean, half frightened at the sight of the new upperworld. And, see, the great trout are moving everywhere. Fish toolarge and well fed to care for the fly at any other season, who havebeen lounging among the weeds all day and snapping at passingminnows, have come to the surface; and are feeding steadily, splashing five or six times in succession, and then going down awhileto bolt their mouthful of victims; while here and there a heavysilent swirl tells of a fly taken before it has reached the surface, untimely slain before it has seen the day. 

Now--put your Green-drake on; and throw, regardless of bank-fishingor any other rule, wherever you see a fish rise. Do not work yourflies in the least, but let them float down over the fish, or sink ifthey will; he is more likely to take them under water than on thetop. And mind this rule: be patient with your fish; and do notfancy that because he does not rise to you the first or the tenthtime, therefore he will not rise at all. He may have filled hismouth and gone down to gorge; and when he comes up again, if your flybe the first which he meets, he will probably seize it greedily, andall the more so if it be under water, so seeming drowned andhelpless. Besides, a fish seldom rises twice exactly in the sameplace, unless he be lying between two weeds, or in the corner of aneddy. His small wits, when he is feeding in the open, seem to hintto him that after having found a fly in one place he must move a footor two on to find another; and therefore it may be some time beforeyour turn comes, and your fly passes just over his nose; which if itdo not do, he certainly will not, amid such an abundance, go out ofhis way for it. In the meanwhile your footlink will very probablyhave hit him over the back, or run foul of his nose, in which caseyou will not catch him at all. A painful fact for you; but if youcould catch every fish you saw, where would be the trout for nextseason?

Put on a dropper of some kind, say a caperer, as a second chance. Ialmost prefer the dark claret-spinner, with which I have killed verylarge fish alternately with the green-drake, even when it was quitedark; and for your stretcher, of course a green-drake. 

For a blustering evening like this your drake can hardly be too largeor too rough; in brighter and stiller weather the fish often prefer afly half the size of the natural one. Only bear in mind that themost tempting form among these millions of drakes is that one whosewings are very little coloured at all, of a pale greenish yellow;whose body is straw-coloured, and his head, thorax, and legs, spottedwith dark brown--best represented by a pheasant or coch-a-bonddhuhackle. 

The best imitation of this, or of any drake, which I have ever seen, is one by Mr. Macgowan, whilome of Ballyshannon, now of No. 7, Bruton-street, Berkeley-square, whose drakes, known by a waxy body ofsome mysterious material, do surpass those of all other men, andshould be known and honoured far and wide. But failing them, you maydo well with a drake which is ribbed through the whole length withred hackle over a straw-coloured body. A North-countryman wouldlaugh at it, and ask us how we fancy that fish will mistake for thatdelicate waxy fly a heavy rough palmer, made heavier and rougher bytwo thick tufts of yellow mallard wing: but if he will fishtherewith, he will catch trout; and mighty ones they will be. I havefound, again and again, this drake, in which the hackle is ribbed alldown the body, beat a bare-bodied one in the ratio of three fish toone. The reason is difficult to guess. Perhaps the shiningtransparent hackle gives the fly more of the waxy look of the naturalinsect; or perhaps the 'buzzly' look of the fly causes the fish tomistake it for one half emerged from its pupa case, fluttering, entangled, and helpless. But whatever be the cause, I am sure of thefact. Now--silence and sport for the next three hours. 

* * * * *

There! All things must end. It is so dark that I have been fishingfor the last five minutes without any end fly; and we have lost ourtwo last fish simply by not being able to guide them into the net. But what an evening's sport we have had! Beside several over a poundwhich I have thrown in (I trust you have been generous and donelikewise), there are six fish averaging two pounds apiece; and whatis the weight of that monster with whom I saw you wrestling dimlythrough the dusk, your legs stuck knee-deep in a mudbank, your headembowered in nettles, while the keeper waltzed round you, roaringmere incoherencies?--four pounds full. Now, is there any sherry leftin the flask? No. Then we will give the keeper five shillings; heis well worth his pay; and then drag our weary limbs towards the hallto bath, supper, and bed; while you confess, I trust, that you mayget noble sport, hard exercise, and lovely scenery, without goingsixty miles from London town. 

III. THE FENS. 

A certain sadness is pardonable to one who watches the destruction ofa grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bringblessings to the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that itis right and good that the Great Fen should have become, instead of awaste and howling wilderness, a garden of the Lord, where

'All the land in flowery squares, Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind, Smells of the coming summer. '

And yet the fancy may linger, without blame, over the shining meres, the golden reed-beds, the countless water-fowl, the strange and gaudyinsects, the wild nature, the mystery, the majesty--for mystery andmajesty there were--which haunted the deep fens for many a hundredyears. Little thinks the Scotsman, whirled down by the GreatNorthern Railway from Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place, even twenty years ago, was that Holme and Whittlesea, which is nowbut a black, unsightly, steaming flat, from which the meres and reed-beds of the old world are gone, while the corn and roots of the newworld have not as yet taken their place. 

But grand enough it was, that black ugly place, when backed byCaistor Hanglands and Holme Wood, and the patches of the primaevalforest; while dark-green alders, and pale-green reeds, stretched formiles round the broad lagoon, where the coot clanked, and the bitternboomed, and the sedge-bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around; while high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyondkite, as far as eye could see. Far off, upon the silver mere, wouldrise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness and itswhite paint. Then down the wind came the boom of the greatstanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound, louder as itneared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the hounds ofCottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terrifiedwild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the airwith the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all soundedthe wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the greatwild swan. 

They are all gone now. No longer do the ruffs trample the sedge intoa hard floor in their fighting-rings, while the sober reeves standround, admiring the tournament of their lovers, gay with ears andtippets, no two of them alike. Gone are ruffs and reeves, spoonbills, bitterns, avosets; the very snipe, one hears, disdains tobreed. Gone, too, not only from Whittlesea but from the whole world, is that most exquisite of English butterflies, Lycaena dispar--thegreat copper; and many a curious insect more. Ah, well, at least weshall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague;and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking and opium-eating; andchildren will live and not die. For it was a hard place to live in, the old Fen; a place wherein one heard of 'unexampled instances oflongevity, ' for the same reason that one hears of them in savagetribes--that few lived to old age at all, save those ironconstitutions which nothing could break down. 

And now, when the bold Fen-men, who had been fighting water by thehelp of wind, have given up the more capricious element for that moremanageable servant fire; have replaced their wind-mills by steam-engines, which will work in all weathers; and have pumped the wholefen dry--even too dry, as the last hot summer proved; when the onlybit of the primaeval wilderness left, as far as I know, is 200 acresof sweet sedge and Lastraea thelypteris in Wicken Fen: there can beno harm in lingering awhile over the past, and telling of what theGreat Fen was, and how it came to be that great flat which reaches(roughly speaking) from Cambridge to Peterborough on the south-westside, to Lynn and Tattershall on the north-east, some forty miles andmore each way. 

To do that rightly, and describe how the Fen came to be, one must goback, it seems to me, to an age before all history; an age whichcannot be measured by years or centuries; an age shrouded in mystery, and to be spoken of only in guesses. To assert anything positivelyconcerning that age, or ages, would be to show the rashness ofignorance. 'I think that I believe, ' 'I have good reason tosuspect, ' 'I seem to see, ' are the strongest forms of speech whichought to be used over a matter so vast and as yet so littleelaborated. 

'I seem to see, ' then, an epoch after those strata were laid downwith which geology generally deals; after the Kimmeridge clay, Oxfordclay, and Gault clay, which form the impervious bedding of the fens, with their intermediate beds of coral-rag and green sand, had beendeposited; after the chalk had been laid on the top of them, at thebottom of some ancient ocean; after (and what a gulf of time isimplied in that last 'after!') the boulder-clay (coeval probably withthe 'till' of Scotland) had been spread out in the 'age of ice' ontop of all; after the whole had been upheaved out of the sea, andstood about the same level as it stands now: but before the greatvalley of the Cam had been scooped out, and the strata were stillcontinuous, some 200 feet above Cambridge and its colleges, from thetop of the Gog-magogs to the top of Madingley Rise. 

In those ages--while the valleys of the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, theWelland, the Glen, and the Witham were sawing themselves out by noviolent convulsions, but simply, as I believe, by the same slowaction of rain and rivers by which they are sawing backward into theland even now--I 'seem to see' a time when the Straits of Dover didnot exist--a time when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land. Through it, into a great estuary between North Britain and Norway, flowed together all the rivers of north-eastern Europe--Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, Thames, and all the rivers of east England, asfar north as the Humber. 

And if a reason be required for so daring a theory--first started, ifI recollect right, by the late lamented Edward Forbes--a sufficientone may be found in one look over a bridge, in any river of the Eastof England. There we see various species of Cyprinidae, 'rough' or'white' fish--roach, dace, chub, bream, and so forth, and with themtheir natural attendant and devourer, the pike. 

Now these fish belong almost exclusively to the same system ofrivers--those of north-east Europe. They attain their highestdevelopment in the great lakes of Sweden. Westward of the Straits ofDover they are not indigenous. They may be found in the streams ofsouth and western England; but in every case, I believe, they havebeen introduced either by birds or by men. From some now submerged'centre of creation' (to use poor Edward Forbes's formula) they musthave spread into the rivers where they are now found; and spread byfresh water, and not by salt, which would destroy them in a singletide. 

Again, there lingers in the Cam, and a few other rivers of north-eastern Europe, that curious fish the eel-pout or 'burbot' (Molvalota). Now he is utterly distinct from any other fresh-water fish ofEurope. His nearest ally is the ling (Molva vulgaris); a deep-seafish, even as his ancestors have been. Originally a deep-sea form, he has found his way up the rivers, even to Cambridge, and thereremains. The rivers by which he came up, the land through which hepassed, ages and ages since, have been all swept away; and he hasnever found his way back to his native salt-water, but lives on in astrange land, degraded in form, dwindling in numbers, and now fastdying out. The explanation may be strange: but it is the only onewhich I can offer to explain the fact--which is itself much morestrange--of the burbot being found in the Fen rivers. 

Another proof may be found in the presence of the edible frog of theContinent at Foulmire, on the edge of the Cambridge Fans. It is amoot point still with some, whether he was not put there by man. Itis a still stronger argument against his being indigenous, that he isnever mentioned as an article of food by the mediaeval monks, whowould have known--Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, as many of them were--that he is as dainty as ever was a spring chicken. But if he beindigenous, his presence proves that once he could either hop acrossthe Straits of Dover, or swim across the German Ocean. 

But there can be no doubt of the next proof--the presence in the Fens(where he is now probably extinct) and in certain spots in EastAnglia, which I shall take care not to mention, of that exquisitelittle bird the 'Bearded Tit' (Calamophilus biarmicus). Tit he isnone; rather, it is said, a finch, but connected with no otherEnglish bird. His central home is in the marshes of Russia andPrussia; his food the mollusks which swarm among the reed-beds wherehe builds; and feeding on those from reed-bed to reed bed, all acrosswhat was once the German Ocean, has come the beautiful little birdwith long tail, orange tawny plumage, and black moustache, whichmight have been seen forty years ago in hundreds on ever reed-rond ofthe Fen. 

One more proof--for it is the heaping up of facts, each minute byitself, which issues often in a sound and great result. In drainingWretham Mere, in Norfolk, not so very far from the Fens, in the year1856 there were found embedded in the peat moss (which is not theScotch and Western Sphagnum palustre, but an altogether differentmoss, Hypnum fluitans), remains of an ancient lake-dwelling, supported on piles. A dwelling like those which have latelyattracted so much notice in the lakes of Switzerland: like thosewhich the Dyaks make about the ports and rivers of Borneo; dwellingsinvented, it seems to me, to enable the inhabitants to escape notwild beasts only, but malaria and night frosts; and, perched abovethe cold and poisonous fogs, to sleep, if not high and dry, at leasthigh and healthy. 

In the bottom of this mere were found two shells of the fresh-watertortoise, Emys lutaria, till then unknown in England. 

These little animals, who may be seen in hundreds in the meres ofeastern Europe, sunning their backs on fallen logs, and diving intothe water at the sound of a footstep, are eaten largely incontinental capitals (as is their cousin the terrapin, Emys picta, inthe Southern States). They may be bought at Paris, at fashionablerestaurants. Thither they may have been sent from Vienna or Berlin;for in north France, Holland, and north-west Germany they areunknown. A few specimens have been found buried in peat in Swedenand Denmark; and there is a tale of a live one having been found inthe extreme south part of Sweden, some twenty years ago. {103} IntoSweden, then, as into England, the little fresh-water tortoise hadwandered, as to an extreme limit, beyond which the change of climate, and probably of food, killed him off. 

But the emys which came to the Wretham bog must have had a longjourney; and a journey by fresh water too. Down Elbe or Weser hemust have floated, ice-packed, or swept away by flood, till somewhereoff the Doggerbank, in that great network of rivers which is now opensea, he or his descendants turned up Ouse and Little Ouse, till theyfound a mere like their old Prussian one, and there founded a tinycolony for a few generations, till they were eaten up by the savagesof the table dwelling; or died out--as many a human family has diedout--because they found the world too hard. 

And lastly, my friend Mr. Brady, well known to naturalists, has foundthat many forms of Entomastraca are common to the estuaries of theeast of England and to those of Holland. 

It was thus necessary, in order to account for the presence of someof the common animals of the fen, to go back to an epoch of immenseremoteness. 

And how was that great lowland swept away? Who can tell? Probablyby no violent convulsion. Slow upheavals, slow depressions, theremay have been--indeed must have been--as the sunken fir-forests ofBrancaster, and the raised beach of Hunstanton, on the extreme north-east corner of the Wash, testify to this day. But the main agent ofdestruction has been, doubtless, that same ever-gnawing sea-washwhich devours still the soft strata of the whole east coast ofEngland, as far as Flamborough Head; and that great scavenger, thetide-wave, which sweeps the fallen rubbish out to sea twice in everytwenty-four hours. Wave and tide by sea, rain and river by land;these are God's mighty mills in which He makes the old world new. And as Longfellow says of moral things, so may we of physical:-

'Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingsmall. Though He sit, end wait with patience, with exactness grinds He all. '

The lighter and more soluble particles, during that slow but vastdestruction which is going on still to this day, have been carriedfar out to sea, and deposited as ooze. The heavier and coarser havebeen left along the shores, as the gravels which fill the oldestuaries of the east of England. 

From these gravels we can judge of the larger animals which dwelt inthat old world. About these lost lowlands wandered herds of thewoolly mammoth. Elephas primigenius, whose bones are common incertain Cambridge gravels, whose teeth are brought up by dredgers, far out in the German Ocean, off certain parts of the Norfolk coast. With them wandered the woolly rhinoceros (R. Tichorhinus), thehippopotamus, the lion--not (according to some) to be distinguishedfrom the recent lion of Africa--the hyaena, the bear, the horse, thereindeer, and the musk ox; the great Irish elk, whose vast horns areso well known in every museum of northern Europe; and that mighty ox, the Bos primigenius, which still lingered on the Continent inCaesar's time, as the urus, in magnitude less only than theelephant, --and not to be confounded with the bison, a relation of, ifnot identical with, the buffalo of North America, --which stilllingers, carefully preserved by the Czar, in the forests ofLithuania. 

The remains of this gigantic ox, be it remembered, are foundthroughout Britain, and even into the Shetland Isles. Would that anygentleman who may see these pages would take notice of the fact, thatwe have not (so I am informed) in these islands a single perfectskeleton of Bos primigenius; while the Museum of Copenhagen, to itshonour, possesses five or six from a much smaller field than is opento us; and be public-spirited enough, the next time he hears of ox-bones, whether in gravel or in peat (as he may in the draining of anynorthern moss), to preserve them for the museum of his neighbourhood--or send them to Cambridge. 

But did all these animals exist at the same time? It is difficult tosay. The study of the different gravels is most intricate--almost aspecial science in itself--in which but two or three men are adepts. It is hard, at first sight, to believe that the hippopotamus couldhave been the neighbour of the Arctic reindeer and musk ox: but thatthe woolly mammoth not only may have been such, but was such, therecan be no doubt. His remains, imbedded in ice at the mouth of thegreat Siberian rivers, with the wool, skin, and flesh (in some cases)still remaining on the bones, prove him to have been fitted for acold climate, and to have browsed upon the scanty shrubs of NorthernAsia. But, indeed, there is no reason, a priori, why these hugemammals, now confined to hotter countries, should not have onceinhabited a colder region, or at least have wandered northwards inwhole herds in summer, to escape insects, and find fresh food, andabove all, water. The same is the case with the lion, and other hugebeasts of prey. The tiger of Hindostan ranges, at least in summer, across the snows of the Himalaya, and throughout China. Even at theriver Amoor, where the winters are as severe as at St. Petersburg, the tiger is an ordinary resident at all seasons. The lion was, undoubtedly, an inhabitant of Thrace as late as the expedition ofXerxes, whose camels they attacked; and the 'Nemaean lion, ' and theother lions which stand out in Grecian myth, as having been killed byHercules and the heroes, may have been the last remaining specimensof that Felis spelaea (undistinguishable, according to some, from theAfrican lion), whose bones are found in the gravels and the cavernsof these isles. 

And how long ago were those days of mammoths and reindeer, lions andhyaenas? We must talk not of days, but of ages; we know nothing ofdays or years. As the late lamented Professor Sedgwick has wellsaid:-

'We allow that the great European oscillation, which ended in theproduction of the drift (the boulder clay, or till), was effectedduring a time of vast, but unknown length. And if we limit ourinquiries, and ask what was the interval of time between the newestbed of gravel near Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or siltin Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, we are utterly at a loss for adefinite answer. The interval of time may have been very great. Butwe have no scale on which to measure it. '

Let us suppose, then, the era of 'gravels' past; the valleys whichopen into the fen sawn out by rivers to about their present depth. What was the special cause of the fen itself? why did not the greatlowland become a fertile 'carse' of firm alluvial soil, like that ofStirling?

One reason is, that the carse of Stirling has been upheaved sometwenty feet, and thereby more or less drained, since the time of theRomans. A fact patent and provable from Cramond (the old Roman portof Alaterna) up to Blair Drummond above Stirling, where whales'skeletons, and bone tools by them, have been found in loam and peat, twenty feet above high-water mark. The alluvium of the fens, on theother hand, has very probably suffered a slight depression. 

But the main reason is, that the silt brought down by the fen riverscannot, like that of the Forth and its neighbouring streams, get safeaway to sea. From Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, all down theLincolnshire coast, the land is falling, falling for ever into thewaves; and swept southward by tide and current, the debris turns intothe Wash between Lincolnshire and Norfolk, there to repose, as in aquiet haven. 

Hence that vast labyrinth of banks between Lynn and Wisbeach, of mudinside, brought down by the fen rivers; but outside (contrary to theusual rule) of shifting sand, which has come inward from the sea, andprevents the mud's escape--banks parted by narrow gullies, thedelight of the gunner with his punt, haunted by million wild-fowl inwinter, and in summer hazy steaming flats, beyond which the trees ofLincolnshire loom up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, while the masts and sails of distant vessels quiver, fantasticallydistorted and lengthened, sometimes even inverted, by a refractionlike that which plays such tricks with ships and coasts in the Arcticseas. Along the top of the mud banks lounge the long black rows ofseals, undistinguishable from their reflection in the still waterbelow; distorted too, and magnified to the size of elephants. Longlines of sea-pies wing their way along at regular tide-hours, from orto the ocean. Now and then a skein of geese paddle hastily out ofsight round a mud-cape; or a brown robber gull (generallyRichardson's Skua) raises a tumult of screams, by making a raid upona party of honest white gulls, to frighten them into vomiting uptheir prey for his benefit; or a single cormorant flaps along, closeto the water, towards his fishing ground. Even the fish are shy ofhaunting a bottom which shifts with every storm; and innumerableshrimps are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea:beside, all is silence and desolation, as of a world waiting to bemade. 

So strong is the barrier which these sea-borne sands oppose to theriver-borne ooze, that as soon as a seabank is built--as theprojectors of the 'Victoria County' have built them--across any partof the estuary, the mud caught by it soon 'warps' the space withininto firm and rich dry land. But that same barrier, ere the fen wasdrained, backed up for ages not only the silt, but the very water ofthe fens; and spread it inland into a labyrinth of shifting streams, shallow meres, and vast peat bogs, on those impervious clays whichfloor the fen. Each river contributed to the formation of those bogsand meres, instead of draining them away; repeating on a huge scalethe process which may be seen in many a highland strath, where theground at the edge of the stream is firm and high; the meadows nearthe hillfoot, a few hundred yards away, bogland lower than the bankof the stream. For each flood deposits its silt upon the immediatebank of the river, raising it year by year; till--as in the case ofthe 'Levee' of the Mississippi, and probably of every one of the oldfen rivers--the stream runs at last between two natural dykes, at alevel considerably higher than that of the now swamped andundrainable lands right and left of it. 

If we add to this, a slope in the fen rivers so extraordinarilyslight, that the river at Cambridge is only thirteen and a half feetabove the mean sea level, five-and-thirty miles away, and that if thegreat sea-sluice of Denver, the key of all the eastern fen, werewashed away, the tide would back up the Cam to within ten miles ofCambridge; if we add again the rainfall upon that vast flat area, utterly unable to escape through rivers which have enough to do todrain the hills around; it is easy to understand how peat, thecertain product of standing water, has slowly overwhelmed the richalluvium, fattened by the washing of those phosphatic greensand beds, which (discovered by the science of the lamented Professor Henslow)are now yielding round Cambridge supplies of manure seeminglyinexhaustible. Easy it is to understand how the all-devouring, yetall-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually the stately forestsof fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once grew onthat rank land; how trees, torn down by flood or storm, floated andlodged in rafts, damming the waters back still more; how streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt andsand with the peat-moss; how Nature, left to herself, ran into wildriot and chaos more and more; till the whole fen became one 'DismalSwamp, ' in which the 'Last of the English' (like Dred in Mrs. Stowe'stale) took refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, a free andjoyous life awhile. 

For there were islands, and are still, in that wide fen, which haveescaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss; outcrops of firm land, which even in the Middle Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of theprimaeval forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least ofthose wild beasts which roamed on the older continent of the 'gravelage. ' The all-preserving peat, as well as the monkish records of theearly Middle Age, enable us to repeople, tolerably well, theprimaeval fen. 

The gigantic ox, Bos primigenius, was still there, though there is norecord of him in monkish tales. But with him had appeared (notunknown toward the end of the gravel age) another ox, smaller andwith shorter horns, Bos longifrons; which is held to be the ancestorof our own domestic short-horns, and of the wild cattle stillpreserved at Chillingham and at Cadzow. The reindeer haddisappeared, almost or altogether. The red deer, of a size besidewhich the largest Scotch stag is puny, and even the great Carpathianstag inferior, abound; so does the roe, so does the goat, which oneis accustomed to look on as a mountain animal. In the WoodwardianMuseum there is a portion of a skull of an ibex--probably Caprasibirica--which was found in the drift gravel at Fulbourne. Wildsheep are unknown. The horse occurs in the peat; but whether wild ortame, who can tell? Horses enough have been mired and drowned sincethe Romans set foot on this island, to account for the presence ofhorses' skulls, without the hypothesis of wild herds, such asdoubtless existed in the gravel times. The wolf, of course, iscommon; wild cat, marten, badger, and otter all would expect; but notso the beaver, which nevertheless is abundant in the peat; and damageenough the busy fellows must have done, cutting trees, dammingstreams, flooding marshes, and like selfish speculators in all ages, sacrificing freely the public interest to their own. Here and thereare found the skulls of bears, in one case that of a polar bear, ice-drifted; and one of a walrus, probably washed in dead after a storm. 

Beautiful, after their kind, were these fen-isles, in the eyes of themonks who were the first settlers in the wilderness. 

The author of the History of Ramsey grows enthusiastic, and, afterthe manner of old monks, somewhat bombastic also, as he describes thelonely isle which got its name from the solitary ram who had wanderedthither, either in some extreme drought or over the winter ice, andnever able to return, was found, fat beyond the wont of rams, feedingamong the wild deer. He tells of the stately ashes--most of them cutin his time, to furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the richpastures painted with all gay flowers in spring; of the 'green crown'of reed and alder which girdled round the isle; of the fair wide merewith its 'sandy beach' along the forest side: 'a delight, ' he says, 'to all who look thereon. '

In like humour, William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half ofthe twelfth century, speaks of Thorney Abbey and isle. 'Itrepresents, ' he says, 'a very Paradise, for that in pleasure anddelight it resembles heaven itself. These marshes abound in trees, whose length without a knot doth emulate the stars. The plain thereis as level as the sea, which with green grass allures the eye, andso smooth that there is nought to hinder him who runs through it. Neither is therein any waste place for in some parts are apple trees, in other vines, which are either spread on the ground or raised onpoles. A mutual strife is there between nature and art; so that whatone produces not, the other supplies. What shall I say of those fairbuildings, which 'tis so wonderful to see the ground among those fensupbear?'

But the most detailed picture of a fen-isle is that in the secondpart of the Book of Ely; wherein a single knight of all the Frencharmy forces his way into the isle of St. Etheldreda, and, hospitablyentertained there by Hereward and his English, is sent back safe toWilliam the Conqueror, to tell him of the strength of Ely isle. 

He cannot praise enough--his speech may be mythical; but as writtenby Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describefaithfully what the place was like--the wonders of the isle: itssoil the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noblehunting-grounds, its store of sheep and cattle (though its vines, hesays, as a Frenchman had good right to say, were not equally to bepraised), its wide meres and bogs, about it like a wall. In it was, to quote roughly, 'abundance of tame beasts and of wild stag, roe, and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were caught in snares or gins. But of the kindof fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I say? In the poolsaround are netted eels innumerable, great water wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French called sea-serpents;smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely a mistake forsturgeon], are said often to be taken. But of the birds which hauntaround, if you be not tired, as of the rest, we will expound. Innumerable geese, gulls, coots, divers, water-crows, herons, ducks, of which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or at moulting time, I have seen hundreds taken at a time, by nets, springes, orbirdlime, ' and so forth till, as he assures William, the Frenchmanmay sit on Haddenham field blockading Ely for seven years more, 'erethey will make one ploughman stop short in his furrow, one huntercease to set his nets, or one fowler to deceive the birds withspringe and snare. '

And yet there was another side to the picture. Man lived hard inthose days, under dark skies, in houses--even the most luxurious ofthem--which we should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit forfelons' cells. Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased, andthankful to God for the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch ofgreen, after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Age. Andugly enough those winters must have been, what with snow-storm anddarkness, flood and ice, ague and rheumatism; while through the longdrear winter nights the whistle of the wind and the wild cries of thewater-fowl were translated into the howls of witches and demons; and(as in St. Guthlac's case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever madefiends take hideous shapes before the inner eye, and act fantastichorrors round the old fen-man's bed of sedge. 

The Romans seem to have done something toward the draining andembanking of this dismal swamp. To them is attributed the car-dyke, or catch-water drain, which runs for many miles from Peterboroughnorthward into Lincolnshire, cutting off the land waters which flowdown from the wolds above. To them, too, is to be attributed the oldRoman bank, or 'vallum, ' along the sea-face of the marshlands, markedto this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. But theEnglish invaders were incapable of following out, even of preserving, any public works. Each village was isolated by its own 'march' offorest; each yeoman all but isolated by the 'eaves-drip, ' or greenlane round his farm. Each 'cared for his own things, and none forthose of others;' and gradually, during the early Middle Age, thefen--save those old Roman villages--returned to its primaeval jungle, under the neglect of a race which caricatured local self-governmentinto public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an alien enemy, who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest withoutcalling aloud or blowing a horn. Till late years, the Englishfeeling against the stranger lasted harsh and strong. The farmer, strong in his laws of settlement, tried at once to pass him into thenext parish. The labourer, not being versed in law, hove half abrick at him, or hooted him through the town. It was in the fens, perhaps, that the necessity of combined effort for fighting the brutepowers of nature first awakened public spirit, and associate labour, and the sense of a common interest between men of different countriesand races. 

But the progress was very slow; and the first civilizers of the fenwere men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature, or call together round them communities of men. Hermits, driven bythat passion for isolated independence which is the mark of theTeutonic mind, fled into the wilderness, where they might, ifpossible, be alone with God and their own souls. Like St. Guthlac ofCrowland, after wild fighting for five-and-twenty years, they longedfor peace and solitude; and from their longing, carried out with thatiron will which marked the mediaeval man for good or for evil, spranga civilization of which they never dreamed. 

Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf's'History of Crowland' (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheaptranslation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a formof thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to bereading of the inhabitants of another planet. Most amusing and mosthuman is old Ingulf and his continuator, 'Peter of Blois;' and thoughtheir facts are not to be depended on as having actually happened, they are still instructive, as showing what might, or ought to havehappened, in the opinion of the men of old. 

Even more naive is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, writtenpossibly as early as the eighth century, and literally translated byMr. Goodwin, of Cambridge. 

There we may read how the young warrior-noble, Guthlac ('The Battle-Play, ' the 'Sport of War'), tired of slaying and sinning, bethoughthim to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered intothe fen, where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) tookhim in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buriedin reeds and alders; and among the trees, nought but an old 'law, ' asthe Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken intoseeking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself ahermit's cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and howmen came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably oneBeccel, who acted as his servant; and how as Beccel was shaving thesaint one day, there fell on him a great temptation: Why should henot cut St. Guthlac's throat, and install himself in his cell, thathe might have the honour and glory of sainthood? But St. Guthlacperceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naive honestyof those half-savage times), and rebuked the offender intoconfession, and all went well to the end. 

There we may read, too, a detailed account of a Fauna now happilyextinct in the fens: of the creatures who used to hale St. Guthlacout of his hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft throughfrost and fire--'Develen and luther gostes'--such as tormentedlikewise St. Botolph (from whom Botulfston=Boston, has its name), andwho were supposed to haunt the meres and fens, and to have anespecial fondness for old heathen barrows with their fancied treasurehoards; how they 'filled the house with their coming, and poured inon every side, from above, and from beneath, and everywhere. Theywere in countenance horrible, and they had great heads, and a longneck, and a lean visage; they were filthy and squalid in theirbeards, and they had rough ears, and crooked nebs, and fierce eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth were like horses' tusks; and theirthroats were filled with flame, and they were grating in their voice;they had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, and twistedtoes, and cried hoarsely with their voices; and they came with suchimmoderate noise and immense horror, that him thought all betweenheaven and earth resounded with their voices. And they tugged andled him out of the cot, and led him to the swart fen, and threw andsunk him in the muddy waters. After that they brought him into thewild places of the wilderness, among the thick beds of brambles, thatall his body was torn. After that they took him and beat him withiron whips; and after that they brought him on their creaking wingsbetween the cold regions of the air. '

But there are gentler and more human touches in that old legend. Youmay read in it, how all the wild birds of the fen came to St. Guthlac, and he fed them after their kind. How the ravens tormentedhim, stealing letters, gloves, and what not, from his visitors; andthen, seized with compunction at his reproofs, brought them back, orhanged them on the reeds; and how, as Wilfrid, a holy visitant, wassitting with him, discoursing of the contemplative life, two swallowscame flying in, and lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint'shand, now on his shoulder, now on his knee. And how, when Wilfridwondered thereat, Guthlac made answer, 'Know you not that he who hathled his life according to God's will, to him the wild beasts and thewild birds draw the more near. '

After fifteen years of such a life, in fever, agues, and starvation, no wonder if St. Guthlac died. They buried him in a leaden coffin (agrand and expensive luxury in the seventh century) which had beensent to him during his life by a Saxon princess; and then, over hissacred and wonder-working corpse, as over that of a Buddhist saint, there rose a chapel, with a community of monks, companies of pilgrimswho came to worship, sick who came to be healed; till, at last, founded on great piles driven into the bog, arose the lofty woodenAbbey of Crowland; in its sanctuary of the four rivers, its dykes, parks, vineyards, orchards, rich ploughlands, from which, in time offamine, the monks of Crowland fed all people of the neighbouringfens; with its tower with seven bells, which had not their like inEngland; its twelve altars rich with the gifts of Danish Vikings andprinces, and even with twelve white bear-skins, the gift of Canute'sself; while all around were the cottages of the corrodiers, or folkwho, for a corrody, or life pittance from the abbey, had given awaytheir lands, to the wrong and detriment of their heirs. 

But within these four rivers, at least, was neither tyranny norslavery. Those who took refuge in St. Guthlac's peace from cruellords must keep his peace toward each other, and earn their livinglike honest men, safe while they did so; for between those fourrivers St. Guthlac and his abbot were the only lords, and neithersummoner, nor sheriff of the king, nor armed force of knight or earl, could enter 'the inheritance of the Lord, the soil of St. Mary andSt. Bartholomew, the most holy sanctuary of St. Guthlac and hismonks; the minster free from worldly servitude; the special almshouseof most illustrious kings; the sole refuge of anyone in worldlytribulation; the perpetual abode of the saints; the possession ofreligious men, specially set apart by the common council of therealm; by reason of the frequent miracles of the holy confessor St. Guthlac, an ever-fruitful mother of camphire in the vineyards ofEngedi; and by reason of the privileges granted by the kings, a cityof grace and safety to all who repent. '

Does not all this sound--as I said just now--like a voice fromanother planet? It is all gone; and it was good and right that itshould go when it had done its work, and that the civilization of thefen should be taken up and carried out by men like the good knight, Richard of Rulos, who, two generations after the Conquest, marryingHereward's granddaughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deepmeadow), thought that he could do the same work from the hall ofBourne as the monks did from their cloisters; got permission from theCrowland monks, for twenty marks of silver, to drain as much as hecould of the common marshes; and then shut out the Welland by strongdykes, built cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till'out of slough and bogs accursed, he made a garden of pleasure. '

Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, besides those firmdykes and rich corn lands of the Porsand, which endure unto this day. For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the oldwooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noblepile of stone whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot ofCrowland sent French monks to open a school under the new Frenchdonjon, in the little Roman town of Grante-brigge; whereby--so doesall earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever--St. Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage intoCrowland Island, became the spiritual father of the University ofCambridge in the old world; and therefore of her noble daughter, theUniversity of Cambridge, in the new world which fen-men, sailing fromBoston deeps, colonized and Christianized, 800 years after St. Guthlac's death. 

The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 800 yearsslowly, and often disastrously. Great mistakes were made; as when acertain bishop, some 700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut fromLittleport drain to Rebeck (or Priests'-houses), and found, to hishorror and that of the fen-men, that he had let down upon Lynn thepent-up waters of the whole higher bogs; that rivers were runningbackwards, brooks swelling to estuaries, and the whole north-easternfen ruinate, to be yet more ruinate by banks confusedly thrown up inself-defence, till some order was restored in 1332, and the fensprospered--such little of them as could be drained at all--for nightwo hundred years. Honour, meanwhile, to another prelate, goodBishop Morton, who cut the great learn from Guyhirn--the last placeat which one could see a standing gallows, and two Irish reapershanging in chains, having murdered the old witch of Guyhirn for thesake of hidden treasure, which proved to be some thirty shillings anda few silver spoons. 

The belief is more general than well-founded that the drainage of thefens retrograded on account of the dissolution of the monasteries. The state of decay into which those institutions had already fallen, and which alone made their dissolution possible, must have extendeditself to these fen-lands. No one can read the account of theirdebts, neglect, malversation of funds, in the time of Henry VIII. , without seeing that the expensive works necessary to keep fen-landsdry must have suffered, as did everything else belonging to theconvents. 

It was not till the middle or end of Elizabeth's reign that therecovery of these 'drowned lands' was proceeded with once more; andduring the first half of the seventeenth century there went on, moreand more rapidly, that great series of artificial works which, thoughoften faulty in principle, often unexpectedly disastrous in effect, have got the work done, as all work is done in this world, not aswell as it should have been done, but at least done. 

To comprehend those works would be impossible without maps and plans;to take a lively interest in them impossible, likewise, save to anengineer or a fen-man. Suffice it to say, that in the early part ofthe seventeenth century we find a great company of adventurers--morethan one Cromwell among them, and Francis, the great and good Earl ofBedford, at their head--trying to start a great scheme for drainingthe drowned 'middle level' east of the Isle of Ely. How they sentfor Vermuyden, the Dutchman, who had been draining in NorthLincolnshire, about Goole and Axholme Isle; how they got into hishands, and were ruined by him; how Francis of Bedford had to sellvaluable estates to pay his share; how the fen-men looked on Francisof Bedford as their champion; how Charles I. Persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the 'Lynn Law' of 1630, given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to something likesharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work into hishands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and thefen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose toavenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times;how Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up theso-called 'Pretended Ordinance' of 1649, which was a compromisebetween Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful thatCharles II. 's Government were content to call it 'pretended' and letit stand, because it was actually draining the fens; and how SirCornelius Vermuyden, after doing mighty works, and taking mightymoneys, died a beggar, writing petitions which never got answered;how William, Earl of Bedford, added, in 1649, to his father's 'oldBedford River' that noble parallel river, the Hundred foot, bothrising high above the land between dykes and 'washes, ' i. E. Wastespaces right and left, to allow for flood water; how the GreatBedford Rivers silted up the mouth of the Ouse, and backed the floodsup the Cam; how Denver sluice was built to keep them back; and soforth, --all is written, or rather only half or quarter written, inthe histories of the fens. 

Another matter equally, or even more important, is but half written--indeed, only hinted at--the mixed population of the fens. 

The sturdy old 'Girvii, ' 'Gyrwas, ' men of the 'gyras' or marshes, whoin Hereward's time sang their three-man glees, 'More Girviorumtripliciter canentes, ' had been crossed with the blood ofScandinavian Vikings in Canute's conquest; crossed again with Englishrefugees from all quarters during the French conquest under William. After the St. Bartholomew they received a fresh cross of Huguenot, fleeing from France--dark-haired, fiery, earnest folk, whose namesand physiognomies are said still to remain about Wisbeach, Whittlesea, and Thorney. Then came Vermuyden's Dutchmen, leavingsome of their blood behind them. After the battle of Dunbar anothercross came among them, of Scotch prisoners, who, employed byCromwell's Government on the dykes, settled down among the fen-men tothis day. Within the memory of man, Scotchmen used to come down intothe fens every year, not merely for harvest, but to visit theirexpatriated kinsmen. 

To these successive immigrations of strong Puritan blood, more thaneven the influence of the Cromwells and other Puritan gentlemen, wemay attribute that strong Calvinist element which has endured for nownigh three centuries in the fen; and attribute, too, that sturdyindependence and self-help which drove them of old out of Bostontown, to seek their fortunes first in Holland, then in Massachusettsover sea. And that sturdy independence and self-help is not gone. There still lives in them some of the spirit of their mythic giantHickafrid (the Hickathrift of nursery rhymes), who, when theMarshland men (possibly the Romanized inhabitants of the wallvillages) quarrelled with him in the field, took up the cart-axle fora club, smote them hip and thigh, and pastured his cattle in theirdespite in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one has ever seena fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper whichthere is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, thespring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to thedyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatalthread which is trickling over the dyke--or worse, through someforgotten rat's hole in its side--hundreds of men are clustered, without tumult, without complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting the brute powers of nature, not for their employer's sakealone, but for the sake of their own year's labour and their ownyear's bread. The sheep have been driven off the land below; thecattle stand ranged shivering on high dykes inland; they will besaved in punts, if the worst befall. But a hundred spades, wieldedby practised hands, cannot stop that tiny rat-hole. The tricklebecomes a rush--the rush a roaring waterfall. The dyke-top trembles--gives. The men make efforts, desperate, dangerous, as of sailors ina wreck, with faggots, hurdles, sedge, turf: but the bank willbreak; and slowly they draw off; sullen, but uncomplaining; beaten, but not conquered. A new cry rises among them. Up, to save yondersluice; that will save yonder lode; that again yonder farm; thatagain some other lode, some other farm, far back inland, but guessedat instantly by men who have studied from their youth, as thenecessity of their existence, the labyrinthine drainage of landswhich are all below the water level, and where the inner lands, inmany cases, are lower still than those outside. 

So they hurry away to the nearest farms; the teams are harnessed, thewaggons filled, and drawn down and emptied; the beer-cans go roundcheerily, and the men work with a sort of savage joy at being able todo something, if not all, and stop the sluice on which so muchdepends. As for the outer land, it is gone past hope; through thebreach pours a roaring salt cataract, digging out a hole on theinside of the bank, which remains as a deep sullen pond for years tocome. Hundreds, thousands of pounds are lost already, past all hope. Be it so, then. At the next neap, perhaps, they will be able to mendthe dyke, and pump the water out; and begin again, beaten but notconquered, the same everlasting fight with wind and wave which theirforefathers have waged for now 800 years. 

He who sees--as I have seen--a sight like that, will repine no morethat the primaeval forest is cut down, the fair mere drained. Forinstead of mammoth and urus, stag and goat, that fen feeds cattlemany times more numerous than all the wild venison of the primaevaljungle; and produces crops capable of nourishing a hundred times asmany human beings; and more--it produces men a hundred times asnumerous as ever it produced before; more healthy and long-lived--andif they will, more virtuous and more happy--than ever was Girvian inhis log-canoe, or holy hermit in his cell. So we, who knew the deepfen, will breathe one sigh over the last scrap of wilderness, and sayno more; content to know that -

'The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. '

IV. MY WINTER GARDEN. {135}

So, my friend: you ask me to tell you how I contrive to support thismonotonous country life; how, fond as I am of excitement, adventure, society, scenery, art, literature, I go cheerfully through the dailyroutine of a commonplace country profession, never requiring a six-weeks' holiday; not caring to see the Continent, hardly even to spenda day in London; having never yet actually got to Paris. 

You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round me, whose talk is ofbullocks--as indeed mine is, often enough; why I am not by this time'all over blue mould;' why I have not been tempted to bury myself inmy study, and live a life of dreams among old books. 

I will tell you. I am a minute philosopher: though one, thankHeaven, of a different stamp from him whom the great Bishop Berkeleysilenced--alas! only for a while. I am possibly, after all, a man ofsmall mind, content with small pleasures. So much the better for me. Meanwhile, I can understand your surprise, though you cannotunderstand my content. You have played a greater game than mine;have lived a life, perhaps more fit for an Englishman; certainly morein accordance with the taste of our common fathers, the Vikings, andtheir patron Odin 'the goer, ' father of all them that go ahead. Youhave gone ahead, and over many lands; and I reverence you for it, though I envy you not. You have commanded a regiment--indeed anarmy, and 'drank delight of battle with your peers;' you have ruledprovinces, and done justice and judgment, like a noble Englishman asyou are, old friend, among thousands who never knew before whatjustice and judgment were. You have tasted (and you have deserved totaste) the joy of old David's psalm, when he has hunted down the lastof the robber lords of Palestine. You have seen 'a people whom youhave not known, serve you. As soon as they heard of you, they obeyedyou; but the strange children dissembled with you:' yet before you, too, 'the strange children failed, and trembled in their hill-forts. '

Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done it; and I do notwonder that to a man who has been set to such a task, and given powerto carry it through, all smaller work must seem paltry; that such aman's very amusements, in that grand Indian land, and that freeadventurous Indian life, exciting the imagination, calling out allthe self-help and daring of a man, should have been on a par withyour work; that when you go a sporting, you ask for no meanerpreserve than the primaeval forest, no lower park wall than the snow-peaks of the Himalaya. 

Yes; you have been a 'burra Shikarree' as well as a 'burra Sahib. 'You have played the great game in your work, and killed the greatgame in your play. How many tons of mighty monsters have you done todeath, since we two were schoolboys together, five-and-twenty yearsago? How many starving villages have you fed with the flesh ofelephant or buffalo? How many have you delivered from man-eatingtigers, or wary old alligators, their craws full of poor girls'bangles? Have you not been charged by rhinoceroses, all but ript upby boars? Have you not seen face to face Ovis Ammon himself, thegiant mountain sheep--primaeval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flockson earth? Your memories must be like those of Theseus and Hercules, full of slain monsters. Your brains must be one fossiliferousdeposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog and tiger, rhinoceros andelephant, lie heaped together, as the old ichthyosaurs andplesiosaurs are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme. And therefore Ilike to think of you. I try to picture your feelings to myself. Ispell over with my boy Mayne Reid's amusing books, or the 'Old ForestRanger, ' or Williams's old 'Tiger Book, ' with Howitt's plates; andtry to realize the glory of a burra Shikarree: and as I read andimagine, feel, with Sir Hugh Evans, 'a great disposition to cry. '

For there were times, full many a year ago, when my brains were fullof bison and grizzly bear, mustang and big-horn, Blackfoot andPawnee, and hopes of wild adventure in the Far West, which I shallnever see; for ere I was three-and-twenty, I discovered, plainlyenough, that my lot was to stay at home and earn my bread in a veryquiet way; that England was to be henceforth my prison or my palace, as I should choose to make it: and I have made it, by Heaven's help, the latter. 

I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of youth, this little England--or rather, this little patch of moor in which Ihave struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do--looked at momentsrather like a prison than a palace; that my foolish young heart wouldsigh, 'Oh! that I had wings'--not as a dove, to fly home to its nestand croodle there--but as an eagle, to swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant and self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look back asaltogether unwholesome and undesirable. But the thirst for adventureand excitement was strong in me, as perhaps it ought to be in all attwenty-one. Others went out to see the glorious new worlds of theWest, the glorious old worlds of the East--why should not I? Othersrambled over Alps and Apennines, Italian picture-galleries andpalaces, filling their minds with fair memories--why should not I?Others discovered new wonders in botany and zoology--why should notI? Others too, like you, fulfilled to the utmost that strange lustafter the burra shikar, which even now makes my pulse throb as oftenas I see the stags' heads in our friend A---'s hall: why should notI? It is not learnt in a day, the golden lesson of the Old Collect, to 'love the thing which is commanded, and desire that which ispromised. ' Not in a day: but in fifteen years one can spell out alittle of its worth; and when one finds one's self on the wrong sideof forty, and the first grey hairs begin to show on the temples, andone can no longer jump as high as one's third button--scarcely, alas!to any button at all; and what with innumerable sprains, bruises, soakings, and chillings, one's lower limbs feel in a cold thaw muchlike an old post-horse's, why, one makes a virtue of necessity: andif one still lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks forwonders, not in the Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the turf on thelawn and the brook in the park; and with good Alphonse Karr enjoysthe macro-microcosm in one 'Tour autour de mon jardin. '

For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of nature inevery tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to see it, and can disabuseour minds of that tyrannous phantom of size. Only recollect thatgreat and small are but relative terms; that in truth nothing isgreat or small, save in proportion to the quantity of creativethought which has been exercised in making it; that the fly who basksupon one of the trilithons of Stonehenge, is in truth infinitelygreater than all Stonehenge together, though he may measure the tenthof an inch, and the stone on which he sits five-and-twenty feet. Youdiffer from me? Be it so. Even if you prove me wrong I will believemyself in the right: I cannot afford to do otherwise. If you rob meof my faith in 'minute philosophy, ' you rob me of a continual sourceof content, surprise, delight. 

So go your way and I mine, each working with all his might, andplaying with all his might, in his own place and way. Remember only, that though I never can come round to your sphere, you must some daycome round to me, when wounds, or weariness, or merely, as I hope, ahealthy old age, shall shut you out for once and for all from burrashikar, whether human or quadruped. --For you surely will not take topolitics in your old age? You will not surely live to solicit (asmany a fine fellow, alas! did but last year) the votes, not even ofthe people, but merely of the snobocracy, on the ground of yourhaving neither policy nor principles, nor even opinions, upon anymatter in heaven or earth?--Then in that day will you be forced, myfriend, to do what I have done this many a year; to refrain yoursoul, and keep it low. You will see more and more the depth of humanignorance, the vanity of human endeavours. You will feel more andmore that the world is going God's way, and not yours, or mine, orany man's; and that if you have been allowed to do good work onearth, that work is probably as different from what you fancy it asthe tree is from the seed whence it springs. You will grow content, therefore, not to see the real fruit of your labours; because if yousaw it you would probably be frightened at it, and what is very goodin the eyes of God would not be very good in yours; content, also, toreceive your discharge, and work and fight no more, sure that God isworking and fighting, whether you are in hospital or in the field. And with this growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles willgrow on you a respect for simple labours, a thankfulness for simplepleasures, a sympathy with simple people, and possibly, my trustyfriend, with me and my little tours about that moorland which I callmy winter-garden, and which is to me as full of glory and ofinstruction as the Himalaya or the Punjab are to you, and in which Icontrive to find as much health and amusement as I have time for--andwho ought to have more?

I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in any legal sense(for only in a few acres have I a life interest), but in that highersense in which ten thousand people can own the same thing, and yet noman's right interfere with another's. To whom does the ApolloBelvedere belong, but to all who have eyes to see its beauty? Sodoes my winter-garden; and therefore to me among the rest. 

Besides (which is a gain to a poor man) my pleasure in it is a verycheap one. So are all those of a minute philosopher, except hismicroscope. But my winter-garden, which is far larger, at allevents, than that famous one at Chatsworth, costs me not one penny inkeeping up. Poor, did I call myself? Is it not true wealth to haveall I want without paying for it? Is it not true wealth, royalwealth, to have some twenty gentlemen and noblemen, nay, even royalpersonages, planting and improving for me? Is it not more than royalwealth to have sun and frost, Gulf-stream and south-westers, laws ofgeology, phytology, physiology, and other ologies--in a word, thewhole universe and the powers thereof, day and night, paving, planting, roofing, lighting, colouring my winter-garden for me, without my even having the trouble to rub a magic ring and tell thegenii to go to work?

Yes. I am very rich, as every man may be who will. In the doings ofour little country neighbourhood I find tragedy and comedy, toofantastic, sometimes too sad, to be written down. In the words ofthose whose talk is of bullocks, I find the materials of all possiblemetaphysic, and long weekly that I had time to work them out. Infifteen miles of moorland I find the materials of all possiblephysical science, and long that I had time to work out one smallestsegment of that great sphere. How can I be richer, if I have lyingat my feet all day a thousand times more wealth than I can use?

Some people--most people--in these run-about railway days, wouldcomplain of such a life, in such a 'narrow sphere, ' so they call it, as monotonous. Very likely it is so. But is it to be complained ofon that account? Is monotony in itself an evil? Which is better, toknow many places ill, or to know one place well? Certainly--if ascientific habit of mind be a gain--it is only by exhausting as faras possible the significance of an individual phenomenon (is not thatsentence a true scientific one in its magniloquence?) that you candiscover any glimpse of the significance of the universal. Even menof boundless knowledge, like Humboldt, must have had once theirspeciality, their pet subject, or they would have, strictly speaking, no knowledge at all. The volcanoes of Mexico, patiently andlaboriously investigated in his youth, were to Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole Cosmos. I learn more, studying over and overagain the same Bagshot sand and gravel heaps, than I should byroaming all Europe in search of new geologic wonders. Fifteen yearshave I been puzzling at the same questions and have only guessed at afew of the answers. What sawed out the edges of the moors into longnarrow banks of gravel? What cut them off all flat atop? What makesErica Tetralix grow in one soil, and the bracken in another? How didthree species of Club-moss--one of them quite an Alpine one--get downhere, all the way from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch ofgravel? Why did that one patch of Carex arenaria settle in the onlysquare yard for miles and miles which bore sufficient resemblance toits native sandhill by the seashore, to make it comfortable? Why didMyosurus minimus, which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years, appear by dozens in the fifteenth, upon a new-made bank, which hadbeen for at least two hundred years a farm-yard gateway? Why does itgenerally rain here from the south-west, not when the barometerfalls, but when it begins to rise again? Why--why is everything, which lies under my feet all day long? I don't know; and you can'ttell me. And till I have found out, I cannot complain of monotony, with still undiscovered puzzles waiting to be explained, and so tocreate novelty at every turn. 

Besides, monotony is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, andmorally useful. Marriage is monotonous: but there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wedlock. Living in the same house ismonotonous: but three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomotion is regarded as an evil by our Litany. The Litany, asusual, is right. 'Those who travel by land or sea' are to be objectsof our pity and our prayers; and I do pity them. I delight in thatsame monotony. It saves curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disappointment, and a host of bad passions. It gives a man theblessed, invigorating feeling that he is at home; that he has roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he sees; and that only The Beingwho will do nothing cruel or useless can tear them up. It ispleasant to look down on the same parish day after day, and say, Iknow all that lies beneath, and all beneath know me. If I want afriend, I know where to find him; if I want work done, I know whowill do it. It is pleasant and good to see the same trees year afteryear; the same birds coming back in spring to the same shrubs; thesame banks covered with the same flowers, and broken (if they bestiff ones) by the same gaps. Pleasant and good it is to ride thesame horse, to sit in the same chair, to wear the same old coat. That man who offered twenty pounds' reward for a lost carpet-bag fullof old boots was a sage, and I wish I knew him. Why should onechange one's place, any more than one's wife or one's children? Is ahermit-crab, slipping his tail out of one strange shell into another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little better, either a dignified, safe, or graceful animal? No; George Riddler was a true philosopher. 

'Let vules go sarching vur and nigh, We bides at Whum, my dog and I;'

and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable; for theoftener one sees, the better one knows; and the better one knows, themore one loves. 

It is an easy philosophy; especially in the case of the horse, wherea man cannot afford more than one, as I cannot. To own a stud ofhorses, after all, is not to own horses at all, but riding-machines. Your rich man who rides Crimaea in the morning, Sir Guy in theafternoon, and Sultan to-morrow, and something else the next day, maybe a very gallant rider: but it is a question whether he enjoys thepleasure which one horse gives to the poor man who rides him dayafter day; one horse, who is not a slave, but a friend; who haslearnt all his tricks of voice, hand, heel, and knows what his masterwants, even without being told; who will bear with his master'sinfirmities, and feels secure that his master will bear with his inturn. 

Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour; and were one rich, onewould do even as the rich are wont to do: but still, I am a minutephilosopher. And therefore, this afternoon, after I have done thesame work, visited the same people, and said the same words to them, which I have done for years past, and shall, I trust, for many a yearto come, I shall go wandering out into the same winter-garden on thesame old mare; and think the same thoughts, and see the same fir-trees, and meet perhaps the same good fellows hunting of their fox, as I have done with full content this many a year; and rejoice, as Isaid before, in my own boundless wealth, who have the whole universeto look at, without being charged one penny for the show. 

As I have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy the want ofluxuries only because I cannot get them; but if my self-deception beuseful to me, leave it alone. 

No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent winter-gardenat the Crystal Palace: yet let me, if I choose, prefer my own; Iargue that, in the first place, it is far larger. You may drive, Ihear, through the grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile. You may ride through mine for fifteen miles on end. I prefer, too, to any glass roof which Sir Joseph Paxton ever planned, that domeabove my head some three miles high, of soft dappled grey and yellowcloud, through the vast lattice-work whereof the blue sky peeps, andsheds down tender gleams on yellow bogs, and softly rounded heatherknolls, and pale chalk ranges gleaming far away. But, above all, Iglory in my evergreens. What winter-garden can compare for them withmine? True, I have but four kinds--Scotch fir, holly, furze, and theheath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown fern, sheetsof yellow bog-grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whosepurple tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fragrantgreen ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in painting as inmusic, what effects are more grand than those produced by thescientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simpleelements? Enough for me is the one purple birch; the bright holliesround its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furze-patch, richwith its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped here andthere with a golden bud; the deep soft heather carpet, which invitesyou to lie down and dream for hours; and behind all, the wall of redfir-stems, and the dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, against the soft grey sky. 

An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation? Well, I like it, outside and inside. I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir upmy imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch thesaw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They are myAlps; little ones it may be: but after all, as I asked before, whatis size? A phantom of our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, ifyou will consider wisely, consists in form, and not in size: and tothe eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two incheslong, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteriesand melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the grass, and look nearenough to see something more of what is to be seen; and you will findtropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs anddebacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow: dark strids, tremendous cataracts, 'deep glooms and sudden glories, ' in everyfoot-broad rill which wanders through the turf. All is there for youto see, if you will but rid yourself of 'that idol of space;' andNature, as everyone will tell you who has seen dissected an insectunder the microscope, is as grand and graceful in her smallest as inher hugest forms. 

The March breeze is chilly: but I can be always warm if I like in mywinter-garden. I turn my horse's head to the red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein ifthere be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols;but endless vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up thewarm dark roof, lessening away into endless gloom, paved with richbrown fir-needle--a carpet at which Nature has been at work for fortyyears. Red shafts, green roof, and here and there a pane of bluesky--neither Owen Jones nor Willement can improve upon thatecclesiastical ornamentation, --while for incense I have the freshhealthy turpentine fragrance, far sweeter to my nostrils than thestifling narcotic odour which fills a Roman Catholic cathedral. There is not a breath of air within: but the breeze sighs over theroof above in a soft whisper. I shut my eyes and listen. Surelythat is the murmur of the summer sea upon the summer sands in Devonfar away. I hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves gentlyupon the shore, and die away to rise again. And with the innumerablewave-sighs come innumerable memories, and faces which I shall neversee again upon this earth. I will not tell even you of that, oldfriend. 

It has two notes, two keys rather, that Eolian-harp of fir-needlesabove my head; according as the wind is east or west, the needles dryor wet. This easterly key of to-day is shriller, more cheerful, warmer in sound, though the day itself be colder: but grander still, as well as softer, is the sad soughing key in which the south-westwind roars on, rain-laden, over the forest, and calls me forth--beinga minute philosopher--to catch trout in the nearest chalk-stream. 

The breeze is gone a while; and I am in perfect silence--a silencewhich may be heard. Not a sound; and not a moving object; absolutelynone. The absence of animal life is solemn, startling. Thatringdove, who was cooing half a mile away, has hushed his moan; thatflock of long-tailed titmice, which were twinging and pecking aboutthe fir-cones a few minutes since, are gone: and now there is noteven a gnat to quiver in the slant sun-rays. Did a spider run overthese dead leaves, I almost fancy I could hear his footfall. Thecreaking of the saddle, the soft step of the mare upon the fir-needles, jar my ears. I seem alone in a dead world. A dead world:and yet so full of life, if I had eyes to see! Above my head everyfir-needle is breathing--breathing for ever; currents unnumberedcirculate in every bough, quickened by some undiscovered miracle;around me every fir-stem is distilling strange juices, which nolaboratory of man can make; and where my dull eye sees only death, the eye of God sees boundless life and motion, health and use. 

Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the winter-garden, andmeditate upon that one word--Life; and specially on all that Mr. Lewes has written so well thereon--for instance -

'We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identificationwith Nature. The simple cell, from which the plant or animal arises, must draw light and heat from the sun, nutriment from the surroundingworld, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though latentwith life; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lyingthousands of years in those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, andsmile forth as golden wheat. What we call growth, is it not aperpetual absorption of Nature, the identification of the individualwith the universal? And may we not, in speculative moods, considerDeath as the grand impatience of the soul to free itself from thecircle of individual activity--the yearning of the creature to beunited with the Creator?

'As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual life. In theearly days of man's history, Nature and her marvellous ongoings wereregarded with but a casual and careless eye, or else with the merestwonder. It was late before profound and reverent study of her lawscould wean man from impatient speculations; and now, what is ourintellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough mentalabsorption of Nature? When that absorption is completed, the mysticdrama will be sunny clear, and all Nature's processes be visible toman, as a Divine Effluence and Life. '

True: yet not all the truth. But who knows all the truth?

Not I. 'We see through a glass darkly, ' said St. Paul of old; andwhat is more, dazzle and weary our eyes, like clumsy microscopists, by looking too long and earnestly through the imperfect and by nomeans achromatic lens. Enough. I will think of something else. Iwill think of nothing at all -

Stay. There was a sound at last; a light footfall. 

A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great bright eyes fullof terror, her ears aloft to catch some sound behind. She sees us, turns short, and vanishes into the gloom. The mare pricks up herears too, listens, and looks: but not the way the hare has gone. There is something more coming; I can trust the finer sense of thehorse, to which (and no wonder) the Middle Age attributed the powerof seeing ghosts and fairies impalpable to man's gross eyes. Beside, that hare was not travelling in search of food. She was not lopingalong, looking around her right and left; but galloping steadily. She has been frightened; she has been put up: but what has put herup? And there, far away among the fir-stems, rings the shriek of astartled blackbird. What has put him up?

That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes widen till they areready to burst, and your ears are first shot forward towards yournose, and then laid back with vicious intent. Stand still, oldwoman! Do you think still, after fifteen winters, that you can catcha fox?

A fox it is indeed; a great dog-fox, as red as the fir-stems betweenwhich he glides. And yet his legs are black with fresh peat-stains. He is a hunted fox: but he has not been up long. 

The mare stands like a statue: but I can feel her trembling betweenmy knees. Positively he does not see us. He sits down in the middleof a ride, turns his great ears right and left, and then scratchesone of them with his hind foot, seemingly to make it hear the better. Now he is up again and on. 

Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards away, standeth, or rather lieth, for it is on dead flat ground, the famous castle of Malepartus, whichbeheld the base murder of Lampe the hare, and many a seely soulbeside. I know it well; a patch of sand-heaps, mingled with greatholes, amid the twining fir-roots; ancient home of the last of thewild beasts. And thither, unto Malepartus safe and strong, trotsReinecke, where he hopes to be snug among the labyrinthine windings, and innumerable starting-holes, as the old apologue has it, of hisballium, covert-way, and donjon keep. Full blown in self-satisfaction he trots, lifting his toes delicately, and carrying hisbrush aloft, as full of cunning and conceit as that world-famousancestor of his, whose deeds of unchivalry were the delight, if notthe model, of knight and kaiser, lady and burgher, in the Middle Age. 

Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus; examines it withhis nose; goes on to a postern; examines that also, and then another, and another; while I perceive afar, projecting from every cave'smouth, the red and green end of a new fir-faggot. Ah, Reinecke!fallen is thy conceit, and fallen thy tail therewith. Thou hastworse foes to deal with than Bruin the bear, or Isegrim the wolf, orany foolish brute whom thy great ancestor outwitted. Man the many-counselled has been beforehand with thee; and the earths are stopped. 

One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches those trustycounsellors, his ears, as if he would tear them off, 'revolving swiftthoughts in a crafty mind. '

He has settled it now. He is up and off--and at what a pace! Out ofthe way, Fauns and Hamadryads, if any be left in the forest. What apace! And with what a grace beside!

Oh Reinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite of thy greatnaughtiness. Art thou some fallen spirit, doomed to be hunted forthy sins in this life, and in some future life rewarded for thyswiftness, and grace, and cunning, by being made a very messenger ofthe immortals? Who knows? Not I. 

I am rising fast to Pistol's vein. Shall I ejaculate? Shall Inotify? Shall I waken the echoes? Shall I break the grand silenceby that scream which the vulgar view-halloo call?

It is needless; for louder and louder every moment swells up a soundwhich makes my heart leap into my mouth, and my mare into the air. 

Music? Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that thou wert here thisday, and not in St. Martin's Hall, to hear that chorus, as it poursround the fir-stems, rings against the roof above, shatters up into ahundred echoes, till the air is live with sound! You love madrigals, and whatever Weekes, or Wilbye, or Orlando Gibbons sang of old. Sodo I. Theirs is music fit for men: worthy of the age of heroes, ofDrake and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakspeare: but oh that you couldhear this madrigal! If you must have 'four parts, ' then there theyare. Deeped-mouthed bass, rolling along the ground; rich joyfultenor; wild wistful alto; and leaping up here and there above thethrong of sounds, delicate treble shrieks and trills of tremblingjoy. I know not whether you can fit it into your laws of music, anymore than you can the song of that Ariel sprite who dwells in theEolian harp, or the roar of the waves on the rock, or

'Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, And murmur of innumerable bees. '

But music it is. A madrigal? Rather a whole opera of DerFreischutz--daemoniac element and all--to judge by those red lips, fierce eyes, wild, hungry voices; and such as should make Reinecke, had he strong aesthetic sympathies, well content to be hunted fromhis cradle to his grave, that such sweet sounds might by him enrichthe air. Heroes of old were glad to die, if but some 'vates sacer'would sing their fame in worthy strains: and shalt not thou too beglad, Reinecke? Content thyself with thy fate. Music soothes care;let it soothe thine, as thou runnest for thy life; thou shalt haveenough of it in the next hour. For as the Etruscans (says Athenaeus)were so luxurious that they used to flog their slaves to the sound ofthe flute, so shall luxurious Chanter and Challenger, Sweet-lips andMelody, eat thee to the sound of rich organ-pipes, that so thoumayest, 'Like that old fabled swan, in music die. 

And now appear, dim at first and distant, but brightening and nearingfast, many a right good fellow and many a right good horse. I knowthree out of four of them, their private histories, the privatehistories of their horses: and could tell you many a good story ofthem: but shall not, being an English gentleman, and not an Americanlitterateur. They may not all be very clever, or very learned, orvery anything except gallant men; but they are all good enoughcompany for me, or anyone; and each has his own specialite, for whichI like him. That huntsman I have known for fifteen years, and satmany an hour beside his father's death-bed. I am godfather to thatwhip's child. I have seen the servants of the hunt, as I have thehounds, grow up round me for two generations, and I feel for them asold friends; and like to look into their brave, honest, weather-beaten faces. That red coat there, I knew him when he was aschoolboy; and now he is a captain in the Guards, and won hisVictoria Cross at Inkermann: that bright green coat is the bestfarmer, as well as the hardest rider, for many a mile round; one whoplays, as he works, with all his might, and might have been a beausabreur and colonel of dragoons. So might that black coat, who nowbrews good beer, and stands up for the poor at the Board ofGuardians, and rides, like the green coat, as well as he works. Thatother black coat is a county banker; but he knows more of the foxthan the fox knows of himself, and where the hounds are, there willhe be this day. That red coat has hunted kangaroo in Australia:that one, as clever and good as he is brave and simple, has stood byNapier's side in many an Indian fight: that one won his Victoria atDelhi, and was cut up at Lucknow, with more than twenty wounds: thatone has--but what matter to you who each man is? Enough that eachcan tell one a good story, welcome one cheerfully, and give one outhere, in the wild forest, the wholesome feeling of being at homeamong friends. 

There is music, again, if you will listen, in the soft tread of thesehundred horse-hoofs upon the spongy vegetable soil. They aretrotting now in 'common time. ' You may hear the whole Croats' March(the finest trotting march in the world) played by those iron heels;the time, as it does in the Croats' March, breaking now and then, plunging, jingling, struggling through heavy ground, bursting for amoment into a jubilant canter as it reaches a sound spot. 

The hounds feather a moment round Malepartus, puzzled by the windingsof Reinecke's footsteps. You can hear the flap and snort of thedogs' nostrils as they canter round; and one likes it. It isexciting: but why--who can tell?

What beautiful creatures they are, too! Next to a Greek statue (Imean a real old Greek one; for I am a thoroughly anti-preraphaelitebenighted pagan heathen in taste, and intend some day to get up aCinque-Cento Club, for the total abolition of Gothic art)--next to aGreek statue, I say, I know few such combinations of grace andstrength as in a fine foxhound. It is the beauty of the Theseus--light and yet massive; and light not in spite of its masses, but onaccount of the perfect disposition of them. I do not care for gracein man, woman, or animal, which is obtained (as in the old Germanpainters) at the expense of honest flesh and blood. It may be allvery pure, and unearthly, and saintly, and what not; but it is nothealthy; and, therefore, it is not really High Art, let it callitself such as much as it likes. The highest art must be that inwhich the outward is the most perfect symbol of the muward; and, therefore, a healthy soul can be only exprest by a healthy body; andstarved limbs and a hydrocephalous forehead must be either taken asincorrect symbols of spiritual excellence, or as--what they werereally meant for--symbols of certain spiritual diseases which were inthe Middle Age considered as ecclesiastical graces and virtues. Wherefore I like pagan and naturalist art; consider Titian andCorreggio as unappreciated geniuses, whose excellences the world willin some saner mood rediscover; hold, in direct opposition to Rio, that Rafaelle improved steadily all his life through, and that hisnoblest works are not his somewhat simpering Madonnas and somewhatimpish Bambinos (very lovely though they are), but his great, coarse, naturalist, Protestant cartoons, which (with Andrea Mantegna'sHeathen Triumph) Cromwell saved for the British nation. Probably noone will agree with all this for the next quarter of a century: butafter that I have hopes. The world will grow tired of pretending toadmire Manichaean pictures in an age of natural science; and Art willlet the dead bury their dead, and beginning again where MichaelAngelo and Rafaelle left off work forward into a nobler, truer, freer, and more divine school than the world has yet seen--at least, so I hope. 

And all this has grown out of those foxhounds. Why not? Theirs isthe sort of form which expresses to me what I want Art to express--Nature not limited, but developed, by high civilization. The oldsavage ideal of beauty was the lion, type of mere massive force. That was succeeded by an over-civilized ideal, say the fawn, type ofdelicate grace. By cunning breeding and choosing, through longcenturies, man has combined both, and has created the foxhound, lionand fawn in one; just as he might create noble human beings; did hetake half as much trouble about politics (in the true old sense ofthe word) as he does about fowls. Look at that old hound, who standsdoubtful, looking up at his master for advice. Look at the severity, delicacy, lightness of every curve. His head is finer than a deer's;his hind legs tense as steel springs; his fore-legs straight asarrows: and yet see the depth of chest, the sweep of loin, thebreadth of paw, the mass of arm and thigh; and if you have an eye forform, look at the absolute majesty of his attitude at this moment. Majesty is the only word for it. If he were six feet high, insteadof twenty-three inches, with what animal on earth could you comparehim? Is it not a joy to see such a thing alive? It is to me, atleast. I should like to have one in my study all day long, as Iwould have a statue or a picture; and when Mr. Morrell gave (as theysay) two hundred guineas for Hercules alone, I believe the dog waswell worth the money, only to look at. But I am a minutephilosopher. 

I cap them on to the spot at which Reinecke disappeared. OldVirginal's stern flourishes; instantly her pace quickens. Onewhimper, and she is away full-mouthed through the wood, and the packafter her: but not I. 

I am not going with them. My hunting days are over. Let it sufficethat I have, in the days of my vanity, 'drank delight of battle withmy peers, far on the ringing plains' of many a county, grass andforest, down and vale. No, my gallant friends. You know that Icould ride, if I chose; and I am vain enough to be glad that you knowit. But useless are your coaxings, solicitations, wavings of honestright hands. 'Life, ' as my friend Tom Brown says, 'is not all beerand skittles;' it is past two now, and I have four old women to readto at three, and an old man to bury at four; and I think, on thewhole, that you will respect me the more for going home and doing myduty. That I should like to see this fox fairly killed, or evenfairly lost, I deny not. That I should like it as much as I can likeany earthly and outward thing, I deny not. But sugar to one's breadand butter is not good; and if my winter-garden represent the breadand butter, then will fox-hunting stand to it in the relation ofsuperfluous and unwholesome sugar: so farewell; and long may yournoble sport prosper--'the image of war with only half its danger, ' totrain you and your sons after, into gallant soldiers--full of

'The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength and skill. '

So homeward I go through a labyrinth of fir-stems and, what is worse, fir-stumps, which need both my eyes and my horse's at every moment;and woe to the 'anchorite, ' as old Bunbury names him, who carries hisnose in the air, and his fore feet well under him. Woe to the self-willed or hard-hided horse who cannot take the slightest hint of theheel, and wince hind legs or fore out of the way of those jaggedpoints which lie in wait for him. Woe, in fact, to all who areclumsy or cowardly, or in anywise not 'masters of the situation. '

Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look anywhere but overyour horse's nose, under the dark roof between the red fir-pillars, in that rich subdued light. Now I plunge into a gloomy dell, whereinis no tinkling rivulet, ever pure; but instead a bog, hewn out into achess-board of squares, parted by deep narrow ditches some twentyfeet apart. Blundering among the stems I go, fetlock-deep in peat, and jumping at every third stride one of the said uncanny gripes, half hidden in long hassock grass. Oh Aira caespitosa, most statelyand most variable of British grasses, why will you always grow whereyou are not wanted? Through you the mare all but left her hind legsin that last gripe. Through you a red-coat ahead of me, avoiding oneof your hassocks, jumped with his horse's nose full butt against afir-stem, and stopped, 'As one that is struck deadBy lightning, ere he falls, '

as we shall soon, in spite of the mare's cleverness. Would we wereout of this!

Out of it we shall be soon. I see daylight ahead at last, brightbetween the dark stems. Up a steep slope, and over a bank which isnot very big, but being composed of loose gravel and peat mould, gives down with me, nearly sending me head over heels in the heather, and leaving me a sheer gap to scramble through, and out on the openmoor. 

Grand old moor! stretching your brown flats right away toward Windsorfor many a mile. --Far to our right is the new Wellington College, looking stately enough here all alone in the wilderness, in spite ofits two ugly towers and pinched waist. Close over me is the longfir-fringed ride of Easthampstead, ending suddenly in Caesar's camp;and hounds and huntsmen are already far ahead, and racing up theRoman road, which the clods of these parts, unable to give a betteraccount of it, call the Devil's Highway. 

Racing indeed; for as Reinecke gallops up the narrow heather-fringedpathway, he brushes off his scent upon the twigs at every stride; andthe hounds race after him, showing no head indeed, and keeping, forconvenience, in one long line upon the track: but going heads up, sterns down, at a pace which no horse can follow. --I only hope theymay not overrun the scent. 

They have overrun it; halt, and put their heads down a moment. Butwith one swift cast in fall gallop they have hit it off again, fiftyyards away in the heather, long ere the horsemen are up to them; forthose hounds can hunt a fox because they are not hunted themselves, and so have learnt to trust themselves, and act for themselves; asboys should learn at school, even at the risk of a mistake or two. Now they are showing head indeed, down a half-cleared valley, andover a few ineffectual turnips withering in the peat, a patch ofgrowing civilization in the heart of the wilderness; and then overthe brook, while I turn slowly away, through a green wilderness ofself-sown firs. 

There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, colonizing thedesert in spite of frost, and gales, and barrenness; and clusteringtogether, too, as Scotsmen always do abroad, little and big, everyone under his neighbour's lee, according to the good old proverb oftheir native land, 'Caw me, and I'll caw thee. '

I respect them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their forms, fromJames the First's gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park--the only placein England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are--down tothe little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth. Seven years on an average have most of them spent in ineffectualefforts to become a foot high. Nibbled off by hares, trodden down bycattle, cut down by turf-parers, seeing hundreds of their brethrencut up and carried off in the turf-fuel, they are as gnarled andstubbed near the ground as an old thorn-bush in a pasture. But theyhave conquered at last, and are growing away, eighteen inches a year, with fair green brushes silvertipt, reclothing the wilderness with avegetation which it has not seen for--how many thousand years?

No man can tell. For when last the Scotch fir was indigenous toEngland, and, mixed with the larch, stretched in one vast forest fromNorfolk into Wales, England was not as it is now. Snowdon was, itmay be, fifteen thousand feet in height, and from the edges of itsglaciers the marmot and the musk ox, the elk and the bear, wandereddown into the Lowlands, and the hyena and the lion dwelt in thosecaves where fox and badger only now abide. And how did the Scotchfir die out? Did the whole land sink slowly from its sub-Alpineelevation into a warmer climate below? Or was it never raised atall? Did some change of the Atlantic sea-floor turn for the firsttime the warm Gulf Stream to these shores; and with its soft sea-breezes melt away the 'Age of Ice, ' till glaciers and pines, marmotsand musk oxen, perspired to death, and vanished for an aeon? Whoknows? Not I. But of the fact there can be no doubt. Whether, aswe hold traditionally here, the Scotch fir was re-introduced by Jamesthe First when he built Bramshill for Raleigh's hapless pet, Henrythe Prince, or whatever may have been the date of their re-introduction, here they are, and no one can turn them out. Incountless thousands the winged seeds float down the south-west galesfrom the older trees; and every seed which falls takes root in groundwhich, however unable to bear broad-leaved trees, is ready by longrest for the seeds of the needle-leaved ones. Thousands perishyearly; but the eastward march of the whole, up hill and down dale, is sure and steady as that of Lynceus' Goths in Goethe's Helena:-

'Ein lang und breites Volkegewicht, Der erate wusste vom letzen nicht. 

Der erste fiel, der zweite stand, Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand, Ein jeder hundertfach gestarkt;Erschlagene Tausend unbemerkt -

- till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, stretching to theeastward of each tract of older trees, a long cloud of younger ones, like a green comet's tail--I wish their substance was as yieldingthis day. Truly beautiful--grand indeed to me it is--to see younglive Nature thus carrying on a great savage process in the heart ofthis old and seemingly all-artificial English land; and reproducinghere, as surely as in the Australian bush, a native forest, carelessof mankind. Still, I wish it were easier to ride through. Stiff arethose Scotchmen, and close and stout they stand by each other, andclaw at you as you twist through them, the biggest aiming at yourhead, or even worse, at your knees; while the middle-sized slip theirbrushes between your thigh and the saddle, and the little babiestickle your horse's stomach, or twine about his fore-feet. Whish--whish; we are enveloped in what seems an atmosphere of scrubbing-brushes. Fain would I shut my eyes: but dare not, or I shall rideagainst a tree. Whish--whish; alas for the horse which cannot windand turn like a hare! Plunge--stagger. What is this? A broad lineof ruts; perhaps some Celtic track-way, two thousand years old, nowmatted over with firs; dangerous enough out on the open moor, whenonly masked by a line of higher and darker heath: but doublydangerous now when masked by dark undergrowth. You must find yourown way here, mare. I will positively have nothing to do with it. Idisclaim all responsibility. There are the reins on your neck; dowhat you will, only do something--and if you can, get forward, andnot back. 

There is daylight at last, and fresh air. I trot contemptuouslythrough the advanced skirmishers of the Scotch invading army; andwatch my friends some mile and a half off, who have threaded apracticable track-way through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet forfirs to root in, and are away in 'a streamer. ' Now a streamer isproduced in this wise. There is but one possible gap in a bank, onepossible ford in a brook; one possible path in a cover; and as eachman has to wait till the man before him gets through, and themgallops on, each man loses twenty yards or more on the man beforehim: wherefore, by all laws of known arithmetic, if ten men tailthrough a gap, then will the last of the ten find himself two hundredyards behind the foremost, which process several times repeated, produces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz. Twenty men gallopingabsurdly as hard as they can, in a line half a mile long, and inhumours which are celestial in the few foremost, contented in thecentral, and gradually becoming darker in the hindmost; till in thelast man they assume a hue altogether Tartarean. Farewell, bravegentlemen! I watch, half sadly, half self-contented, the red coatsscattered like sparks of fire over hill and dale, and turn slowlyhomeward, to visit my old women. 

I pass through a gateway, out upon a village green, planted with rowsof oaks, surrounded by trim sunny cottages, a pleasant oasis in themiddle of the wilderness. Across the village cricket-ground--we aregreat cricketers in these parts, and long may the good old game liveamong us; and then up another hollow lane, which leads between dampshaughs and copses toward the further moor. 

Curious things to a minute philosopher are these same hollow lanes. They set him on archaeological questions, more than he can solve; andI meditate as I go, how many centuries it took to saw through thewarm sandbanks this dyke ten feet deep, up which he trots, with theoak boughs meeting over his head. Was it ever worth men's while todig out the soil? Surely not. The old method must have been, toremove the softer upper spit, till they got to tolerably hard ground;and then, Macadam's metal being as yet unknown, the rains and thewheels of generations sawed it gradually deeper and deeper, till thisroad-ditch was formed. But it must have taken centuries to do it. Many of these hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, must beas old or older than the Conquest. In Devonshire I am sure that theyare. But there many of them, one suspects, were made not of malice, but of cowardice prepense. Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, asneaking animal, and liked to keep when he could under cover of banksand hill-sides; while your bold Roman made his raised roads straightover hill and dale, as 'ridge-ways' from which, as from an eagle'seyrie, he could survey the conquered lowlands far and wide. It marksstrongly the difference between the two races, that differencebetween the Roman paved road with its established common way for allpassengers, its regular stations and milestones, and the Celtictrack-way winding irresolutely along in innumerable ruts, parting tomeet again, as if each savage (for they were little better) had takenhis own fresh path when he found the next line of ruts too heavy forhis cattle. Around the spurs of Dartmoor I have seen many ancientroads, some of them long disused, which could have been hollowed outfor no other purpose but that of concealment. 

So I go slowly up the hill, till the valley lies beneath me like along green garden between its two banks of brown moor; and on througha cheerful little green, with red brick cottages scattered all round, each with its large neat garden, and beehives, and pigs and geese, and turf-stack, and clipt yews and hollies before the door, and rosydark-eyed children, and all the simple healthy comforts of a wild'heth-cropper's' home. When he can, the good man of the house worksat farm labour, or cuts his own turf; and when work is scarce, hecuts copses and makes heath-brooms, and does a little poaching. True, he seldom goes to church, save to be christened, married, orburied: but he equally seldom gets drunk. For church and publicstand together two miles off; so that social wants sometimes bringtheir own compensations with them, and there are two sides to everyquestion. 

Hark! A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above. And then another, and another. My friends may trust it; for the clod of these partsdelights in the chase like any bare-legged Paddy, and casts awayflail and fork wildly, to run, shout, assist, and interfere in allpossible ways, out of pure love. The descendant of many generationsof broom-squires and deer-stealers, the instinct of sport is strongwithin him still, though no more of the king's deer are to be shot inthe winter turnip-fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hookhung from an orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to haresand pheasants, and too probably once in his life, 'hits the keeperinto the river, ' and reconsiders himself for a while after over acrank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults; and I have mine. But he is a thorough good fellow nevertheless; quite as good as I:civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; and a farshrewder fellow too--owing to his dash of wild forest blood, fromgipsy, highwayman; and what not--than his bullet-headed and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South-Saxon of the Chalk-downs. Dark-hairedhe is, ruddy, and tall of bone; swaggering in his youth; but when hegrows old, a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous asa prince. Sixteen years have I lived with him hail fellow well met, and never yet had a rude word or action from him. 

With him I have cast in my lot, to live and die, and be buried by hisside; and to him I go home contented, to look after his pettyinterests, cares, sorrows--Petty, truly--seeing that they include thewhole primal mysteries of life--Food, raiment, and work to earn themwithal; love and marriage, birth and death, right doing and wrongdoing, 'Schicksal und eigene Schuld;' and all those commonplaces ofhumanity which in the eyes of a minute philosopher are most divine, because they are most commonplace--catholic as the sunshine and therain which come down from the Heavenly Father, alike upon the eviland the good. As for doing fine things, my friend, with you, I havelearnt to believe that I am not set to do fine things, simply becauseI am not able to do them; and as for seeing fine things, with you, Ihave learnt to see the sight--as well as to try to do the duty--whichlies nearest me; and to comfort myself with the fancy that if I makegood use of my eyes and brain in this life, I shall see--if it be ofany use to me--all the fine things, or perhaps finer still, in thelife to come. But if not--what matter? In any life, in any state, however simple or humble, there will be always sufficient to occupy aMinute Philosopher; and if a man be busy, and busy about his duty, what more does he require, for time or for eternity?

V. FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 

The point from which to start, in order best to appreciate the changefrom ocean to sea, is perhaps Biarritz. The point at which to stopis Cette. And the change is important. Between the two points racesare changed, climates are changed, scenery is changed, the veryplants under your feet are changed, from a Western to an Easterntype. You pass from the wild Atlantic into the heart of the RomanEmpire--from the influences which formed the discoverers of the NewWorld, to those which formed the civilizers of the Old. Gascony, notonly in its scenery, but in its very legends, reminds you of Devonand Cornwall; Languedoc of Greece and Palestine. 

In the sea, as was to be expected, the change is even more complete. From Biarritz to Cette, you pass from poor Edward Forbes's Atlanticto his Mediterranean centre of creation. In plain English and fact, whether you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the region ofrespectable whales, herrings, and salmon, to that of tunnies, sciaenas, dorados, and all the gorgons, hydras, and chimaeras dire, which are said to grace the fish-markets of Barcelona or Marseilles. 

But to this assertion, as to most concerning nature, there areexceptions. Mediterranean fishes slip out of the Straits ofGibraltar, and up the coast of Portugal, and, once in the Bay ofBiscay, find the feeding good and the wind against them, and staythere. 

So it befalls, that at worthy M. Gardere's hotel at Biarritz (he hasseen service in England, and knows our English ways), you may have atdinner, day after day, salmon, louvine, shad, sardine, dorado, tunny. The first is unknown to the Mediterranean; for Fluellen mistook whenhe said that there were salmons in Macedon, as well as Monmouth; thelouvine is none other than the nasty bass, or sea-perch of theAtlantic; the shad (extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) isa gigantic herring which comes up rivers to spawn; a fish common(with slight differences) to both sides of the North Atlantic; whilethe sardine, the dorado, and the tunny (whether he be the true tunnyor the Alalonga) are Mediterranean fish. 

The whale fishery of these shores is long extinct. The Biscayanwhale was supposed to be extinct likewise. But like the ibex, andsome other animals which man has ceased to hunt, because he fanciesthat he has killed them all, they seem inclined to reappear. For in1854 one was washed ashore near St. Jean de Luz, at news whereofEschricht, the great Danish naturalist, travelled night and day fromCopenhagen, and secured the skeleton of the new-old monster. 

But during the latter part of the Middle Ages, and on--if I recollectaright--into the seventeenth century, Bayonne, Biarritz, Guettary, and St. Jean de Luz, sent forth their hardy whale-fishers, who slewall the whales of the Biscayan seas, and then crossed the Atlantic, to attack those of the frozen North. 

British and American enterprise drove them from the West coast of theAtlantic; and now their descendants are content to stay at home andtake the sardine-shoals, and send them in to Bayonne on theirdaughters' heads. 

Pretty enough it was, at least in outward seeming, to meet a party ofthose fisher-girls, bare-legged, high-kilted, lithe as deer, trotting, at a long loping pace, up the high road toward Bayonne, each with her basket on her head, as she laughed and sang, and tossedher black hair, and flashed her brown eyes, full of life and theenjoyment of life. Pretty enough. And yet who will blame the rail, which now sends her quickly into Bayonne--or even her fish withouther; and relieves the fair young maiden from being degraded into abeast of burden?

Handsome folk are these brown Basques. A mysterious people, whodwell alone, and are not counted among the nations; speaking anunique language, and keeping up unique customs, for which the curiousmust consult M. Michel's interesting book. There may be a cross ofEnglish blood among them, too, about Biarritz and Bayonne; Englishfeatures there are, plainly to be seen. And whether or not, oneaccepts the story of the country, that Anglets, near by, is an oldEnglish colony left by our Black Prince, it is certain that BayonneCathedral was built in part by English architects, and carries theroyal arms of England; and every school history will tell us how thiscorner of France was long in our hands, and was indeed English longbefore it was properly French. Moorish blood there may be, too, hereand there, left behind by those who built the little 'atalaya' orfire-beacon, over the old harbour, to correspond, by its smokecolumn, with a long line of similar beacons down the Spanish coast. The Basques resemble in look the Southern Welsh--quick-eyed, neat infeature, neat in dress, often, both men and women, beautiful. Themen wear a flat Scotch cap of some bright colour, and call it'berretta. ' The women tie a gaudy handkerchief round their heads, and compel one corner to stand forward from behind the ear in atriangle, in proportion to the size and stiffness whereof the ladyseems to think herself well dressed. But the pretty Basquehandkerchief will soon give place to the Parisian bonnet. For everycove among the rocks is now filled with smart bathing-houses, fromwhich, in summer, the gay folk of Paris issue in 'costume de bain, 'to float about all day on calabashes--having literally no room forthe soles of their feet on land. Then are opened casinos, theatre, shops, which lie closed all the winter. Then do the Basque house-owners flee into the moors, and camp out (it is said) on the hillsall night, letting their rooms for ten francs a night as mere bed-chambers--for all eating and living is performed in public; while thedove-coloured oxen, with brown holland pinafores over their backs, who dawdle in pairs up and down the long street with their lightcarts, have to make way for wondrous equipages from the Bois deBoulogne. 

Not then, for the wise man, is Biarritz a place to see and to love:but in the winter, when a little knot of quiet pleasant English holdthe place against all comers, and wander, undisturbed by fashion, about the quaint little rocks and caves and natural bridges--andwatch tumbling into the sea, before the Biscayan surges, the trimwalks and summer-houses, which were erected by the municipality inhonour of the Empress and her suite. Yearly they tumble in, andyearly are renewed, as the soft greensand strata are graven away, andwhat must have been once a long promontory becomes a group offantastic pierced rocks, exactly like those which are immortalizedupon the willow-pattern plates. 

Owing to this rapid destruction, the rocks of Biarritz are verybarren in sea-beasts and sea-weeds. But there is one remarkableexception, where the pools worn in a hard limestone are filled withwhat seem at first sight beds of china-asters, of all loveliestcolours--primrose, sea-green, dove, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey. They are all prickly sea-eggs (presumably the Echinus lividus, whichis found in similar places in the west of Ireland), each buried forlife in a cup-shaped hole which he has excavated in the rock, andshut in by an overhanging lip of living lime--seemingly a Nulliporecoralline. What they do there, what they think of, or what food isbrought into their curious grinding-mills by the Atlantic surgeswhich thunder over them twice a day, who can tell? However theyform, without doubt, the most beautiful object which I have ever seenin pool or cove. 

But the glory of Biarritz, after all, is the moors above, and theview to be seen therefrom. Under blazing blue skies, tempered bysoft dappled cloud, for ever sliding from the Atlantic and theAsturias mountains, in a climate soft as milk, and exhilaratingwithal as wine, one sees far and wide a panorama which, from itsvariety as well as its beauty, can never weary. 

To the north, the long sand-line of the Biscayan shore--the bar ofthe Adour marked by a cloud of grey spray. Then the dark pine-flatsof the Landes, and the towers of Bayonne rising through rich woods. To the eastward lies a high country, furred with woods, broken withglens; a country exactly like Devon, through the heart of which, hidden in such a gorge as that of Dart or Taw, runs the swift streamof the Nive, draining the western Pyrenees. And beyond, to thesouth-east, in early spring, the Pyrenean snows gleam bright, whiteclouds above the clouds. As one turns southward, the mountains breakdown into brown heather-hills, like Scottish grouse moors. The twonearest, and seemingly highest, are the famous Rhune and Bayonette, where lie, to this day, amid the heath and crags, hundreds ofunburied bones. For those great hills, skilfully fortified by Soultbefore the passage of the Bidassoa, were stormed, yard by yard, byWellington's army in October 1813. That mighty deed must be read inthe pages of one who saw it with his own eyes, and fought there withhis own noble body, and even nobler spirit. It is not for me to tellof victories, of which Sir William Napier has already told. 

Towards that hill, and the Nivelle at its foot, the land slopes down, still wooded and broken, bounded by a long sweep of clayey crumblingcliff. The eye catches the fort of Secoa, at the mouth of theNivelle--once Wellington's sea-base for his great French campaign. Then Fontarabia, at the Bidassoa mouth; and far off, the cove withinwhich lies the fatal citadel of St. Sebastian; all backed up by thefantastic mountains of Spain; the four-horned "Quatre Couronnes, " thepyramidal Jaysquivel, and beyond them again, sloping headlong intothe sea, peak after peak, each one more blue and tender than the onebefore, leading the eye on and on for seemingly countless leagues, till they die away into the ocean horizon and the boundless west. Not a sail, often for days together, passes between those mountainsand the shore on which we stand, to break the solitude, and peace, and vast expanse; and we linger, looking and looking at we know notwhat, and find repose in gazing purposeless into the utter void. 

Very unlike France are these Basque uplands; very like the seawardparts of Devon and Cornwall. Large oak-copses and boggy meadows fillthe glens; while above, the small fields, with their five-barredgates (relics of the English occupation) and high furze and heath-grown banks, make you fancy yourself for a moment in England. Andthe illusion is strengthened, as you see that the heath of the banksis the Goonhilly heath of the Lizard Point, and that of the bogs theorange-belled Erica ciliaris, which lingers (though rare) both inCornwall and in the south of Ireland. But another glance undeceivesyou. The wild flowers are new, saving those cosmopolitan seeds (likenettles and poppies) which the Romans have carried all over Europe, and the British are now carrying over the world. Every sandy banknear the sea is covered with the creeping stems of a huge reed, whichgrows in summer tall enough to make not only high fences, butfishing-rods. Poverty (though there is none of what we call povertyin Britain) fills the little walled court before its cottage with baytrees and standard figs; while wealth (though there is nothing hereof what we call wealth in Britain) asserts itself uniformly by greatstandard magnolias, and rich trailing roses, in full bloom here inApril instead of--as with us--in July. Both on bank and in bog growScorzoneras (dandelions with sword-shaped leaves) of which there arenone in these isles; and every common is ablaze with strange andlovely flowers. Each dry spot is brilliant with the azure flowers ofa prostrate Lithospermum, so exquisite a plant, that it is a marvelwhy we do not see it, as 'spring-bedding, ' in every British garden. The heath is almost hidden, in places, by the large white flowers andtrailing stems of the sage-leaved Cistus. Delicate purple Ixias, andyet more delicate Hoop-petticoat Narcissus, spring from the turf. And here and there among furze and heath, crop out great pink bunchesof the Daphne Cneorum of our gardens, perfuming all the air. Yes, weare indeed in foreign parts, in the very home of that Atlantic flora, of which only a few species have reached the south-west of theseisles; and on the limit of another flora also--of that of Italy andGreece. For as we descend into the glen, every lane-bank and lowtree is entwined, not with ivy, but with a still more beautifulevergreen, the Smilax of South-eastern Europe, with its zigzag stems, and curving heart-shaped leaves, and hooked thorns; the very oak-scrub is of species unknown to Britain. And what are these talllilies, which fill every glade breast-high with their sword-likeleaves, and spires of white flowers, lilac-pencilled? They are theclassic flower, the Asphodel of Greece and Grecian song; the Asphodelthrough which the ghosts of Homer's heroes strode: as heroes' ghostsmight stride even here. 

For here we are on sacred ground. The vegetation is rank with theblood of gallant invaders, and of no less gallant patriots. In thewords of Campbell's 'Hohenlinden' -

'Every turf beneath our feetMay be a hero's sepulchre. '

That little tarn below has 'bubbled with crimson foam' when the kingsof Europe arose to bring home the Bourbons, as did the Lake Regillusof old, in the day when 'the Thirty Cities swore to bring theTarquins home. '

Turn to the left, above the tarn, and into the great Spanish roadfrom Bayonne to the frontier at what was lately 'La Negresse, ' but isnow a gay railway station. Where that station is, was another tarn, now drained. The road ran between the two. And that narrow space oftwo hundred yards, on which we stand, was for three fearful days thegate of France. 

For on the 10th of December, 1813, Soult, driven into Bayonne byWellington's advance, rushed out again in the early morn, and poureda torrent of living men down this road, and upwards again towards theBritish army which crested that long ridge in front. 

The ridge slopes rapidly away at the back, toward the lowlands of theBidassoa; and once thrust from it, the English army would have beencut in two--one half driven back upon their sea-base at St. Jean deLuz: the other half left on the further side of the Adour. 

And this was the gate, which had to be defended during a three days'battle. That long copse which overhangs the road is the famous wood, which was taken and retaken many times. You house above it, embowered in trees, is the 'Mayor's house, ' in which Sir John Hopewas so nearly captured by the French. Somewhere behind the lanewhere we came down was the battery which blasted off our troops asthey ran up from the lowlands behind, to support their fellows. 

Of the details of the fight you must read in Napier's 'PeninsularWar, ' and in Mr. Gleig's 'Subaltern. ' They are not to be describedby one who never saw a battle, great or small. 

And now, if you choose to start upon your journey from the ocean tothe sea, you will take the railroad here, and run five miles throughthe battle-fields into Bayonne, the quaint old fortress city, girdledwith a labyrinth of walls, and turf-dykes, and outside them meadowsas rich, and trees as stately, as if war had never swept across theland. You may stop, if you will, to look at the tall Spanish houses, with their piazzas and jalousies, and the motley populace, French, Basques, Spaniards, Jews; and, most worth seeing of all, the lovelyladies of Bayonne, who swarm out when the sun goes down, for air andmilitary music. You may try to find (in which you will probablyfail) the arms of England in the roof of the ugly old cathedral; youmay wander the bridges over which join the three quarters of the city(for the Adour and the Nive meet within the walls), and probably loseyour way--a slight matter among folk who, if you will but take offyour hat, call them Monsieur, apologize for the trouble you aregiving, begin the laugh at your own stupidity, and compliment them ontheir city and their fair ladies, will be delighted to walk a mileout of their own way to show you yours. You will gaze up at therock-rooted citadel from whence, in the small hours of April 14, 1813, after peace was agreed on, but unhappily not declared (forNapier has fully exculpated the French Generals), three thousand ofThouvenot's men burst forth against Sir John Hope's unsuspectingbesiegers, with a furious valour which cost the English more than 800men. 

There, in the pine woods on the opposite side, is the Boucault, whereour besieging army lay. Across the reach below stretched Sir JohnHope's famous bridge; and as you leave Bayonne by rail, you runbeneath the English cemetery, where lie the soldiers (officers of theColdstream Guards among them) who fell in the Frenchman's laststruggle to defend his native land. 

But enough of this. I should not have recalled to mind one of thesebattles, had they not, one and all, been as glorious for the Frenchand their great captain--wearied with long marches, disheartened bythe apathy of their own countrymen, and, as they went on, overpoweredby mere numbers--as they were for our veterans, and Wellingtonhimself. 

And now, once through Bayonne, we are in the Pignadas and the Landes. 

To form a conception of these famous Landes, it is only necessary torun down by the South-Western Railway, through the moors of Woking orAscot; spread them out flat, and multiply them to seeming infinity. The same sea of brown heather, broken only by the same dark pignadas, or fir plantations, extends for nigh a hundred miles; and when thetraveller northward has lost sight, first of the Spanish mountains, and then of the Pyrenean snows, he seems to be rushing along a brownocean, without wave or shore. Only, instead of the three heaths ofSurrey and Hants (the same species as those of Scotland), larger andricher southern heaths cover the grey sands; and notably the delicateupright spires of the bruyere, or Erica scoparia, which grows fullsix feet high, and furnishes from its roots those 'bruyere' pipes, which British shopkeepers have rechristened 'briar-roots. ' Instead, again, of the Scotch firs of Ascot, the pines are all pinasters(miscalled P. Maritima). Each has the same bent stem, carrying attop, long, ragged, scanty, leaf-tufts, instead of the straight stemand dense short foliage of the sturdier Scotchman; and down each stemruns a long, fresh scar, and at the bottom (in spring at least), hangs a lip of tin, and a neat earthen pipkin, into which distilsturpentine as clear as glass. The trees have mostly been plantedwithin the last fifty years, to keep the drifting sands from beingblown away. As timber they are about as valuable as those Jerseycow-cabbage stalks, of which the curious will at times make walking-sticks: but as producers of turpentine they have their use, and giveemployment to the sad, stunted, ill-fed folk, unhealthy for want ofwater, and barbarous from utter loneliness, whose only employment, inold times, was the keeping ragged flocks about the moors. Few andfar between the natives may be seen from the railway, seemingly hunghigh in air, till on nearer approach you find them to be stalkingalong on stilts, or standing knitting on the same, a sheepskin overtheir shoulders, an umbrella strapped to their side, and, stuck intothe small of the back, a long crutch, which serves, when resting, asa third wooden leg. 

So run on the Landes, mile after mile, station after station, variedonly by an occasional stunted cork tree, or a starved field of barleyor maize. But the railroad is bringing to them, as elsewhere, labour, civilization, agricultural improvement. Pretty villages, orchards, gardens, are springing up round the lonely 'gares. ' Thelate Emperor helped forward, it is said, new pine plantations, andsundry schemes for reclaiming the waste. Arcachon, on a pine-fringedlagoon of the Atlantic, has great artificial ponds for oysterbreeding, and is rising into a gay watering-place, with adistinguished scientific society. Nay, more: it saw a few yearssince an international exposition of fish, and fish-culture, andfishing-tackle, and all things connected with the fisheries, not onlyof Europe, but of America likewise. Heaven speed the plan; andrestore thereby oysters to our shores, and shad and salmon to therivers both of Western Europe and Eastern North America. 

As for the cause of the Landes, it may be easily divined, by the helpof a map and of common sense. 

The Gironde and the Adour carry to the sea the drainage of nearly athird of France, including almost all the rain which falls on thenorth side of the Pyrenees. What has become of all the sand and mudwhich has been swept in the course of ages down their channels? Whathas become--a very small part, be it recollected, of the wholeamount--of all the rock which has been removed by rain and thunder, frost and snow, in the process of scooping out the deep valleys ofthe Pyrenees? Out of that one crack, which men call the Val d'Ossau, stone has been swept enough to form a considerable island. Where isit all? In these Landes. Carried down year by year to the Atlantic, it has been driven back again, year by year, by the fierce gales ofthe Bay of Biscay, and rolled up into banks and dunes of loose sand, till it has filled up what was once a broad estuary, 140 miles acrossand perhaps 70 miles in depth. Upheaved it may have been also, slowly, from the sea, for recent sea-shells are found as far inlandas Dax; and thus the whole upper end of the Bay of Biscay hastransformed itself during the lapse of, it may be, countless ages, into a desolate wilderness. 

It is at Dax that we leave the main line, and instead of runningnorth for Bordeaux and the land of clarets, turn south-east to Orthezand Pau, and the Gaves, and the Pyrenees. 

And now we pass through ragged uplands, woody and moorish, with thelong yellow maize-stalks of last year's crop rotting in the swampyglens. For the 'petite culture, ' whatever be its advantages, givesno capital or power of combined action for draining wet lands; andthe valleys of Gascony and Bearn in the south, as well as greatsheets of the Pas de Calais in the north, are in a waterlogged state, equally shocking to the eye of a British farmer, and injurious to thehealth and to the crops of the peasants. 

Soon we strike the Adour, here of the shape and size of a second-class Scotch salmon-stream, with swirling brown pools beneath greycrags, which make one long to try in them the virtues of 'JockScott, ' 'the Butcher, ' or the 'Dusty Miller. ' And perhaps notwithout effect; for salmon are there still; and will be more and moreas French 'pisciculture' develops itself under Governmentsupervision. 

Here we touch again the line of that masterly retreat of Soult'sbefore the superior forces of Wellington, to which Napier has donesuch ample and deserved justice. 

There is Berenz, where the Sixth and Light divisions crossed theGave, and clambered into the high road up steep ravines; and there isOrthez itself, with the beautiful old Gothic bridge which the Frenchcould not blow up, as they did every other bridge on their retreat;and the ruins of that robber den to which Gaston Phoebus, Count ofFoix (of whom you may read in Froissart), used to drag his victims;and there overhead, upon the left of the rail and road, is the oldRoman camp, and the hill of Orthez, and St. Boes, and the High Churchof Baights, the scene of the terrible battle of Orthez. 

The Roman camp, then 'open and grassy, with a few trees, ' saysNapier, is now covered with vineyards. Everywhere the fatal slopesare rich with cultivation, plenty, and peace. God grant they mayremain so for ever. 

And so, along the Gave de Pau, we run on to Pau, the ancient capitalof Bearn; the birthplace of Henri Quatre, and of Bernadotte, King ofSweden; where, in the charming old chateau, restored by LouisPhilippe, those who list may see the tortoise which served as thegreat Henry's cradle; and believe, if they list also, the tale thatthat is the real shell. 

For in 1793, when the knights of the 'bonnet rouge' and 'carmagnolecomplete' burst into the castle, to destroy every memorial of hatedroyalty, the shell among the rest, there chanced--miraculouscoincidence--to be in Pau, in the collection of a naturalist, anothershell, of the same shape and size. Swiftly and deftly pious handssubstituted it for the real relic, leaving it to be battered inpieces and trampled in the mud, while the royal cradle lay perdu foryears in the roof of a house, to reappear duly at the Restoration ofthe Bourbons. 

Of Pau I shall say nothing. It would be real impertinence in one whoonly spent three days in it, to describe a city which is known to allEurope; which is a permanent English colony, and boasts of one, andsometimes two, packs of English foxhounds. But this I may be allowedto say. That of all delectable spots I have yet seen, Pau is themost delectable. Of all the landscapes which I have beheld, thatfrom the Place Royale is, for variety, richness, and grandeur, themost glorious; at least as I saw it for the first time. 

Beneath the wall of the high terrace are rich meadows, vocal withfrogs rejoicing in the rain, and expressing their joy, not in thesober monotone of our English frogs, but each according to his kind;one bellowing, the next barking, the next cawing, and the next(probably the little green Hylas, who has come down out of the treesto breed) quacking in treble like a tiny drake. The bark (I suspect)is that of the gorgeous edible frog; and so suspect the youngrecruits who lounge upon the wall, and look down wistfully, longing, I presume, to eat him. And quite right they are; for he (at leasthis thigh) is exceeding good to eat, tenderer and sweeter than anyspring chicken. 

Beyond the meadow, among the poplars, the broad Gave murmurs on overshingly shallows, between aspen-fringed islets, grey with the meltingsnows; and beyond her again rise broken wooded hills, dotted withhandsome houses; and beyond them a veil of mist and rain. 

On a sudden that veil lifts; and five-and-twenty miles away, beneaththe black edge of the cloud, against the clear blue sky, stands outthe whole snow-range of the Pyrenees; and in the midst, exactlyopposite, filling up a vast gap which is the Val d'Ossau, the hugecone, still snowy white, of the Pic du Midi. 

He who is conversant with theatres will be unable to overlook theseeming art--and even artifice--of such an effect. The clouds liftlike a drop-scene; the mountains are so utterly unlike any naturalobject in the north, that for the moment one fancies them painted andnot real; the Pic du Midi stands so exactly where it ought, and isyet so fantastic and unexpected in its shape, that an artist seems tohave put it there. 

But lie who knows nothing, and cares less, about theatres and theirsham glories, and sees for the first time in his life the eternalsnows of which he has read since childhood, draws his breath deeply, and stands astounded, whispering to himself that God is great. 

One hint more, ere we pass on from Pau. Here, at least in springtime, of all places in Europe, may a man feed his ears with song ofbirds. The copses by the Gave, the public walks and woods (whereinEnglish prejudices have happily protected what is elsewhere shot downas game, even to the poor little cock-robins whose corpses lie bydozens in too many French markets), are filled with all our Englishbirds of passage, finding their way northwards from Morocco andAlgiers; and with our English nightingales, black-caps, willow-wrens, and whitethroats, are other songsters which never find their way tothese isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree--and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and the yellowHippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and almost equalling thenightingale, for richness and variety of song--the polyglot warblerwhich penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores of theBritish Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty miles ofsea, after a land journey--and by night, too, as all the warblersjourney--from Africa. 

At Pau, the railroad ended when I was there; and who would goeastward had to take carriage, and go by the excellent road (allpublic roads in the south of France are excellent, and equal to ourbest English roads) over the high Landes to Tarbes; and on again overfresh Landes to Montrejeau; and thence by railway to Toulouse. 

They are very dreary, these high flat uplands, from which innumerablestreams pour down to swell the Adour and the Garonne; and as onerolls along, listening to the eternal tinkle of the horse-bells, onlytwo roadside objects are particularly worthy of notice. First, thecultivation, spreading rapidly since the Revolution, over what wasopen moor; and next the great natural parks which one traverses hereand there; the remnants of those forests which were once sacred tothe seigneurs and their field sports. The seigneurs are gone now, and the game with them; and the forests are almost gone--so ruinate, indeed, by the peasantry, that the Government (I believe) hasinterfered to stop a destruction of timber, which involves thedestruction both of fire-wood and of the annual fall of rain. Butthe trees which remain, whether in forest or in homestead, are sadlymangled. The winters are sharp in these high uplands, and firingscarce; and the country method of obtaining it is to send a woman upa tree, where she hacks off, with feeble arms and feeble tools, boughs halfway out from the stem, disfiguring, and in time destroyingby letting the wet enter, splendid southern oaks, chestnuts, andwalnuts. Painful and hideous, to an eye accustomed to British parks, are the forms of these once noble trees. 

Suddenly we descend a brow into the Yale of Tarbes: a good land andlarge; a labyrinth of clear streams, water-meadows, cherry-orchards, and crops of every kind, and in the midst the pleasant old city, withits once famous University. Of Tarbes, you may read in the pages ofFroissart--or, if you prefer a later authority, in those of Dumas, 'Trois Mousquetaires;' for this is the native land of the immortalUlysses of Gascony, the Chevalier d'Artagnan. 

There you may see, to your surprise, not only gentlemen, but ladies, taking their pleasure on horseback after the English fashion; forthere is close by a great 'haras, ' or Government establishment forhorse-breeding. You may watch the quaint dresses in the marketplace;you may rest, as Froissart rested of old, in a 'right pleasant inn;'you may eat of the delicious cookery which is to be found, even inremote towns, throughout the south of France, and even--if you dare--of 'Coquilles aux Champignons. ' You may sit out after dinner in thatdelicious climate, listening to the rush of the clear Adour throughstreets, and yards, and culverts; for the city, like Romsey, orSalisbury, is built over many streams. You may watch the Pyreneeschanging from white to rose, from rose to lead colour, and then dyingaway into the night--for twilight there is little or none, here inthe far south. 

'The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, At one stride comes the dark. '

And soon from street to street you hear the 'clarion' of thegarrison, that singularly wild and sweet trumpet-call which sendsFrench soldiers to their beds. And at that the whole populace swarmsout, rich and poor, and listens entranced beneath the trees in thePlace Maubourguet, as if they had never heard it before; with anorder and a sobriety, and a good humour, and a bowing to each other, and asking and giving of cigar-lights between men of every class--anda little quiet modest love-making on the outskirts of the crowd, which is very pleasant to behold. And when the music is silent, andthe people go off suddenly, silently, and soberly withal (for thereare no drunkards in these parts), to their early beds, you stand andlook up into the 'purple night, ' as Homer calls it--that southernsky, intensely dark, and yet transparent withal, through which youseem to look beyond the stars into the infinite itself, and recollectthat beyond all that, and through all that likewise, there is aninfinite good God who cares for all these simple kindly folk; andthat by Him all their hearts are as well known, and all theirinfirmities as mercifully weighed, as are, you trust, your own. 

And so you go to rest, content to say, with the wise American, 'Ittakes all sorts to make a world. '

The next morn you rise, to roll on over yet more weary uplands toMontrejeau, over long miles of sandy heath, a magnified Aldershott, which during certain summer months is gay, here and there, likeAldershott, with the tents of an army at play. But in spring thedesolation is utter, and the loneliest grouse-moor, and the boggiestburn, are more cheerful and varied than the Landes of Lannemezan, andthe foul streamlets which have sawn gorges through the sandy waste. 

But all the while, on your right hand, league after league, everfading into blue sky behind you, and growing afresh out of blue skyin front, hangs high in air the white saw of the Pyrenees. High, Isay, in air, for the land slopes, or seems to slope, down from you tothe mountain range, and all their roots are lost in a dim sea ofpurple haze. But shut out the snow line above, and you will findthat the seeming haze is none, but really a clear and richly varieddistance of hills, and woods, and towns, which have become invisiblefrom the contrast of their greens, and greys, and purples, with theglare and dazzle of the spotless snows of spring. 

There they stand, one straight continuous jagged wall, of which noone point seems higher than another. From the Pic d'Ossau, by theMont Perdu and the Maladetta to the Pic de Lart, are peaks pastcounting--hard clear white against the hard clear blue, and blazingwith keen light beneath the high southern sun. Each peak carries itslittle pet cushion of cloud, hanging motionless a few hundred yardsabove in the blue sky, a row of them as far as eye can see. But, ever and anon, as afternoon draws on, one of those little clouds, seeming tired of waiting at its post ever since sunrise, loses itstemper, boils, swells, settles down on its own private peak, andexplodes in a fierce thunderstorm down its own private valley, without discomposing in the least its neighbour cloud-cushions rightand left. Faintly the roll of the thunder reaches the ear. Acrosssome great blackness of cloud and cliff, a tiny spark darts down. Along wisp of mist sweeps rapidly toward you across the lowlands, anda momentary brush of cold rain lays the dust. And then the pageantis played out, and the disturbed peak is left clear again in the bluesky for the rest of the day, to gather another cloud-cushion when to-morrow's sun shall rise. 

To him who looks, day after day, on this astonishing natural wall, stretching, without visible gap, for nearly three hundred miles, itis easy to see why France not only is, but must be, a different worldfrom Spain. Even human thought cannot, to any useful extent, flyover that great wall of homeless rock and snow. On the other sidethere must needs be another folk, with another tongue, other manners, other polities, and if not another creed, yet surely with other, andutterly different, conceptions of the universe, and of man's businesstherein. Railroads may do somewhat. But what of one railroad; oreven of two, one on the ocean, one on the sea, two hundred andseventy miles apart? Before French civilization can inform andelevate the Spanish people you must 'plane down the Pyrenees. '

At Montrejeau, a pretty town upon a hill which overhangs the Garonne, you find, again, verdure and a railroad; and, turning your back uponthe Pyrenees, run down the rich ugly vale of the Garonne, throughcrops of exceeding richness--wheat, which is reaped in July, to befollowed by buckwheat reaped in October; then by green crops to becut in May, and that again by maize, to be pulled in October, andfollowed by wheat and the same rotation. 

Thus you reach Toulouse, a noble city, of which it ill befits apasser-through to speak. Volumes have been written on itsantiquities, and volumes on its history; and all of either that myreaders need know, they will find in Murray's hand-book. 

At Toulouse--or rather on leaving it to go eastward--you become awarethat you have passed into a fresh region. The change has been, ofcourse, gradual: but it has been concealed from you by passing overthe chilly dreary uplands of Lannemezan. Now you find yourself atonce in Languedoc. You have passed from the Atlantic region into theMediterranean; from the old highlands of the wild Vascones, intothose lowlands of Gallia Narbonensis, reaching from the head-watersof the Garonne to the mouths of the Rhone, which were said to be moreItalian than Italy itself. 

The peculiarity of the district is its gorgeous colouring. Everywhere, over rich plains, you look away to low craggy banks oflimestone, the grey whereof contrasts strongly with the green of thelowland, and with the even richer green of the mulberry orchards; andbeyond them again, southward to the now distant snows of thePyrenees, and northward to the orange downs and purple glens of theCevennes, all blazing in the blazing sun. Green, grey, orange, purple, and, in the farthest distance, blue as of the heaven itself, make the land one vast rainbow, and fit dwelling-place for its sunnyfolk, still happy and industrious--once the most cultivated andluxurious people in Europe. 

As for their industry, it is hereditary. These lands were, it maybe, as richly and carefully tilled in the days of Augustus Caesar asthey are now; or rather, as they were at the end of the eighteenthcentury. For, since then, the delver and sower--for centuries theslave of the Roman, and, for centuries after, the slave of Teutonicor Saracenic conquerors--has become his own master, and his ownlandlord; and an impulse has been given to industry, which is shownby trim cottages, gay gardens, and fresh olive orchards, pushed upinto glens which in a state of nature would starve a goat. 

The special culture of the country--more and more special as we runeastward--is that of the mulberry, the almond, and the olive. Alongevery hill-side, down every glen, lie orchard-rows of the preciouspollards. The mulberries are of richest dark velvet green; thealmonds, one glory of rose-colour in early spring, are now of a palerand colder green; the olives (as all the world knows) of a dustygrey, which looks all the more desolate in the pruning time of earlyspring, when half the boughs of the evergreen are cut out, leavingthe trees stripped as by a tempest, and are carried home for fire-wood in the quaint little carts, with their solid creaking wheels, drawn by dove-coloured kine. Very ancient are some of these olives, or rather, olive-groups. For when the tree grows old, it splits, andfalls asunder, as do often our pollard willows; the bark heals overon the inside of each fragment, and what was one tree becomes many, springing from a single root, and bearing such signs of exceeding agethat one can well believe the country tale, how in the olive groundsaround Nismes are still fruiting olives which have furnished oil forthe fair Roman dames who cooled themselves in the sacred fountain ofNemausa, in the days of the twelve Caesars. 

Between the pollard rows are everywhere the rows of vines, or of whatwill be vines when summer comes, but are now black knobbed andgnarled clubs, without a sign of life save here and there one fatgreen shoot of leaf and tendril bursting forth from the seeminglydead stick. 

One who sees that sight may find a new meaning and beauty in themystic words, 'I am the vine, ye are the branches. ' It is not merelythe connection between branch and stem, common to all trees; notmerely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of thegrape, which made the very heathens look upon it as the sacred andmiraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning outof the unfruitful branches, to be burned as fire-wood, or--after theold Roman fashion, which I believe endures still in these parts--buried as manure at the foot of the parent stem; not merely these, but the seeming death of the vine, shorn of all its beauty, itsfruitfulness, of every branch and twig which it had borne the yearbefore, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter'ssleep; and then bursting forth again, by an irresistible inward life, into fresh branches spreading and trailing far and wide, and tossingtheir golden tendrils to the sun. 

This thought, surely--the emblem of the living Church springing fromthe corpse of the dead Christ, who yet should rise and be alive forevermore--enters into, it may be forms an integral part of, themeaning of, that prophecy of all prophecies. 

One ought to look, with something of filial reverence, on theagriculture of the district into which we are penetrating; for it isthe parent of our own. From hence, or strictly speaking from theMediterranean shore beyond us, spread northward and westward throughFrance, Belgium, and Britain, all the tillage which we knew--at leasttill a hundred years ago--beyond the primaeval plan of clearing, orsurface-burning, the forests, growing miserable white crops as longas they would yield, and then letting the land relapse, for twentyyears, into miserable pasture. This process (which lingered thirtyyears ago in remote parts of Devon), and nothing better, seems tohave been that change of cultivated lands which Tacitus ascribes tothe ancient Germans. Rotation of crops, in any true sense, came tous from Provence and Languedoc; and with it, subsoiling; irrigation;all our artificial grasses, with lucerne at the head of the list; ourpeas and beans; some of our most important roots; almost all ourgarden flowers, vegetables, fruits, the fig, the mulberry, the vine--(the olive and the maize came with them from the East, but dared gono further north)--and I know not what more; till we may say, that--saving subsoil-draining, which their climate does not need--theancestors of these good folks were better farmers fifteen hundredyears ago, than too many of our countrymen are at this day. 

So they toil, and thrive, and bless God, under the glorious sun; andas for rain--they have not had rain for these two months--(I speak ofApril, 1864)--and, though the white limestone dust is ankle deep onevery road, say that they want none for two months more, thanks, itis to be presumed, to their deep tillage, which puts the plant-rootsout of the reach of drought. In spring they feed their silkworms, and wind their silk. In summer they reap their crops, and hang themaize-heads from their rafters for their own winter food, while theysell the wheat to the poor creatures, objects of their pity, who livein towns, and are forced to eat white bread. From spring to autumnthey have fruit, and to spare, for themselves and for theircustomers; and with the autumn comes the vintage, and all its classicrevelries. A happy folk--under a happy clime; which yet has itsdrawbacks, like all climes on earth. Terrible thunderstorms sweepover it, hail-laden, killing, battering, drowning, destroying in anhour the labours of the year; and there are ugly mistral windslikewise, of which it may be fairly said, that he who can face aneight days' mistral, without finding his life a burden, must beeither a very valiant man, or have neither liver nor mucous membrane. 

For on a sudden, after still and burning weather, the thermometersuddenly falls from thirty to forty degrees; and out of the north-west rushes a chilly hurricane, blowing fiercer and fiercer each daytoward nightfall, and lulling in the small hours, only to burst forthagain at sunrise. Parched are all lips and eyes; for the air is fullof dust, yea, even of gravel which cuts like hail. Aching are allright-sides; for the sudden chill brings on all manner of livercomplaints and indigestions. All who can afford it, draw tight thejalousies, and sulk in darkness; the leaves are parched, as by anAtlantic gale; the air is filled with lurid haze, as in an Englishnorth-east wind; and no man can breathe freely, or eat his bread withjoy, until the plague is past. 

What is the cause of these mistrals; why all the cold air of CentralFrance should be suddenly seized with madness, and rush into the seabetween the Alps and the Pyrenees; whether the great heat of the sun, acting on the Mediterranean basin, raises up thence--as from the Gulfof Mexico--columns of warm light air, whose place has to be suppliedby colder and heavier air from inland; whether the north-west mistralis, or is not, a diverted north-easter; an arctic current which, inits right road toward the tropics across the centre of France, hasbeen called to the eastward of the Pyrenees (instead of, as usual, tothe westward), by the sudden demand for cold air, --all this let menof science decide; and having discovered what causes the mistral, discover also what will prevent it. That would be indeed a triumphof science, and a boon to tortured humanity. 

But after all, man is a worse enemy to man than any of the bruteforces of nature: and a more terrible scourge than mistral ortempest swept over this land six hundred years ago, when it was, perhaps, the happiest and the most civilized portion of Europe. Thiswas the scene of the Albigense Crusade: a tragedy of which the truehistory will never, perhaps, be written. It was not merely apersecution of real or supposed heretics; it was a national war, embittered by the ancient jealousies of race, between the Frankaristocracy of the north and the Gothic aristocracy of the south, whohad perhaps acquired, with their half-Roman, half-Saracencivilization, mixtures both of Roman and of Saracen blood. As"Aquitanians, " "Provencaux, "--Roman Provincials, as they proudlycalled themselves, speaking the Langue d'Oc, and looking down on thenortherners who spoke the Langue d'Oil as barbarians, they were inthose days guilty of the capital crime of being foreigners; and asforeigners they were exterminated. What their religious tenets were, we shall never know. With the Vaudois, Waldenses, "poor men ofLyons, " they must not be for a moment confounded. Their creedremains to us only in the calumnies of their enemies. Theconfessions in the archives of the Tolosan Inquisition, as elicitedeither under torture or fear of torture, deserve no confidencewhatsoever. And as for the licentiousness of their poetry--which hasbeen alleged as proof of their profligacy--I can only say, that it isno more licentious than the fabliaux of their French conquerors, while it is far more delicate and refined. Humanity, at least, hasdone justice to the Troubadours of the south; and confessed, even inthe Middle Age, that to them the races of the north owed grace ofexpression, delicacy of sentiment, and that respect for women whichsoon was named chivalry; which looks on woman, not with suspicion andcontempt, but with trust and adoration; and is not ashamed to obeyher as "mistress, " instead of treating her as a slave. 

But these Albigenses must have had something in their hearts forwhich it was worth while to die. At Aviguonet, that little grey townon the crag above the railway, they burst into the place, maddened bythe cruelties of the Inquisitor (an archdeacon, if I recollectrightly, from Toulouse), and slew him then and there. They were shutup in the town, and withstood heroically a long and miserable siege. At last they were starved out. The conquerors offered them theirlives--so say the French stories--if they would recant. But theywould not. They were thrust together into one of those stone-walledenclosures below the town, heaped over with vine-twigs and maize-stalks, and burned alive; and among them a young lady of the highestrank, who had passed through all the horrors of the siege, and wasoffered life, wealth, and honour, if she would turn. 

Surely profligate infidels do not so die; and these poor souls, whatever were their sins or their confusions, must be numbered amongthe heroes of the human race. 

But the world has mended since then, and so has the French character. Even before the Revolution of 1793, it was softening fast. Themassacres of 1562 were not as horrible as those of the AlbigenseCrusade, though committed--which the former were not--under severeprovocation. The massacres of 1793--in spite of all that has beensaid--were far less horrible than those of 1562, though they were theoutpouring of centuries of pardonable fury and indignation. Thecrimes of the Terreur Blanche, at the Restoration--though ugly thingswere done in the south, especially in Nismes--were far less horribleagain; though they were, for the most part, acts of direct personalretaliation on the republicans of 1793. And since then the Frenchheart has softened fast. The irritating sense of hereditary wronghas passed away. The Frenchman conceives that justice is done tohim, according to his own notions thereof. He has his share of thesoil, without which no Celtic populace will ever be content. He hasfair play in the battle of life; and a 'Carriere ouverte aux talens. 'He has equal law and justice between man and man. And he is content;and under the sunshine of contentment and self-respect, his nativegood-nature expands; and he shows himself what he is, not merely avaliant and capable, but an honest, kindly, charitable man. 

Yes. France has grown better, and has been growing better, Ibelieve, for centuries past. And the difference between the Franceof the middle age and the France of the present day, is fitlytypified by the difference between the new Carcassone below and theold Carcassone above, where every traveller, even if he be noantiquarian, should stop and gaze about a while. 

The contrast is complete; and one for which a man who loves hisfellow-men should surely return devout thanks to Almighty God. Below, on the west bank of the river, is the new town, spreading andgrowing, unwalled, for its fortifications are now replaced byboulevards and avenues; full of handsome houses; squares where, beneath the plane-tree shade, marble fountains pour out perpetualhealth and coolness; manufactories of gay woollens; healthy, cheerful, market folk; comfortable burghers; industry and peace. Wepass outside to the great basin of the Canal de Languedoc, and getmore avenues of stately trees, and among them the red marble statueof Riquet, whose genius planned and carried out the mighty canalwhich joins the ocean to the sea; the wonder of its day, which provedthe French to be, at least in the eighteenth century, the master-engineers of the world; the only people who still inherited themechanical skill and daring of their Roman civilizers. Riquet borethe labour of that canal--and the calumny and obstructiveness, too, which tried to prevent its formation; France bore the expense; LouisQuatorze, of course, the glory; and no one, it is to be feared, theprofit: for the navigation of the Garonne at the one extremity, andof the Mediterranean shallows at the other, were left unimproved tillof late years, and the canal has become practically useful only justin time to be superseded by the railroads. 

Now cross the Aude. Look down upon the willow and aspen copses, where over the heads of busy washerwomen, the nightingale and thehippolais crowded together away from the dusty plains and downs, shake the copses with their song; and then toil upward to the greyfortress tower on the grey limestone knoll; and pass, out of natureand her pure sunshine, into the black shadow of the unnatural MiddleAge; into the region of dirt and darkness, cruelty and fear; grimfortresses, crowded houses, narrow streets, and pestilence. Passthrough the outer circle of walls, of the latter part of thethirteenth century, to examine--for their architecture is a wholehistory engraved in stones--the ancient walls of the inner enceinte;massive Roman below, patched with striped Visigothic work, with meanand hasty Moorish, with graceful, though heavy, Romanesque of thetimes of the Troubadours; a whole museum of ancient fortifications, which has been restored, stone by stone, through the learning of M. Viollet le Duc and the public spirit of the late Emperor. Pass inunder the gateway and give yourself up to legends. There grins downon you the broad image of the mythic Dame Carcas, who defended thetown single-handed against Charlemagne, till this tower fell down bymiracle, and let in the Christian host. But do not believe that shegave to the place its name of Carcassone; for the first syllable ofthe word is hint enough that it was, long ere her days, a Celticcaer, or hill-fortress. Pause at the inner gate; you need notexactly believe that when the English Crusader, Simon de Montfort, burst it open, and behold, the town within was empty and desolate, hecried: 'Did I not tell you that those heretics were devils; andbehold, being devils, they have vanished into air. ' You mustbelieve, I fear, that of the great multitude who had been crowded, starving, and fever-stricken within, he found four hundred poorwretches who had lingered behind, and burnt them all alive. You neednot believe that that is the mouth of the underground passage whichruns all the way from the distant hills, through which the Vicomte deBeziers, after telling Simon de Montfort and the Abbot of Citeauxthat he would sooner be flayed alive than betray the poor folk whohad taken refuge with him, got them all safe away, men, women, andchildren. You need not believe that that great vaulted chamber wasthe 'Chamber of the Inquisition. ' But you must believe that thosetwo ugly rings let into the roof were put there for the torture ofthe cord; and that many a naked wretch has dangled from them ere now, confessing anything and everything that he--or, alas she--was bidden. But these and their like are the usual furniture of every mediaevalcourt of justice; and torture was not altogether abolished in Francetill the latter part of the eighteenth century. You need notbelieve, again, that that circular tower on the opposite side of thetown was really the 'Tower of the Inquisition;' for many a feudallord, besides the Inquisitors, had their dens of cruelty in those oldtimes. You need not even believe--though it is too likely to betrue--that that great fireplace in the little first-floor room servedfor the torture of the scarpines. But you must believe that in thatlittle round den beneath it, only approached by a trap in the floor, two skeletons were found fastened by those chains to that centralpillar, having died and rotted forgotten in that horrid oubliette--how many centuries ago?

'Plusieurs ont gemis la bas, ' said M. Viollet le Duc's foreman of theworks, as he led us out of that evil hole, to look, with eyes andhearts refreshed by the change, at a curious Visigothic tower, inwhich the good bishop Sidonius Apollinaris may have told of the lastBurgundian invasion of his Auvergne to the good king Theodoric of theWest Goths. 

If anyone wishes to learn what the Middle Ages were like, let him goto Carcassone and see. 

And now onward to Narbonne--or rather, to what was once Narbonne; oneof the earliest colonies ever founded by the Romans; then the capitalof the Visigothic kingdom; then of an Arab kingdom: now a dullfortified town--of a filth unspeakable, and not to be forgotten orforgiven. Stay not therein an hour, lest you take fever, or worse:but come out of the gate over the drawbridge, and stroll down thecanal. Look back a moment, though, across the ditch. The whole faceof the wall is a museum of Roman gods, tombs, inscriptions, bas-reliefs: the wreck of Martial's 'Pulcherrima Narbo, ' the old Romancity, which was demolished by Louis XIII. , to build the uglyfortifications of the then new fashion, now antiquated and useless. Take one glance, and walk on, to look at live Nature--far moreinteresting than dead Art. 

Everything fattens in the close damp air of the canal. The greatflat, with its heavy crops, puts you in mind of the richest Englishlowland--save for the total want of old meadows. The weeds on thebank are English in type, only larger and richer--as becomes theclimate. But as you look among them, you see forms utterly new andstrange, whose kinship you cannot fancy, but which remind you thatyou are nearing Italy, and Greece, and Africa. And in the hedges aregreat bay-trees; and inside them, orchards of standard fig and whitemulberry, with its long yearling shoots of glorious green--soon to bestripped bare for the silkworms; and here and there long lines ofcypresses, black against the bright green plain and bright blue sky. No; you are not in Britain. Certainly not; for there is a drake (nota duck) quacking with feeble treble in that cypress, six feet overyour head; and in Britain drakes do not live in trees. You look forthe climbing palmipede, and see nothing: nor will you see; for thequacker is a tiny green tree-frog, who holds on by the suckers at theends of his toes (with which he can climb a pane of glass, like afly), and has learnt the squirrel's art of going invisible, without'the receipt of fern-seed, ' by simply keeping always on the furtherside of the branch. 

But come back; for the air even here is suggestive of cholera andfever. The uncleanliness of these Narbonnois is shameless andshocking; and 'immondices' of every kind lie festering in therainless heat. The sickened botanist retreats, and buys a bottle ofEau Bully--alias aromatic vinegar. 

There, crowding yon hill, with handsome houses and churches, isBeziers--the blood-stained city. Beneath the pavement of thatchurch, it is said, lie heaped together the remains of thousands ofmen, women, and children, slaughtered around their own altars, onthat fatal day, when the Legate Amalric, asked by the knights howthey should tell Catholics from heretics, cried, "Kill them all--theLord will know his own. "

We will pass on. We have had enough of horrors. And, beside, we arelonging to hurry onward; for we are nearing the Mediterranean now. There are small skiffs lying under the dark tower of Agde, anotherplace of blood, fitly built of black lava blocks, the offspring ofthe nether pit. The railway cuts through rolling banks of dark lava;and now, ahead of us, is the conical lava-hill of Cette, and themouth of the Canal du Midi. 

There it is, at last. The long line of heavenly blue; and over it, far away, the white-peaked lateen sails, which we have seen inpictures since our childhood; and there, close to the rail, beyondthe sand-hills, delicate wavelets are breaking for ever on a yellowbeach, each in exactly the same place as the one which fell before. One glance shows us children of the Atlantic, that we are on atideless sea. 

There it is, --the sacred sea. The sea of all civilization, andalmost all history, girdled by the fairest countries in the world;set there that human beings from all its shores might mingle witheach other, and become humane--the sea of Egypt, of Palestine, ofGreece, of Italy, of Byzant, of Marseilles, and this Narbonnaise, 'more Roman than Rome herself, ' to which we owe the greater part ofour own progress; the sea, too, Algeria and Carthage, and Cyrene, andfair lands now desolate, surely not to be desolate for ever;--the seaof civilization. Not only to the Christian, nor to the classicscholar, but to every man to whom the progress of his race frombarbarism toward humanity is dear, should the Mediterranean Sea beone of the most august and precious objects on this globe; and thefirst sight of it should inspire reverence and delight, as of cominghome--home to a rich inheritance in which he has long believed byhearsay, but which he sees at last with his own mortal corporal eyes. 

Exceedingly beautiful is that first view of the sea from Cette, though altogether different in character from the views of theMediterranean which are common in every gallery of pictures. Thereis nothing to remind one of Claude, or Vernet, or Stanfield. Nomountain-ranges far aloft, no cliffs toppling into the water, withconvents and bastides perched on their crags; and seaports, withtheir land-locked harbours, and quaint lighthouses, nestling on thebrink. That scenery begins on the other side of the Rhone mouth, andcontinues, I believe, almost without interruption, to the shores ofSouthern Palestine, one girdle of perpetual beauty. 

But here, the rail runs along a narrow strip of sand, covered withstraggling vines, and tall white iris, between the sea and the greatEtang de Thau, a long narrow salt-lake, beyond which the widelowlands of the Herault slide gently down, There is not a mountain, hardly a hill, visible for miles: but all around is the great sheetof blue glassy water: while the air is as glassy clear as the water, and through it, at seemingly immense distances, the land shows purpleand orange, blue and grey, till the landscape is one great rainbow. White ships slide to and from far-off towns; fishermen lounge on themarshes, drying long lines of net. Everywhere is vastness, freedom, repose gentle and yet not melancholy; because with all, under theburning blue, there is that fresh wholesome heat, which in itself islife, and youth, and joy. 

Beyond, nearer the mouths of the Rhone, there are, so men say, desolate marshes, tenanted by herds of half-wild horses; foul mud-banks, haunted by the pelican and the flamingo, and waders from theAfrican shore; a region half land, half water, where dwell savagefolk, decimated by fever and ague. But short of those Bouches duRhone, the railway turns to the north, toward Montpellier and

'Arli, dove il Rhodano stagna. '

And at Cette ends this little tour from Ocean to Sea, with the wishthat he who next travels that way may have as glorious weather, andas agreeable a companion, as the writer of these lines had in 1864. 

VI. NORTH DEVON {225a}

I. --EXMOOR. 

We were riding up from Lynmouth, on a pair of ragged ponies, ClaudeMellot and I, along the gorge of Watersmeet. And as we went wetalked of many things; and especially of some sporting book which wehad found at the Lyndale Hotel the night before, and which we had notby any means admired. {225b} I do not object to sporting books ingeneral, least of all to one on Exmoor. No place in England is moreworthy of one. There is no place whose beauties and peculiaritiesare more likely to be thrown into strong relief by being looked atwith a sportsman's eye. It is so with all forests and moorlands. The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. Theyare remnants of the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated tothe genius of animal excitement and savage freedom; after all, notthe most ignoble qualities of human nature. Besides, there is nobetter method of giving a living picture of a whole country than bytaking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all otherobservations into harmony with that original key. Even in merelyscientific books this is very possible. Look, for instance, at HughMiller's 'Old Red Sandstone, ' 'The Voyage of the Beagle, ' andProfessor Forbes's work (we had almost said epic poem) on 'Glaciers. 'Even an agricultural writer, if he have a real insight in him--if hehave anything of that secret of the piu nel' uno, 'the power ofdiscovering the infinite in the finite;' of seeing, like a poet, trivial phenomena in their true relation to the whole of the greatuniverse into which they are so cunningly fitted; if he has learnedto look at all things and men, down to the meanest, as living lessonswritten with the finger of God; if, in short, he has any truedramatic power: then he may impart to that apparently muddiest ofsciences a poetic or a humorous tone, and give the lie toMephistopheles when he dissuades Faust from farming as an occupationtoo mean and filthy for a man of genius. The poetry of agricultureremains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the comedy of it also;though its farce-tragedy has been too often extensively enacted inpractice--unconsciously to the players. As for the old 'pastoral'school, it only flourished before agriculture really existed--thatis, before sound science, hard labour, and economy were necessary--and has been for the last two hundred years simply a dream. Nevertheless, as signs of what may be done even now by a genial manwith so stubborn a subject as 'turnips, barley, clover, wheat, ' it isworth while to look at old Arthur Young's books, both travels andtreatises; and also at certain very spirited 'Chronicles of a ClayFarm, ' by Talpa, which teem with humour and wisdom. 

In sporting literature--a tenth muse, exclusively indigenous toEngland--the same observation holds good tenfold. Some of our mostperfect topographical sketches have been the work of sportsmen. OldIzaak Walton, and his friend Cotton, of Dovedale, whose names willlast as long as their rivers, have been followed by a long train ofworthy pupils. White's 'History of Selborne;' Sir Humphry Davy's'Salmonia;' 'The Wild Sports of the West;' Mr. St. John's charminglittle works on Highland Shooting; and, above all, ChristopherNorth's 'Recreations'--delightful book! to be read and re-read, thetenth time even as the first--an inexhaustible fairy well, springingout of the granite rock of the sturdy Scotch heart, through thetender green turf of a genial boyish old age. Sporting books, whenthey are not filled--as they need never be--with low slang, and uglysketches of ugly characters--who hang on to the skirts of thesporting world, as they would to the skirts of any other world, indefault of the sporting one--form an integral and significant, and, it may be, an honourable and useful part, of the English literatureof this day; and, therefore, all shallowness, vulgarity, stupidity, or bookmaking in that class, must be as severely attacked as innovels and poems. We English owe too much to our field sports toallow people to talk nonsense about them. 

Claude smiled at some such words of mine that day. 'You talk oftenof the poetry of sport. I can see nothing in it but animalexcitement, and a certain quantity, I suppose, of that animal cunningwhich the Red Indian possesses in common with the wolf and the cat, and any other beast of prey. As a fact, the majority of sportsmenare of the most unpoetical type of manhood. '

'More unpoetical than the average man of business, or man of law, Claude? Or even than the average preacher? I believe, on thecontrary, that for most of them it is sport which at once keeps aliveand satisfies what you would call their aesthetic faculties, and so--smile if you will--helps to make them purer, simpler, more genialmen. '

'Little enough of aesthetic appears either in their conversation ortheir writing. '

'Esau is a dumb soul, especially here in England; but he has as deepa heart in him as Jacob, nevertheless, and as tender. Do you fancythat the gentleman over whose book we were grumbling last night, attached no more to his own simple words than you do? His account ofa stag's run looks bald enough to you: but to him (unless Dianastruck him blind for intruding on her privacy) what a whole poem ofmemories there must be in those few words, --"Turned down * * Waterfor a mile, and crossed the forest to Watersmeet, where he was runinto after a gallant race. "'

'A whole poem?'

'Why not? How can there be less, if he had eyes to see?'

'Does he fancy that it is an account of a run to tell us that "Foundat * * * * cover, held away at a slapping pace for * * * * Barn, thenturned down the * * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest; madefor * * * Hill, but being headed, went by ** ** woods to D * * *where he was run into after a gallant race of * * * * hours and * * **miles"? It is nearly as dull as a history book!'

'Nay, I never rode with those staghounds: and yet I can fill up hisoutline for him, wherever the stag was roused. Do you think that henever marked how the panting cavalcade rose and fell on the hugemile-long waves of that vast heather sea; how one long brown hillafter another sunk down, greyer and greyer, behind them, and one longgrey hill after another swelled up browner and browner before them;and how the sandstone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as thegreat horses, like Homer's of old, "devoured up the plain;" and howthey struggled down the hill-side, through bushes and rocks, andbroad slipping rattling sheets of screes, and saw beneath them stagand pack galloping down the shallow glittering river-bed, throwing upthe shingle, striking out the water in long glistening sheets; andhow they too swept after them, down the flat valley, rounding cragand headland, which opened one after another in interminable vista, along the narrow strip of sand and rushes, speckled with stunted, moss-bearded, heather-bedded hawthorns, between the great grimlifeless mountain walls? Did he feel no pleasant creeping of theflesh that day at the sound of his own horse-hoofs, as they sweptthrough the long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of awoman's tresses, and then rang down on the spongy, black, reverberating soil, chipping the honey-laden fragrant heatherblossoms, and tossing them out in a rosy shower? Or, if that werereally too slight a thing for the observation of an averagesportsman, surely he must recollect the dying away of the hounds'voices, as the woodland passes engulfed them, whether it were Brendonor at Badger-worthy, or any other place; how they brushed through thenarrow forest paths, where the ashes were already golden, while theoaks still kept their sombre green, and the red leaves and berries ofthe mountain-ash showed bright beneath the dark forest aisles; andhow all of a sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop andconcentrate, thrown back, louder and louder as they rode, off thesame echoing crag; till at a sudden turn of the road there stood thestag beneath them in the stream, his back against the black rock withits green cushions of dripping velvet, knee-deep in the clear amberwater, the hounds around him, some struggling and swimming in thedeep pool, some rolling and tossing and splashing in a mad, half-terrified ring, as he reared into the air on his great haunches, withthe sparkling beads running off his red mane, and dropping on hisknees, plunged his antlers down among them, with blows which wouldhave each brought certain death with it if the yielding water had notbroken the shock. Do you think that he does not remember the death?The huge carcass dragged out of the stream, followed by dripping, panting dogs; the blowing of the mort, and the last wild halloo, whenthe horn-note and the voices rang through the autumn woods, androlled up the smooth flat mountain sides; and Brendon answeredCountisbury, and Countisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, till itswept out of the gorge and died away upon the Severn sea? And then, does he not remember the pause, and the revulsion, and the feeling ofsadness and littleness, almost of shame, as he looked up for thefirst time--one can pardon his not having done so before--and sawwhere he was, and the beauty of the hill-sides, with the lazy autumnclouds crawling about their tops, and the great sheets of screes, glaciers of stone covering acres and acres of the smooth hill-side, eating far into the woods below, bowing down the oak scrubs withtheir weight, and the circular sweeps of down, flecked withinnumerable dark spots of gorse, each of them guarded where they openinto the river chasm by two fortresses of "giant-snouted crags, "--delicate pink and grey sandstone, from which blocks and crumblingboulders have been toppling slowly down for ages, beneath the frostand the whirlwind, and now lie in long downward streams upon theslope, as if the mountain had been weeping tears of stone? And then, as the last notes of the mort had died away, did not there come overhim an awe at the silence of the woods, not broken, but deepened, bythe unvarying monotone of the roaring stream beneath, which flashedand glittered, half-hidden in the dark chasm, in clear brown poolsreflecting every leaf and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam, ever changing, and yet for ever the fleeting on past the poor deadreeking stag and the silent hounds lying about on the moss-embroidered stones, their lolling tongues showing like bright crimsonsparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the green sombre shades;while the startled water-ousel, with his white breast, flitted a fewyards and stopped to stare from a rock's point at the strangeintruders; and a single stock-dove, out of the bosom of the wood, began calling sadly and softly, with a dreamy peaceful moan? Did henot see and hear all this, for surely it was there to see and hear?'

'Not he. The eye only sees that which it brings within the power ofseeing; and all I shall say of him is, that a certain apparition inwhite leathers was at one period of its appearance dimly conscious ofequestrian motion towards a certain brown two-horned phenomenon, andother spotted phenomena, at which he had been taught by habit to makethe articulate noises "stag" and "hounds, " among certain grey, andgreen, and brown phenomena, at which the same habit and the exampleof his fellows had taught him to say, "Rock, and wood, and mountain, "and perhaps the further noises of "Lovely, splendid, majestic. "'

'As usual, sir! You dwellers in Babylon fancy that you have themonopoly of all the intellect, and all the taste, because you earnyour livings by talking about pretty things, and painting prettythings: little do you suspect, shut up together in your littleliterary worlds, and your artistic worlds, how many thousands of usoutside barbarians there are who see as clearly, and enjoy as deeplyas you do: but hold their tongues about their own feelings, simplybecause they have never been driven by emptiness of pocket to lookround for methods of expressing them. And, after all--how much ofnature can you express? You confest yourself yesterday baffled byall the magnificence around you. '

'Yes! to paint it worthily one would require to be a Turner, a CopleyFielding, and a Creswick, all in one. '

'And did you ever remark how such scenes as this gorge of the"Watersmeet" stir up a feeling of shame, almost of peevishness, before the sense of a mysterious meaning which we ought to understandand cannot?'

He smiled. 

'Our torments do by length of time become our elements; and painfulas that sensation is to the earnest artist, he will feel it, I fancy, at last sublime itself into an habitually gentle, reverent, almostmelancholy tone of mind, as of a man bearing the burden of aninfinite and wonderful message which his own frivolity and lazinesshinder him from speaking out. '

'Then it should beget in him, too, something of merciful indulgencetowards the seeming stupidity of those who see, after all, only avery little shallower than he does into the unfathomable depths ofnature. '

'Well, sporting books and sportsmen seem to me, by their very object, not to be worth troubling our heads about. Out of nothing, comesnothing. See, my hands are as soft as any lady's in Belgravia. Icould not, to save my life, lift a hundredweight a foot off theground; while you have been a wild man of the woods, a leaper ofditches, a rower of races, and a wanton destroyer of all animal life:and yet--'

'You would hint politely that you are as open as me to all noble, andchivalrous, and truly manly emotions?'

'What think you?'

'That you are far worthier in such matters than I, friend. But donot forget that it may be your intellect, and your profession--in oneword, Heaven's mercy--which have steered you clear of shoals uponwhich you will find the mass of our class founder. Woe to the classor the nation which has no manly physical training! Look at themanners, the morals, the faces of the young men of the shopkeepingclasses, if you wish to see the effects of utterly neglecting thephysical development of man; {235} of fancying that all the muscularactivity he requires under the sun is to be able to stand behind acounter, or sit on a desk-stool without tumbling off. Be sure, besure, that ever since the days of the Persians of old, effeminacy, ifnot twin-sister of cowardice and dishonesty, has always gone hand inhand with them. To that utter neglect of any exercises which callout fortitude, patience, self-dependence, and daring, I attribute agreat deal of the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity, the wantof a high sense of honour, which is increasing just now among themiddle classes; and from which the navigator, the engineer, theminer, and the sailor are comparatively free. '

'And perhaps, too, that similar want of a high sense of honour, whichseems, from the religious periodicals, to pervade a large proportionof a certain more venerable profession?'

'Seriously, Claude, I believe you are not far wrong. But we aregetting on delicate ground there: however I have always found, thatof whatever profession he may be--to travestie Shakspeare's words, -

"The man that hath not sporting in his soul, Is fit for treason's direst stratagems" -

and so forth. '

'Civil to me!'

'Oh, you have a sporting soul in you, like hundreds of otherEnglishmen who never handled rod or gun; or you would not be steeringfor Exmoor to-day. If a lad be a genius, you may trust him to findsome original means for developing his manly energies, whether inart, agriculture, science, or travels, discovery, and commerce. Butif he be not, as there are a thousand chances to one he will not be, then whatever you teach him, let the two first things be, as theywere with the old Persians, "To speak the truth, and to draw thebow. "'

By this time we had reached the stream, just clearing from the lastnight's showers. A long transparent amber shallow, dimpled withfleeting silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veinedsnow; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in withheathery rocks, and paved with sandstone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing refractions of the eddies, --sight deliciousto the angler. 

I commenced my sport at once, while Claude wandered up the glen tosketch a knoll of crags, on which a half-wild moorland pony, the onlyliving thing in sight, stood staring and snuffing at the intruder, his long mane and tail streaming out wildly against the sky. 

I had fished on for some hour or two; Claude had long sincedisappeared among the hills; I fancied myself miles from any humanbeing, when a voice at my elbow startled me

'A bleak place for fishing this, sir!'

I turned; it was an old grey-whiskered labouring man, with pick andspade on shoulder, who had crept on me unawares beneath the wall ofthe neighbouring deer-cover. Keen honest eyes gleamed out from hisbrown, scarred, weather-beaten face; and as he settled himselfagainst a rock with the deliberate intention of a chat, I commencedby asking after the landlord of those parts, well known and honouredboth by sportsman and by farmer. 

'He was gone to Malta--a warmer place that than Exmoor. '

'What! have you been in Malta?'

Yes, he had been in Malta, and in stranger places yet. He had been asailor: he had seen the landing in Egypt, and heard the Frenchcannon thundering vainly from the sand-hills on the English boats. He had himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the ship's side to thedeath-bed of the brave. He had seen Caraccioli hanging at his ownyard-arm, and heard (so he said, I know not how correctly) LadyHamilton order out the barge herself, and row round the frigate ofthe murdered man, to glut her eyes with her revenge. He had seen, too, the ghastly corpse floating upright, when Nelson and theenchantress met their victim, returned from the sea-depths to stareat them, as Banquo's ghost upon Macbeth. But she was 'a mortal finewoman, was Lady Hamilton, though she was a queer one, and cruel kindto the sailors; and many a man she saved from flogging; and one fromhanging, too; that was a marine that got a-stealing; for Nelson, though he was kind enough, yet it was a word and a blow with him; andquite right he, sir; for there be such rascals on board ship, that ifyou ain't as sharp with them as with wild beastesses, no man's life, nor the ship's neither, would be worth a day's purchase. '

So he, with his simple straightforward notions of right and wrongworth, much maudlin unmerciful indulgence which we hear in thesedays: and yet not going to the bottom of the matter either, as weshall see in the next war. But, rambling on, he told me how he hadcome home, war-worn and crippled, to marry a wife and get tall sons, and lay his bones in his native village; till which time (for deathto the aged poor man is a Sabbath, of which he talks freely, calmly, even joyously) 'he just got his bread, by the squire's kindness, patching and mending at the stone deer-fences. '

I gave him something to buy tobacco, and watched him as he crawledaway, with a sort of stunned surprise. And he had actually seenNelson sit by Lady Hamilton! It was so strange, to have that gayItalian bay, with all its memories, --the orgies of Baiae, and theunburied wrecks of ancient towns, with the smoking crater far above;and the world-famous Nile-mouths and those great old wars, big withthe destinies of the world; and those great old heroes, with theirawful deeds for good and evil, all brought so suddenly and livinglybefore me, up there in the desolate moorland, where the deer, andbirds, and heath, and rushes were even as they had been from thebeginning. Like Wordsworth with his Leech-Gatherer (a poem which I, in spite of laughter, must rank among his very highest), -

'While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The old man's shape, and speech--all troubled me;In my mind's eye I seemed to see him paceAbout the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently. . . . And when he ended, I could have laughed myself to scorn to findIn that decrepit man so firm a mind. '

Just then I heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude toiling down tome over the hill-side. He joined me, footsore and weary, but ingreat excitement; for the first minute or two he could not speak, andat last, -

'Oh, I have seen such a sight!--but I will tell you how it all was. After I left you I met a keeper. He spoke civilly to me--you know myantipathy to game and those who live thereby: but there was a wild, bold, self-helping look about him and his gun alone there in thewaste--and after all he was a man and a brother. Well, we fell intotalk, and fraternized; and at last he offered to take me to aneighbouring hill and show me "sixty head of red-deer all together;"and as he spoke he looked quite proud of his words. "I was lucky, "he said, "to come just then, for the stags had all just got theirheads again. " At which speech I wondered; but was silent, andfollowed him, I, Claude the Cockney, such a walk as I shall nevertake again. Behold these trousers--behold these hands! scratched topieces by crawling on all-fours through the heather. But I sawthem. '

'A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers?'

'Worth Saint Chrysostom's seven years' nakedness on all-fours! Andso I told the fellow, who by some cunning calculations about wind, and sun, and so forth, which he imparted to my uncomprehending ears, brought me suddenly to the top of a little crag, below which, somehundred yards off, the whole herd stood, stags, hinds--but I can'tdescribe them. I have not brought away a scrap of sketch, though wewatched them full ten minutes undiscovered; and then the stare, andthe toss of those antlers, and the rush! That broke the spell withme; for I had been staring stupidly at them, trying in vain to takein the sight, with the strangest new excitement heaving and boilingup in my throat; and at the sound of their hoofs on the turf I woke, and found the keeper staring, not at them, but at me, who, I verilybelieve, had something very like a tear in these excitable eyes ofmine. '

'"Ain't you well, sir?" said he. "You needn't be afeard; it's onlyat the fall of the year the stags is wicked. "

'I don't know what I answered at first; but the fellow understood mewhen I shook his hand frantically, and told him that I should thankhim to the last day of my life, and that I would not have missed itfor a thousand pounds. In part-proof whereof I gave him a sovereignon the spot, which seemed to clear my character in his eyes as muchas the crying at the sight of a herd of deer had mystified it. '

'Claude, well-beloved, ' said I, 'will you ever speak contemptuouslyof sportsmen any more?'

'"Do manus, " I have been vilifying them, as one does most things inthe world, only for want of understanding them. How shall I dopenance? Go and take service with Edwin Landseer, as pupil, colour-grinder, footboy?'

'You will then be very near to a very great poet, ' quoth I, 'and onewhose works will become, as centuries roll on, more and more valuableto art and to science, and, possibly, to something higher thaneither. '

'I begin to guess your meaning, ' answered Claude. 

'So we lounged, and dreamt, and fished, in heathery Highland, ' as Mr. Clough would say, while the summer snipes flitted whistling up theshallow before us, and the soft, south-eastern clouds slid lazilyacross the sun, and the little trout snapped and dimpled at a tinypartridge hackle, with a twist of orange silk, whose elegance forshape and colour reconciled Claude's heart somewhat to my everlastingwhipping of the water. When as last:-

'You seem to have given up catching anything. You have not stirred afish in this last two pools, except that little saucy yellow shrimp, who jumped over your fly, and gave a spiteful slap at it with histail. '

Too true; and what could be the cause? Had that impudent sand-piperfrightened all the fish on his way up? Had an otter paralysed themwith terror for the morning? Or had a stag been down to drink? Wesaw the fresh slot of his broad claws, by the bye, in the mud a fewyards back. 

'We must have seen the stag himself, if he had been here lately, 'said Claude. 

'Mr. Landseer knows too well by this time that that is a nonsequitur. '

'"I am no more a non sequitur than you are, " answered the Cornishmagistrate to the barrister. '

'Fish and deer, friend, see us purblind sons of men somewhat morequickly than we see them, fear sharpening the senses. Perhaps, afterall, the fault is in your staring white-straw hat, a garment whichhas spoilt many a good day's fishing. Ah, no! there is the cause;the hat of a mightier than you--the thunder-spirit himself. Thor isat hand, while the breeze, awe-stricken, falls dead calm before hismarch. Behold, climbing above that eastern ridge, his huge powderedcauliflower-wig, barred with a grey horizontal handkerchief of mist. '

'Oh, profane and uncomely simile!--which will next, I presume, likenthe coming hailstorm to hair-powder shaken from the said wig. '

'To shot rather than to powder. Flee, oh, flee to yonder pile ofcrags, and thank your stars that there is one at hand; for thesemountain tornadoes are at once Tropic in their ferocity and Siberianin their cutting cold. '

Down it came. The brown hills vanished in white sheets of hail, first falling perpendicularly, then slanting and driving furiouslybefore the cold blast which issued from the storm. The rock above usrang with the thunder-peals; and the lightning, which might havefallen miles away, seemed to our dazzled eyes to dive into theglittering river at our feet. We sat silent some half-hour, listening to the voice of One more mighty than ourselves; and it waslong after the uproar had rolled away among the hills, and a steady, sighing sheet of warmer rains, from banks of low grey fog, hadsucceeded the rattling of the hail upon the crisp heather, that Iturned to Claude. 

'And now, since your heart is softened towards these wild, stag-hunting, trout fishing, jovial west-countrymen, consider whether itshould not be softened likewise toward those old outlaw ballads whichI have never yet been able to make you admire. They express feelingsnot yet extinct in the minds of a large portion of the lower orders, as you would know had you lived, like me, all your life in poachingcounties, and on the edges of one forest after another, --feelingswhich must be satisfied, even in the highest development of thecivilization of the future, for they are innate in every thoughtfuland energetic race, --feelings which, though they have often led tocrime, have far oftener delivered from swinish sensuality; thefeelings which drove into the merry greenwood "Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John;" "Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William ofCloudislee;" the feelings which prompted one half of his inspirationto the nameless immortal who wrote the "Nutbrown Maid;"--feelingswhich could not then, and cannot now, be satisfied by the drudgery ofa barbaric agriculture, which, without science, economy, orenterprise, offers no food for the highest instincts of the humanmind, its yearnings after Nature, after freedom, and the nobleexcitement of self-dependent energy. '

Our talk ended: but the rain did not: and we were at last fain toleave our shelter, and let ourselves be blown by the gale (thedifficulty being not to progress forward, but to keep our feet) backto the shed where our ponies were tied, and to canter home toLynmouth, with the rain cutting our faces like showers of pebbles, and our little mountain ponies staggering against the wind, and morethan once, if Londoners will believe me, blown sheer up against thebank by some mad gust, which rushed perpendicularly, not down, butup, the chasms of the glens below. 

II. --THE COAST LINE. 

It is four o'clock on a May morning, and Claude and I are justembarking on board a Clovelly trawling skiff, which, having disposedof her fish at various ports along the Channel, is about to runleisurely homewards with an ebb tide, and a soft north-easterlybreeze. 

So farewell, fair Lynmouth; and ye storm-spirits, send us apropitious day; and dismiss those fantastic clouds which arecoquetting with your thrones, crawling down one hill-side, andwhirling and leaping up another, in wreaths of snow, and dun, andamber, pierced every minute by some long glittering upward arrow fromthe rising sun, which gilds grey crags and downs a thousand feetabove, while underneath the gorges still sleep black and cold inshade. 

There, they have heard us! The cap rises off the 'Summer-househill, ' that eight hundred feet of upright wall, which seems ready totopple down into the nest of be-myrtled cottages at its foot; and aswe sweep out into the deeper water the last mist-flake streams upfrom the Foreland, and vanishes in white threads into the stainlessblue. 

'Look at the colours of that Foreland!' cried Claude. 'The simplemonotone of pearly green, broken only at intervals by blood-redstains, where the turf has slipped and left the fresh rock bare, andall glimmering softly through a delicate blue haze, like the bloom ona half-ripened plum!'

'And look, too, how the grey pebble beach is already dancing andquivering in the mirage which steams up, like the hot breath of alimekiln, from the drying stones. Talk of "glazings and scumblings, "ye artists! and bungle at them as you will, what are they to Nature'sown glazings, deepening every instant there behind us?'

'Mock me not. I have walked up and down here with a humbled andbroken spirit, and had nearly forsworn the audacity of paintinganything beyond a beech stem, or a frond of fern. '

'The little infinite in them would have baffled you as much as theonly somewhat bigger infinite of just the hills on which they grow. '

'Confest: and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth! Farewell to thecharming contrast of civilized English landscape-gardening, with itsvillas, and its exotics, and its evergreens, thus strangely and yetharmoniously confronted with the chaos of the rocks and mountain-streams. Those grounds of Sir William H---'s are a double paradise, the wild Eden of the Past side by side with the cultivated Eden ofthe Future. How its alternations of Art and Savagery at once startleand relieve the sense, as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses ofpiled boulders, and torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern-fringed waterfalls, into "trim walks, and fragrant alleys green; andthe door of a summer-house transports you at a step from Richmond tothe Alps. Happy he who "possesses, " as the world calls it, andhappier still he whose taste could organize, that fairy bower. '

So he, magniloquently, as was his wont; and yet his declamationsalways flowed with such a graceful ease, --a simple, smilingearnestness, --an unpractised melody of voice, that what would havebeen rant from other lips, from his showed only as the healthyenthusiasm of the passionate, all-seeing, all-loving artist. 

'Look yonder, again, ' said he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewnhill-side above us. 'One wonders at that sight, whether the fable ofthe giants be not true after all, --and that "Vale of Rocks, " hangingfive hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and totteringbattlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, whichhang sloping, caught in act to fall, be not some enormous Cyclopeantemple left half-disinterred: or is it a fragment of old Chaos, leftunorganized?--or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, afterthe rest of England had been made, some angel put up a notice for hisfellows, "Dry rubbish shot here"?'

'Not so, unscientific! It is the grandfather of hills, --a fossilbone of some old continent, which stood here ages before England was. And the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as youdo bits of ochre, for his "Continental Sketches, " found in it thematerials for a whole dark ground-tone of coal-measures, and a fewhundred miles of warm high-lights, which we call New Red Sandstone. '

What a sea-wall they are, those Exmoor hills! Sheer upward from thesea a thousand feet rise the downs; and as we slide and staggerlazily along before the dying breeze, through the deep water whichnever leaves the cliff, the eye ranges, almost dizzy, up some fivehundred feet of rock, dappled with every hue; from the intense darkof the tide-line, through the warm green and brown rock-shadows, outof which the horizontal cracks of the strata loom black, and thebreeding gulls show like lingering snow-flakes; up to the middlecliff, where delicate grey fades into pink, pink into red, red intoglowing purple; up to where the purple is streaked with glossy ivywreaths, and black-green yews; up to where all the choir of coloursvanishes abruptly on the mid-hill, to give place to one yellowish-grey sheet of upward down, sweeping aloft smooth and unbroken, exceptby a lonely stone, or knot of clambering sheep, and stopped by onegreat rounded waving line, sharp-cut against the brilliant blue. Thesheep hang like white daisies upon the steep; and a solitary falconrides, a speck in air, yet far below the crest of that tall hill. Now he sinks to the cliff edge, and hangs quivering, supported, likea kite, by the pressure of his breast and long curved wings, againstthe breeze. 

There he hangs, the peregrine--a true 'falcon gentle, ' 'sharp-notched, long-taloned, crooked-winged, ' whose uncles and cousins, ages since, have struck at duck and pheasant, and sat upon the wristsof kings. And now he is full proud of any mouse or cliff-lark; likean old Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans, he lingers round 'thehunting-field of his fathers. ' So all things end. 

'The old order changeth, giving place to the new;And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. '

'Ay, and the day may come, ' said Claude, 'when the brows of that hugeHigh Vere shall be crowned with golden wheat, and every rock-ledge onTrentishoe, like those of Petra and the Rhine, support its garden-bedof artificial soil. '

'And when, ' I answered, 'the shingly sides of that great chasm ofHeadon's Mouth may be clothed with the white mulberry, and the summerlimestone-skiffs shall go back freighted with fabrics which vie withthe finest woof of Italy and Lyons. '

'You believe, then, in the late Mrs. Whitby of Lymington?'

'Seeing is believing, Claude: through laughter, and failures, andthe stupidity of half-barbarous clods, she persevered in her silk-growing, and succeeded; and I should like to put her book into thehands of every squire in Devon, Cornwall, and the South of Ireland. '

'Or require them to pass an examination in it, as one more among themany books which I intend, in my ideal kingdom, all landlords to readand digest, before they are allowed to take possession of theirestates. In the meantime, what is that noble conical hill, which hasincreased my wonder at the infinite variety of beauty which TheSpirit can produce by combinations so simple as a few grey stones anda sheet of turf?'

'The Hangman. '

'An ominous name. What is its history?'

'Some sheep-stealer, they say, clambering over a wall with his bootyslung round his neck, was literally hung by the poor brute'sstruggles, and found days after on the mountain-side, a blackenedcorpse on one side of the wall, with the sheep on the other, and theravens--You may fill up the picture for yourself. '

But, see, as we round the Hangman, what a change of scene--thesquare-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under dark slate-beds, fantastically bent and broken by primeval earthquakes. Woodedcombes, and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and slopetowards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked harbours. There shines among the woods the Castle ofWatermouth, on its lovely little salt-water loch, the safest harbouron the coast; and there is Combe-Martin, mile-long man-stye, whichseven centuries of fruitless silver-mining, and of the right (nowdeservedly lost) of 'sending a talker to the national palaver, ' haveneither cleansed nor civilized. Turn, turn thy head away, dearClaude, lest even at this distance some foul odour taint the summerairs, and complete the misfortune already presaged by that pale, sadface, sickening in the burning calm! For this great sun-roastedfire-brick of the Exmoor range is fairly burning up the breeze, andwe have nothing but the tide to drift us slowly down to Ilfracombe. 

Now we open Rillage, and now Hillsborough, two of the mostpicturesque of headlands; see how their round foreheads of glisteninggrey shale sink down into two dark, jagged moles, running far out toseaward, and tapering off, each into a long black horizontal line, vanishing at last beneath its lace-fringe of restless hissing foam. How grand the contrast of the lightness of those sea-lines, with thesolid mass which rests upon them! Look, too, at the glaring lightsand Tartarean shadows of those chasms and caves, which the tide neverleaves, or the foot of man explores; and listen how, at every rush ofthe long ground-swell, mysterious mutterings, solemn sighs, suddenthunders, as of a pent-up earthquake, boom out of them across theglassy swell. Look at those blasts of delicate vapour that shoot upfrom hidden rifts, and hang a moment, and vanish; and those greencolumns of wave which rush mast-high up the perpendicular walls, andthen fall back and outward in a waterfall of foam, lacing the blackrocks with a thousand snowy streams. There they fall, and leap, andfall again. And so they did yesterday, and the day before; and sothey did centuries ago, when the Danes swept past them, battleworn, and sad of heart for the loss of the magic raven flag, from the fightat Appledore, to sit down and starve on 'the island of Bradanrelice, which men call Flat Holms. ' Ay, and even so they leapt and fell, before a sail gleamed on the Severn sea, when the shark and theichthyosaur paddled beneath the shade of tropic forests--now scantyturf and golden gorse. And so they will leap and fall on, on, through the centuries and the ages. O dim abyss of Time, into whichwe peer shuddering, what will be the end of thee, and of thisceaseless coil and moan of waters? It is true, that when thou shaltbe no more, then, too, 'there shall be no more sea;' and this oceanbed, this great grave of fertility, into which all earth's wastedriches stream, day and night, from hill and town, shall rise andbecome fruitful soil, corn-field and meadow-land; and earth shallteem as thick with living men as bean-fields with the summer bees?What a consummation! At least there is One greater than sea, ortime: and the Judge of all the earth will do right. 

But there is Ilfracombe, with its rock-walled harbour, its littlewood of masts within, its white terraces, rambling up the hills, andits capstone sea-walk, the finest 'marine parade, ' as Cockneydomterms it, in all England, except that splendid Hoe at Plymouth, 'LamGoemagot, ' Gog-magog's leap, as the old Britains called it, overwhich Corineus threw that mighty giant. And there is the littleisolated rock-chapel, where seven hundred years ago, our west-countryforefathers used to go to pray St. Nicholas for deliverance fromshipwreck, --a method lovingly regretted by some, as a 'pious idea ofthe Ages of faith. ' We, however, shall prefer the method oflighthouses and the worthy Trinity Board, as actually more godly and'faithful, ' as well as more useful; and, probably, so do the sailorsthemselves. 

But Claude is by this time nearly sick of the roasting calm, and therolling ground-swell, and the smell of fish, and is somewhat sleepyalso, between early rising and incoherent sermons; wherefore, if hetakes good advice, he will stay and recruit himself at Ilfracombe, before he proceeds further with his self-elected cicerone on thegrand tour of North Devon. Believe me, Claude, you will not stirfrom the place for a month at least. For be sure, if you are sea-sick, or heart-sick, or pocket-sick either, there is no pleasanter orcheaper place of cure (to indulge in a puff of a species now wellnigh obsolete, the puff honest and true) than this same Ilfracombe, with its quiet nature and its quiet luxury, its rock fairyland andits sea-walks, its downs and combes, its kind people, and, ifpossible, its still kinder climate, which combines the soft warmth ofSouth Devon with the bracing freshness of the Welsh mountains; wherewinter has slipped out of the list of the seasons, and mother Earthmakes up for her summer's luxury by fasting, 'not in sackcloth andashes, but in new silk and old sack;' and instead of standing threemonths chin-deep in ice, and christening great snowballs her 'friendsand family, ' as St. Francis of Assisi did of old, knows no severerasceticism than tepid shower-baths, and a parasol of soft grey mist. 

III. --MORTE. 

I had been wandering over the centre of Exmoor, killing trout as Iwent, through a country which owes its civilization and tillage tothe spirit of one man, who has found stag-preserving by no meansincompatible with large agricultural improvements; among a populationwho still evince an unpleasant partiality for cutting and carryingfarmers' crops by night, without leave or licence, and forhousebreaking after the true classic method of Athens, by fairlydigging holes through the house walls; a little nook of primevalsavagery fast reorganizing itself under the influences of thesebetter days. I had been on Dartmoor, too; but of that noble moorlandrange so much has been said and sung of late, that I really am afraidit is becoming somewhat cockney and trite. Far and wide I hadwandered, rod in hand, becoming a boy again in the land of myboyhood, till, once more at Ilfracombe, opposite me sat ClaudeMellot, just beginning to bloom again into cheerfulness. 

We were on the point of starting for Morte, and so round to SauntonCourt, and the sands beyond it; where a Clovelly trawler, which wehad chartered for the occasion, had promised to send a boat on shoreand take us off, provided the wind lay off the land. 

But, indeed, the sea was calm as glass, the sky cloudless azure; andthe doubt was not whether we should be able to get on board throughthe surf, but whether, having got on board, we should not lie tillnightfall, as idle

'As a painted ship, Upon a painted ocean. '

And now behold us on our way up lovely combes, with their greencopses, ridges of rock, golden furze, fruit-laden orchards, andslopes of emerald pasture, pitched as steep as house-roofs, where thered longhorns are feeding, with their tails a yard above their heads;and under us, seen in bird's-eye view, the ground-plans of the littlesnug farms and homesteads of the Damnonii, 'dwellers in the valley, 'as we West-countrymen were called of old. Now we are leaving themfar below us; the blue hazy sea is showing far above the serratedridge of the Tors, and their huge bank of sunny green: and before usis a desolate table-land of rushy pastures and mouldering banks, festooned with the delicate network of the little ivy-leavedcampanula, loveliest of British wild-flowers, fit with its hair-likestems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the temples of Titania. Alas! we have passed out of the world into limbum patrum, and theregion of ineffectuality and incompleteness. The only cultivatorshere, and through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, are therook and mole: and yet the land is rich enough--the fat deepcrumbling of the shale and ironstone returning year by year into themud, from whence it hardened ages since. There are scores of farmsof far worse land in mid-England, under 'a four-course shift, 'yielding their load of wheat an acre. When will that land do asmuch? When will the spirit of Smith of Deanston and Grey of Dilstondescend on North Devon? When will some true captain of industry, andTheseus of the nineteenth century, like the late Mr. Warnes ofTrimmingham, teach the people here to annihilate poor-rates bygrowing flax upon some of the finest flax land, and in the finestflax climate, that we have in England? The shrewd Cornishmen ofLaunceston and Bodmin have awakened long ago to 'the new gospel offertility. ' When will North Devon awake?

'When landlords and farmers, ' said Claude, 'at last acknowledge theirdivine vocation, and feel it a noble and heaven-ordained duty toproduce food for the people of England; when they learn that to growrushes where they might grow corn, ay, to grow four quarters of wheatwhere they might grow five, is to sin against God's blessings andagainst the English nation. No wonder that sluggards like these cryout for protection--that those who cannot take care of the land feelthat they themselves need artificial care. '

'We will not talk politics, Claude. Our modern expediency mongershave made them pro tempore an extinct science. "Let the dead burytheir dead. " The social questions are now-a-days becoming far moreimportant than the mere House of Commons ones. '

'There does seem here and there, ' he said, 'some sign of improvement. I see the paring plough at work on one field and another. '

'Swiftly goes the age, and slowly crawls improvement. The greaterpart of that land will be only broken up to be exhausted by corn-cropafter corn-crop, till it can bear no more, and the very manure whichis drawn home from it in the shape of a few turnips will be wasted byevery rain of heaven, and the straw probably used to mend bad placesin the road with; while the land returns to twenty years of worsesterility than ever; on the ground that -

'"Veather did zo, and gramfer did zo, and why shouldn't Jan do thezame?"' * * * *

'But here is Morte below us. "The little grey church on the windyshore, " which once belonged to William de Tracy, one of your friendThomas a Becket's murderers. If you wish to vent your wrath againstthose who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, there is a tomb in thechurch which bears De Tracy's name; over which rival Dryasdustscontend fiercely with paper-arrows: the one party asserting that hebecame a priest, and died here in the wilderness; the others that thetomb is of later date, that he fled hence to Italy, under favour of acertain easy-going Bishop of Exeter, and died penitent and dulyshriven, according to the attestations of a certain or uncertainBishop of Cosenza. '

'Peace be with him and with the Bishop! The flight to Italy seems avery needless precaution to a man who owned this corner of the world. A bailiff would have had even less chance here then than in Connemaraa hundred years ago. '

'He certainly would have fed the crabs and rock-cod in two hoursafter his arrival. Nevertheless, I believe the Cosenza story is thesafer one. '

'What a chaos of rock-ridges!--Old starved mother Earth's bare-wornribs and joints peeping out through every field and down; and onthree sides of us, the sullen thunder of the unseen surge. What aplace for some "gloom-pampered man" to sit and misanthropize!'

'"Morte, " says the Devonshire proverb, "is the place on earth whichheaven made last, and the devil will take first. "'

'All the fitter for a misanthrope. But where are the trees? I havenot seen one for the last four miles. '

'Nor will you for a few miles more. Whatever will grow here (andmost things will) they will not, except, at least, hereafter the sea-pine of the Biscay shore. You would know why, if you had ever felt asouth-westerly gale here, when the foam-flakes are flying milesinland, and you are fain to cling breathless to bank and bush, if youwant to get one look at those black fields of shark's-tooth tide-rocks, champing and churning the great green rollers into snow. Wildfolk are these here, gatherers of shell-fish and laver, and mercilessto wrecked vessels, which they consider as their own by immemorialusage, or rather right divine. Significant, how an agriculturalpeople is generally as cruel to wrecked seamen, as a fishing one ismerciful. I could tell you twenty stories of the baysmen down thereto the westward risking themselves like very heroes to savestrangers' lives, and beating off the labouring folk who swarmed downfor plunder from the inland hills. '

'Knowledge, you see, breeds sympathy and love. But what a mercilesscoast!'

'Hardly a winter passes without a wreck or two. You see there lyingabout the timbers of more than one tall ship. You see, too, thatblack rock a-wash far out at sea, apparently a submarine outlier ofthe north horn of this wide rock-amphitheatre below us. That is theMorte stone, the "Death-rock, " as the Normans christened it of old;and it does not belie its name even now. See how, even in this calm, it hurls up its column of spray at every wave; and then conceivebeing entrapped between it and the cliffs, on some blinding, whirlingwinter's night, when the land is shrouded thick in clouds, and theroar of the breakers hardly precedes by a minute the crash of yourbows against the rocks. '

'I never think, on principle, of things so painful, and yet soirrelievable. Yet why does not your much-admired Trinity House erecta light there?'

'So ask the sailors; for it is indeed one of the gateway-jambs of theChannel, and the deep water and the line of coast tempt all craft topass as close to it as possible. '

'Look at that sheet of yellow sand below us now, banked to the inlandwith sand-hills and sunny downs, and ending abruptly at the foot ofthat sombre wall of slate-hill, which runs out like a huge pier intothe sea some two miles off. '

'That is Woollacombe: but here on our right is a sight worth seeing. Every gully and creek there among the rocks is yellow, but not withsand. Those are shells; the sweepings of the ocean bed for milesaround, piled there, millions upon millions, yards deep, in everystage of destruction. There they lie grinding to dust; and everygale brings in fresh myriads from the inexhaustible sea-world, as ifDeath could be never tired of devouring, or God of making. The braingrows dizzy and tired, as one's feet crunch over the endless varietyof their forms. '

'And then one recollects that every one of them has been a livingthing--a whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, anddeath. Waste it cannot be, or cruelty on the part of the Maker: butwhy this infinite development of life, apparently only to furnish outof it now and then a cartload of shell-sand to these lazy farmers?But after all, there is not so much life in all those shells puttogether as in one little child: and it may die the hour that it isborn! What we call life is but an appearance and a becoming; thetrue life of existence belongs only to spirits. And whether or notwe, or the sea-shell there, are at any given moment helping to makeup part of some pretty little pattern in this great kaleidoscopecalled the material universe, yet, in the spirit all live to Him, andshall do so for ever. '

And thereon he rambled off into a long lecture on 'species-spirits, 'and 'individual-spirits, ' and 'personal spirits, ' doubtless mostimportant. But I, what between the sun, the luncheon, and themetaphysic, sank into soft slumbers, from which I was only awakenedby the carriage stopping, according to our order, on the top ofSaunton hill. 

We left the fly, and wandered down towards the old gabled court, nestling amid huge walnuts in its southward glen; while before usspread a panorama, half sea, half land, than which, perhaps, ourEngland owns few lovelier. 

At our feet was a sea of sand--for the half-mile to the right smoothas a floor, bounded by a broad band of curling waves, which creptslowly shorewards with the advancing tide. Right underneath us thesand was drifted for miles into fantastic hills, which quivered inthe heat, the glaring yellow of its lights chequered by delicate pinkshadows and sheets of grey-green bent. To the left were richalluvial marshes, covered with red cattle sleeping in the sun, andlaced with creeks and flowery dykes; and here and there a scarletline, which gladdened Claude's eye as being a 'bit of positive colourin the foreground, ' and mine, because they were draining tiles. Beyond again, two broad tide-rivers, spotted with white and red-brownsails, gleamed like avenues of silver, past knots of gay dwellings, and tall lighthouses, and church-towers, and wandered each on its ownroad, till they vanished among the wooded hills. On the easternhorizon the dark range of Exmoor sank gradually into lower and morebroken ridges, which rolled away, woodland beyond woodland, till alloutlines were lost in purple haze; while, far beyond, the granitepeaks of Dartmoor hung like a delicate blue cloud, and enticed theeye away into infinity. From hence, as our eyes swept round thehorizon, the broken hills above the river's mouth gradually rose intothe table-land of the 'barren coal-measures' some ten miles off, --along straight wall of cliffs which hounded the broad bay, buried indeepest shadow, except where the opening of some glen revealed fardepths of sunlit wood. A faint perpendicular line of white houses, midway along the range, marked our destination; and far to thewestward, the land ended sheer and suddenly at the cliffs ofHartland, the 'Promontory of Hercules, ' as the old Romans called it, to reappear some ten miles out in the Atlantic, in the blue flat-topped island of Lundy, so exactly similar in height and form to theopposite cape, that it required no scientific imagination to supplythe vast gap which the primeval currents had sawn out. There it alllay beneath us like a map; its thousand hues toned down harmoniouslyinto each other by the summer haze, and 'the eye was not filled withseeing, ' nor the spirit with the intoxicating sight of infinitelyvarious life and form in perfectest repose. 

I was the first to break the silence. 

'Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little?'

No answer. 

'Not even rhapsodize? call it "lovely, exquisite, grand, majestic"?There are plenty of such words in worldlings' mouths--not a Cockneybut would burst out with some enthusiastic commonplace at such asight--surely one or other of them must be appropriate. '

'Silence, profane! and take me away from this. Let us go down, andhide our stupidities among those sand-hills, and so forget the whole. What use standing here to be maddened by this tantalizing earth-spirit, who shows us such glorious things, and will not tell us whatthey mean?'

So down we went upon the burrows, among the sands, which hid from usevery object but their own chaotic curves and mounds. Above, ahundred skylarks made the air ring with carollings; strange and gaudyplants flecked the waste round us; and insects without number whirredover our heads, or hung poised with their wings outspread on the tallstalks of marram grass. All at once a cloud hid the sun, and asummer whirlwind, presage of the thunderstorm, swept past us, carrying up with it a column of dry sand, and rattling the dry bentsover our heads. 

'What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds!' said Claude. 'Ican conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter's sky instead ofthis burning azure, one of the most desolate places on the earth. '

'Ay, desolate enough, ' I said, as we walked down beyond the tide-mark, over the vast fields of ribbed and splashy sands, 'when thedead shells are rolling and crawling up the beach in wreaths beforethe gale, with a ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the "Valley ofVision, " and when not a flower shows on that sandcliff, which is nowone broad bed of yellow, scarlet, and azure. '

'That is the first spot in England, ' said Claude, 'except, of course, "the meads of golden king-cups, " where I have seen wild flowers givea tone to the colouring of the whole landscape, as they are said todo in the prairies of Texas. And look how flowers and cliff are bothglowing in a warm green haze, like that of Cuyp's wonderful sandcliffpicture in the Dulwich Gallery, --wonderful, as I think, and true, letsome critics revile it as much as they will. '

'Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here; its curiousresemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years ago, a livinginterest in landscape-painting. But look there; even in these grandsummer days there is a sight before us sad enough. There are theribs of some ill-fated ship, a man-of-war too, as the story goes, standing like black fangs, half-buried in the sand. And off what arethose two ravens rising, stirring up with their obscene wings asickly, putrescent odour? A corpse?'

No, it was not a corpse; but the token of many corpses. A fragmentof some ship; its gay green paint and half-effaced gildingcontrasting mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle-shells, which clustered on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, and tornand scattered by the greedy beaks of the ravens. 

In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, monthsago, to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down? Howlong had that scrap of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream, from Newfoundland into the Mid-Atlantic, and hitherward on itshomeless voyage toward the Spitzbergen shore? And who were all thoseliving men who "went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls ofheroes, " to give no sign until the sea shall render up her dead? Andevery one of them had a father and mother--a wife, perhaps, andchildren, waiting for him--at least a whole human life, childhood, boyhood, manhood, in him. All those years of toil and education, toget him so far on his life-voyage; and here is the end thereof!'

'Say rather, the beginning thereof, ' Claude answered, stepping intothe boat. 'This wreck is but a torn scrap of the chrysalis-cocoon;we may meet the butterflies themselves hereafter. '

* * * * *

And now we are on board; and alas! some time before the breeze willbe so. Take care of that huge boom, landsman Claude, swaying andsweeping backwards and forwards across the deck, unless you wish tobe knocked overboard. Take care, too, of that loose rope's end, unless you wish to have your eyes cut out. Take my advice, lie downhere across the deck, as others are doing. Cover yourself withgreat-coats, like an Irishman, to keep yourself cool, and let usmeditate little on this strange thing, and strange place, which holdsus now. 

Look at those spars, how they creak and groan with every heave of thelong glassy swell. How those sails flap, and thunder, and rage, withuseless outcries and struggles--only because they are idle. Let thewind take them, and they will be steady, silent in an instant--theirdeafening dissonant grumbling exchanged for the soft victorious songof the breeze through the rigging, musical, self-contented, as ofbird on bough. So it is through life; there is no true rest butlabour. "No true misery, " as Carlyle says, "but in that of not beingable to work. " Some may call it a pretty conceit. I call it a greatworldwide law, which reaches from earth to heaven. Whatever thePreacher may have thought it in a moment of despondency, what is itbut a blessing that "sun, and wind, and rivers, and ocean, " as hesays, and "all things, are full of labour--man cannot utter it. "This sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not sweep in andout here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay, more, in thevery water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls may havehunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath glaringwhite-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and cocoa-nuts, and shaddock groves. For on those white sands there to theleft, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, andtropic seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with theirfragile shells of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously infleets from the far west out of the passing Gulf Stream, where theyhave been sailing out their little life, never touching shore orground, but buoyed each by his cluster of air-bubbles, pumped in atwill under the skin of his tiny foot, by some cunning machinery ofvalves--small creatures truly, but very wonderful to men who havelearned to reverence not merely the size of things, but the wisdom oftheir idea, and raising strange longings and dreams about thatsubmarine ocean-world which stretches, teeming with richer life thanthis terrestrial one, away, away there westward, down the path of thesun, toward the future centre of the world's destiny. 

Wonderful ocean-world! three-fifths of our planet! Can it be truethat no rational beings are denizens there? Science is severelysilent--having as yet seen no mermaids: our captain there forward isnot silent--if he has not seen them, plenty of his friends have. Theyoung man here has been just telling me that it was only last monthone followed a West Indiaman right across the Atlantic. "For, " sayshe, "there must be mermaids, and such like. Do you think Heavenwould have made all that water there only for the herrings andmackerel?"

I do not know, Tom: but I, too, suspect not; and I do know thathonest men's guesses are sometimes found by science to have beenprophecies, and that there is no smoke without fire, and fewuniversal legends without their nucleus of fact. After all, thosesea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a hurry, at themere despotic fiat of stern old Dame Analysis, divine and reverend asshe is. Why, like Keats's Lamia, 'Must all charms flee, At the mere touch of cold Philosophy, '

who will not even condescend to be awe-struck at the new wonderswhich she herself reveals daily? Perhaps, too, according to the Dukeof Wellington's great dictum, that each man must be the best judge inhis own profession, sailors may know best whether mermaids exist ornot. Besides, was it not here on Croyde Sands abreast of us, thisvery last summer, that a maiden--by which beautiful old word West-country people still call young girls--was followed up the shore by amermaid who issued from the breakers, green-haired, golden-combed, and all; and, fleeing home, took to her bed and died, poor thing, ofsheer terror in the course of a few days, persisting in her accountof the monster? True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown LundyIsland seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring-tides and aschool of fish. Be it so. Lundy and its seals are wonderful enoughin all reason to thinking men, as it looms up there out of theAtlantic, with its two great square headlands, not twenty miles fromus, in the white summer haze. We will go there some day, and pick upa wild tale or two about it. 

But, lo! a black line creeps up the western horizon. Tom, gesticulating, swears that he sees 'a billow break. ' True: therethey come; the great white horses, that 'champ and chafe, and toss inthe spray. ' That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heelsover, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the weight of herheavy trawl. Five minutes more, and the breeze will be down upon us. The young men whistle openly to woo it; the old father thinks such asuperstition somewhat beneath both his years and his religion, butcannot help pursing up his lips into a sly 'whe-eugh' when he has gotwell forward out of sight. 

* * * *

Five long minutes; there is a breath of air; a soft distant murmur;the white horses curve their necks, and dive and vanish; and riseagain like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Fatherand sons are struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken squaresailforward; while we haul away upon the main-sheet. 

When will it come? It is dying back--sliding past us. 'Hopedeferred maketh the heart sick. ' No, louder and nearer swells 'thevoice of many waters, ' 'the countless laugh of ocean, ' like the mirthof ten thousand girls, before us, behind us, round us; and the oilyswell darkens into crisp velvet-green, till the air strikes us, andheels us over; and leaping, plunging, thrashing our bows into theseas, we spring away close-hauled upon the ever-freshening breeze, while Claude is holding on by ropes and bulwarks, and some, whosesea-legs have not yet forgot their craft, are swinging like apendulum as they pace the deck, enjoying, as the Norse vikings wouldhave called it, 'the gallop of the flying sea-horse, and the shiverof her tawny wings. '

Exquisite motion! more maddening than the smooth floating stride ofthe race-horse, or the crash of the thorn-hedges before the stalwarthunter, or the swaying of the fir-boughs in the gale, when we used toclimb as schoolboys after the lofty hawk's nest; but not so maddeningas the new motion of our age--the rush of the express-train, when thelive iron pants and leaps and roars through the long chalk cutting;and white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky and vanish; androcks, and grass, and bushes, fleet by in dim blended lines; and thelong hedges revolve like the spokes of a gigantic wheel; and farbelow, meadows, and streams, and homesteads, with all their lazy old-world life, open for an instant, and then flee away; while awe-struck, silent, choked with the mingled sense of pride andhelplessness, we are swept on by that great pulse of England's life-blood, rushing down her iron veins; and dimly out of the future loomsthe fulfilment of our primaeval mission, to conquer and subdue theearth, and space too, and time, and all things, --even, hardest of alltasks, yourselves, my cunning brothers ever learning some freshlesson, except that hardest one of all, that it is the Spirit of Godwhich giveth you understanding. 

Yes, great railroads, and great railroad age, who would exchange you, with all your sins, for any other time? For swiftly as rushesmatter, more swiftly rushes mind; more swiftly still rushes theheavenly dawn up the eastern sky. 'The night is far spent, the dayis at hand. ' 'Blessed is that servant whom his Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching!'

But come, my poor Claude, I see you are too sick for such deepsubjects; so let us while away the time by picking the brains of thistall handsome boy at the helm, who is humming a love-song to himselfsotto voce, lest it should be overheard by the grey-headed father, who is forward, poring over his Wesleyan hymn-book. He will havesomething to tell you; he has a soul in him looking out of those wilddark eyes, and delicate aquiline features of his. He is no spade-drudge or bullet-headed Saxon clod: he has in his veins the blood ofDanish rovers and passionate southern Milesians, who came hither fromTeffrobani, the Isle of Summer, as the old Fenic myths inform us. Come and chat with him. You dare not stir? Perhaps you are in theright. I shall go and fraternize, and bring you reports. 

* * * *

He has been, at all events, 'up the Straits' as the Mediterraneanvoyage is called here, and seen 'Palermy' and the Sicilians. But, for his imagination, what seems to have struck it most was that itwas a 'fine place for Jack, for a man could get mools there for amatter of three-halfpence a-day. '

'And was that all you got out of him?' asked Claude, sickly andsulkily. 

'Oh, you must not forget the halo of glory and excitement which in asailor's eyes surrounds the delights of horseback. But he gave mebesides a long glowing account of the catechism which they had there, three-quarters of a mile long. '

'Pope Pius's catechism, I suppose?'

So thought I, at first; but it appeared that all the dead of the citywere arranged therein, dried and dressed out in their finest clothes, 'every sect and age, ' as Tom said, 'by itself; as natural as life!'We may hence opine that he means some catacombs or other. 

Poor Claude could not even get up a smile: but his sorrows werecoming swiftly to an end. The rock clefts grew sharper and sharperbefore us. The soft masses of the lofty bank of wooded cliff rosehigher and higher. The white houses of Clovelly, piled stair abovestair up the rocks, gleamed more and more brightly out of the greenround bosoms of the forest. As we shut in headland after headland, one tall conical rock after another darkened with its black pyramidthe bright orb of the setting sun. Soon we began to hear the softmurmur of the snowy surf line; then the merry voices of the childrenalong the shore; and running straight for the cliff-foot, we shippedinto the little pier, from whence the red-sailed herring-boats wereswarming forth like bees out of a hive, full of gay handsome faces, and all the busy blue-jacketed life of seaport towns, to theirnight's fishing in the bay. 

IV. --CLOVELLY. 

A couple of days had passed, and I was crawling up the paved stairsinaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly denominated'Clovelly-street, ' a landing-net full of shells in one hand, and acouple of mackerel lines in the other; behind me a sheer descent, roof below roof; at an angle of 45 degrees, to the pier and bay, 200feet below, and in front, another hundred feet above, a greenamphitheatre of oak, and ash, and larch, shutting out all but anarrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist wascrawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense darkrainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon thewhite cottages, with their grey steaming roofs, and bright greenrailings, packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; andon the tall tree-fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps ofcourt-yard, calling the rich faint odour out of the verbenas andjessamines, and, alas! out of the herring-heads and tails also, asthey lay in the rivulet; and lighting up the wings of the gorgeousbutterflies, almost unknown in our colder eastern climate, whichfluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up towoodland, and seemed to form the connecting link between thatswarming hive of human industry and the deep wild woods in which itwas embosomed. So up I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my owncatching, --excellent fish, despised by deluded Cockneys, who fancythat because its head is large and prickly, therefore its flesh isnot as firm, and sweet, and white, as that of any cod who evergobbled shell-fish, --when down the stair front of me, greasy as icefrom the daily shower, came slipping and staggering, my friendClaude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio. 

'Where have you been wandering to-day?' I asked. 'Have you yet beenas far as the park, which, as I told you, would supply such endlesssubjects for your pencil?'

'Not I. I have been roaming up and down this same "New Road" aboveus; and find there materials for a good week's more work, if I couldafford it. Indeed, it was only to-day, for the first time, that Igot as far as the lodge at the end of it, and then was glad enough toturn back shuddering at the first glimpse of the flat, drearymoorland beyond, --as Adam may have turned back into Eden after a peepout of the gates of Paradise. '

He should have taken courage and gone a half-mile further, --to thefurze-grown ruins of a great Roman camp, which gives its name to theplace, 'Clovelly, '--Vallum Clausum, or Vallis Clausa, as antiquariansderive it; perhaps, 'the hidden camp, ' or glen, --perhaps somethingelse. Who cares? The old Romans were there, at least 10, 000 strong:and some sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough toperch his summer-house out on a conical point of the Hartland Cliffs, now tumbling into the sea, tesselated pavement, baths and all. Andstrange work, no doubt, went on in that lonely nook, looking out overthe Atlantic swell, --nights and days fit for Petronius's own pen, among a seraglio of dark Celtic beauties. Perhaps it could not beotherwise. An ugly state of things--as heathen conquests always musthave been; yet even in it there was a use and meaning. But they arepast like a dream, those 10, 000 stalwart men, who looked far and wideover the Damnonian moors from a station which would be, even in thesedays, a first-rate military position. Gone, too, are the old SaxonFranklins who succeeded. Old Wrengils, or some such name, whoever hewas, at last found some one's bill too hard for his brain-pan; andthere he lies on the hill above, in his 'barrow' of Wrinklebury. Andgone, too, the gay Norman squire, who, as tradition says, kept hisfair lady in the old watch-tower, on the highest point of the WhiteCliff--'Gallantry Bower, ' as they call it to this day--now a merering of turf-covered stones, and a few low stunted oaks, shorn by theAtlantic blasts into the shape of two huge cannon, which form afavourite landmark for the fisherman of the bay. Gone they all are, Cymry and Roman, Saxon and Norman; and upon the ruins of theiraccumulated labour we stand here. Each of them had his use, --planteda few more trees or cleared a few more, tilled a fresh scrap of down, organized a scrap more of chaos. Who dare wish the tide ofimprovement, which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, swifterand swifter still as it goes on, to stop, just because it is notconvenient to us just now to move on? It will not take anothernineteen hundred years, be sure, to make even this lovely nook assuperior to what it is now as it is now to the little knot of fishinghuts where naked Britons peeped out, trembling at the iron tramp ofeach insolent legionary from the camp above. It will not takeanother nineteen hundred years to develope the capabilities of thisplace, --to make it the finest fishery in England, next to Torbay, --the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, along sixty milesof ruthless coast, --and a commercial centre for a vast tract of half-tilled land within, which only requires means of conveyance to be asfertile and valuable as nine-tenths of England. Meanwhile Claudeought to have seen the deer-park. The panorama from that old ruined'bower' of cliff and woodland, down and sea, is really unique in itsway. 

'So is the whole place, in my eyes, ' said Claude. 'I have seennothing in England to be compared to this little strip of paradisebetween two great waste worlds of sea and moor. Lynmouth might bematched among the mountains of Wales and Ireland. The first threemiles of the Rheidol, from the Devil's Bridge towards Aberystwith, orthe gorge of the Wye, down the opposite watershed of the samemountains, from Castle Dufferin down to Rhaiadyr, are equal to it inmagnificence of form and colour, and superior in size. But Iquestion whether anything ever charmed me more than did the return tothe sounds of nature which greeted me to-day, as I turned back fromthe dreary, silent moorland turnpike into this new road, terracedalong the cliffs and woods--those who first thought of cutting itmust have had souls in them above the herd--and listened to aglorious concert in four parts, blending and supporting each other inexquisite harmony, from the shrill treble of a thousand birds, andthe soft melancholy alto of the moaning woods, downward through therich tenor hum of innumerable insects, who hung like sparks of firebeneath the glades of oak, to the bass of the unseen surge below, "Whose deep and dreadful organ-pipe, "

far below me, contrasted strangely with the rich soft inlandcharacter of the deep woods, luxuriant ferns, and gaudy flowers. Itis that very contrast which makes the place so unique. One isaccustomed to connect with the notion of the sea bare cliffs, breezydowns, stunted shrubs struggling for existence: and instead of thembehold a forest wall, 500 feet high, of almost semi-tropicluxuriance. At one turn, a deep glen, with its sea of green woods, filled up at the mouth with the bright azure sheet of ocean. --Thensome long stretch of the road would be banked on one side withcrumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden hawkweed, andLondon pride, like velvet cushions covered with pink lace, and bedsof white bramble blossom alive with butterflies; while above my head, and on my right, the cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded meso close, that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried insome glen unknown to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere betweengreen sprays and grey stems, gleamed that same boundless ocean blue, seeming, from the height at which I was, to mount into the very sky. It looked but a step out of the leafy covert into blank infinity. And then, as the road wound round some point, one's eye could falldown, down, through the abyss of perpendicular wood, tree below treeclinging to and clothing the cliff, or rather no cliff; butperpendicular sheet of deep wood sedge, and broad crown ferns, spreading their circular fans. --But there is no describing them, orpainting them either. --And then to see how the midday sunbeams leaptpast one down the abyss, throwing out here a grey stem by one pointof burnished silver, there a hazel branch by a single leaf of glowinggolden green, shooting long bright arrows down, through the dim, hot, hazy atmosphere of the wood, till it rested at last upon the dappledbeach of pink and grey pebbles, and the dappled surge which wanderedup and down among them, and broke up into richer intricacy with itschequer-work of woodland shadows, the restless net of snowy foam. '

'You must be fresh from reading Mr. Ruskin's book, Claude, to be ableto give birth to such a piece of complex magniloquence as that lastperiod of yours. '

'Why, I saw all that, and ten thousand things more; and yet do youcomplain of me for having tried to put one out of all those thousandthings into words? And what do you mean by sneering at Mr. Ruskin?Are there not in his books more and finer passages of descriptivepoetry--word-painting--call them what you will, than in any otherprose book in the English language?'

'Not a doubt of it, my dear Claude; but it will not do for every oneto try Mr. Ruskin's tools. Neither you nor I possess that almostRoman severity, that stern precision of conception and expression, which enables him to revel in the most gorgeous language, withoutever letting it pall upon the reader's taste by affectation or over-lusciousness. His style is like the very hills along which you havebeen travelling, whose woods enrich, without enervating, the grandsimplicity of their forms. '

'The comparison is just, ' said Claude. 'Mr. Ruskin's style, likethose very hills, and like, too, the Norman cathedrals of which he isso fond, is rather magnified than concealed by the innumerablemultiplicity of its ornamental chasing and colouring. '

'And is not that, ' I asked, 'the very highest achievement of artisticstyle?'

'Doubtless. The severe and grand simplicity, of which folks talk somuch, is great indeed; but only the greatest as long as men are stillignorant of Nature's art of draping her forms with colour, chiaroscuro, ornament, not at the expense of the original design, butin order to perfect it by making it appeal to every faculty insteadof those of form and size alone. '

'Still you will allow the beauty of a bare rock, a down, a churchspire, a sheet or line of horizontal water, --their necessity to thecompletion of a landscape. I recollect well having the value of astern straight line in Nature brought home to me, when, during a longride in the New Forest, after my eye had become quite dulled andwearied with the monotonous softness of rolling lawns, featheryheath, and rounded oak and beech woods, I suddenly caught sight ofthe sharp peaked roof of Rhinefield Lodge, and its row of tall stiffpoplar-spires, cutting the endless sea of curves. The relief to myeye was delicious. I really believe it heightened the pleasure withwhich I reined in my mare for a chat with old Toomer the keeper, andthe noble bloodhound who eyed me from between his master's legs. '

'I can well believe it. Simple lines in a landscape are of the samevalue as the naked parts of a richly-clothed figure. They act bothas contrasts and as indications of the original substratum of thefigure; but to say that severe simplicity is the highest ideal ismere pedantry and Manicheism. '

'Oh, everything is Manicheism with you, Claude!'

'And no wonder, while the world is as full of it now as it was in thethirteenth century. But let that pass. This craving after so-calledclassic art, whether it be Manicheism or not, is certainly a fightingagainst God, --a contempt of everything which He has taught us artistssince the introduction of Christianity. I abominate this setting upof Sculpture above Painting, of the Greeks above the Italians, --as ifall Eastern civilization, all Christian truth, had taught artnothing, --as if there was not more real beauty in a French cathedralor a Venetian palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more soul inone Rafaelle, or Titian either, than in all the Greek statues of theTribune or Vatican. '

'You have changed your creed, I see, and, like all converts, aresomewhat fierce and fanatical. You used to believe in Zeuxis andParrhasius in old times. '

'Yes, as long as I believed in Fuseli's "Lectures;" but when I saw atPompeii the ancient paintings which still remain to us, my faith intheir powers received its first shock; and when I re-read in theLectures of Fuseli and his school all their extravagant praises ofthe Greek painters, and separated their few facts fairly out fromamong the floods of rant on which they floated, I came to theconclusion that the ancients knew as little of colour or chiaroscuroas they did of perspective, and as little of spiritual expression asthey did of landscape-painting. What do I care for the birds peckingat Zeuxis's grapes, or Zeuxis himself trying to draw backParrhasius's curtain? Imitative art is the lowest trickery. Thereare twenty men in England now capable of the same sleight of hand;and yet these are recorded as the very highest triumphs of ancientart by the only men who have handed down to us any record of it. '

'It may be so; or again, it may not. But do not fancy, Claude, thatclassic sculpture has finished its work on earth. You know that ithas taught you what Gothic art could never teach, --the ideal ofphysical health and strength. Believe that it exists, and willexist, to remind the puny town-dweller of the existence of thatideal; to say to the artisan, every time he looks upon a statue--suchGod intended you to be; such you may be; such your class will be, insome future healthy state of civilization, when Sanitary Reform andSocial Science shall be accepted and carried out as primary duties ofa government toward the nation. 

'Surely, classic sculpture remains, as a witness of the primaevalparadise; a witness that man and woman were created at first healthy, and strong, and fair, and innocent; just as classic literatureremains for a witness that the heathen of old were taught of God;that we have something to learn of them, summed up in that nowobsolete word "virtue"--true and wholesome manhood, which we arelikely to forget, and are forgetting daily, under the enervatingshadow of popular superstitions. {287} And till we have learnt that, may Greek books still form the basis of our liberal education, andmay Greek statues, or even English attempts to copy them, fill publichalls and private houses. This generation may not understand theirdivine and eternal significance; but a future generation, doubt itnot, will spell it out right well. '

Claude and I went forth along the cliffs of a park, which, though notof the largest, is certainly of the loveliest in England, --perhapsunique, from that abrupt contact of the richest inland scenery withthe open sea, which is its distinctive feature. As we wandered alongthe edge of the cliff, beneath us on our left lay wooded valleys, lawns spotted with deer, stately timber trees, oak and beech, birchand alder, growing as full and round-headed as if they had beenburied in some Shropshire valley fifty miles inland, instead ofhaving the Atlantic breezes all the winter long sweeping past a fewhundred feet above their still seclusion. Glens of forest wound awayinto the high inner land, with silver burns sparkling here and thereunder their deep shadows; while from the lawns beneath, the groundsloped rapidly upwards towards us, to stop short in a sheer wall ofcliff, over which the deer were leaning to crop the shoots of ivy, where the slipping of a stone would have sent them 400 feetperpendicular into the sea. On our right, from our very feet, thesea spread out to the horizon; a single falcon was wheeling about theledges below; a single cormorant was fishing in the breakers, divingand rising again like some tiny water-beetle;

 'The murmuring surgeThat on the unnumbered pebbles idly chafedCould not be heard so high. '

The only sound beside the rustle of the fern before the startled deerwas the soft mysterious treble of the wind as it swept over the faceof the cliff beneath us; but the cool air was confined to the hill-tops round beneath, from within a short distance of the shore, thesea was shrouded in soft summer haze. The far Atlantic lay like anocean of white wool, out of which the Hartland Cliffs and the highestpoint of Lundy just showed their black peaks. Here and there thewestern sun caught one white bank of mist after another, and tingedthem with glowing gold; while nearer us long silvery zigzag tide-lines, which we could have fancied the tracks of water-fairies, wandered away under the smoky grey-brown shadows of the fog, andseemed to vanish hundreds of miles off into the void of space, socompletely was all notion of size or distance destroyed by the softgradations of the mist. Suddenly, as we stood watching, a breezefrom the eastward dived into the basin of the bay, swept the cloudsout, packed them together, rolled them over each other, and hurledthem into the air miles high in one Cordillera of snowy mountains, sailing slowly out into the Atlantic; and behold, instead of thechaos of mist, the whole amphitheatre of cliffs, with their gay greenwoods and spots of bright red marl and cold black ironstone, and thegleaming white sands of Braunton, and the hills of Exmoor bathed insunshine, so near and clear we almost fancied we could see the pinkheather-hue upon them; and the bay one vast rainbow, ten miles offlame-colour and purple, emerald and ultramarine, flecked with athousand spots of flying snow. No one knows what gigantic effects ofcolour even our temperate zone can show, till they have been inDevonshire and Cornwall; and last, but not least, in Ireland--theEmerald Isle, in truth. No stay-at-home knows the colour of the seatill he has seen the West of England; and no one, either stay-at-homeor traveller, I suspect, knows what the colour of a green field canbe till he has seen it among the magic smiles and tears of an Irishsummer shower in county Down. 

Down we wandered from our height through 'trim walks and alleysgreen, ' where the arbutus and gumcistus fringed the cliffs, andthrough the deep glades of the park, towards the delicious littlecove which bounds it. --A deep crack in the wooded hills, an old millhalf buried in rocks and flowers, a stream tinkling on from one rock-basin to another towards the beach, a sandy lawn gay with sea-sideflowers over which wild boys and bare-footed girls were driving theirponies with panniers full of sand, and as they rattled back to thebeach for a fresh load, standing upright on the backs of theirsteeds, with one foot in each pannier, at full trot over rocks andstones where a landsman would find it difficult to walk on his ownlegs. 

Enraptured with the place and people, Claude pulled out his sketch-book and sat down. 

'What extraordinary rocks!' said he, at length. 'How different fromthose Cyclopean blocks and walls along the Exmoor cliffs are theserich purple and olive ironstone layers, with their sharp serratedlines and polished slabs, set up on edge, snapped, bent double, twisted into serpentine curves, every sheet of cliff scored withsharp parallel lines at some fresh fantastic angle!'

Yes; there must have been strange work here when all these stratawere being pressed and squeezed together like a ream of wet paperbetween the rival granite pincers of Dartmoor and Lundy. They musthave suffered enough then in a few years to give them a fair right tolie quiet till Doomsday, as they seem likely to do. But it is onlyold Mother Earth who has fallen asleep hereabouts. Air and sea arejust as live as ever. Ay, lovely and calm enough spread beneath usthere the broad semicircle of the bay; but to know what it can be, itshould be seen as I have seen it, when, in the roaring Decembermorning, we have been galloping along the cliffs, wreck-hunting. --Onemorning I can remember well, how we watched from the Hartland Cliffsa great barque, which came drifting and rolling in before the westerngale, while we followed her up the coast, parsons and sportsmen, farmers and Preventive men, with the Manby's mortar lumbering behindus in a cart, through stone gaps and track-ways, from headland toheadland. --The maddening excitement of expectation as she ran wildlytowards the cliffs at our feet, and then sheered off againinexplicably;--her foremast and bowsprit, I recollect, were goneshort off by the deck; a few rags of sail fluttered from her main andmizen. But with all straining of eyes and glasses, we could discernno sign of man on board. Well I recollect the mingled disappointmentand admiration of the Preventive men, as a fresh set of salvorsappeared in view, in the form of a boat's crew of Clovelly fishermen;how we watched breathlessly the little black speck crawling andstruggling up in the teeth of the gale, under the shelter of theland, till, when the ship had rounded a point into smoother water, she seized on her like some tiny spider on a huge unwieldy fly; andthen how one still smaller black speck showed aloft on the main-yard, and another--and then the desperate efforts to get the topsail set--and how we saw it tear out of their hands again, and again, andagain, and almost fancied we could hear the thunder of its flappingsabove the roar of the gale, and the mountains of surf which made therocks ring beneath our feet;--and how we stood silent, shuddering, expecting every moment to see whirled into the sea from the plungingyards one of those same tiny black specks, in each one of which was aliving human soul, with sad women praying for him at home! And thenhow they tried to get her head round to the wind, and disappearedinstantly in a cloud of white spray--and let her head fall backagain--and jammed it round again, and disappeared again--and at lastlet her drive helplessly up the bay, while we kept pace with heralong the cliffs; and how at last, when she had been mastered andfairly taken in tow, and was within two miles of the pier, and allhearts were merry with the hopes of a prize which would make themrich, perhaps, for years to come--one-third, I suppose, of the wholevalue of her cargo--how she broke loose from them at the last moment, and rushed frantically in upon those huge rocks below us, leapinggreat banks of slate at the blow of each breaker, tearing off massesof ironstone which lie there to this day to tell the tale, till shedrove up high and dry against the cliff, and lay, like an enormousstranded whale, grinding and crashing herself to pieces against thewalls of her adamantine cage. And well I recollect the sad recordsof the log-book which was left on board the deserted ship; how shehad been waterlogged for weeks and weeks, buoyed up by her timbercargo, the crew clinging in the tops, and crawling down, when theydared, for putrid biscuit-dust and drops of water, till the water waswashed overboard and gone; and then notice after notice, 'On this daysuch an one died, ' 'On this day such an one was washed away'--the logkept up to the last, even when there was only that to tell, by thestern business-like merchant skipper, whoever he was; and how atlast, when there was neither food nor water, the strong man's heartseemed to have quailed, or perhaps risen, into a prayer, jotted downin the log--'The Lord have mercy on us!'--and then a blank of severalpages, and, scribbled with a famine-shaken hand, 'Remember thyCreator in the days of thy youth;'--and so the log and the ship wereleft to the rats, which covered the deck when our men boarded her. And well I remember the last act of that tragedy; for a ship hasreally, as sailors feel, a personality, almost a life and soul of herown; and as long as her timbers hold together, all is not over. Youcan hardly call her a corpse, though the human beings who inhabitedher, and were her soul, may have fled into the far eternities; and sowe felt that night, as we came down along the woodland road, with thenorth-west wind hurling dead branches and showers of crisp oak-leavesabout our heads; till suddenly, as we staggered out of the wood, wecame upon such a piece of chiaroscuro as would have baffledCorreggio, or Rembrandt, himself. Under a wall was a long tent ofsails and spars, filled with Preventive men, fishermen, Lloyd'sunderwriters, lying about in every variety of strange attitude andcostume; while candles, stuck in bayonet-handles in the wall, pouredout a wild glare over shaggy faces and glittering weapons, and pilesof timber, and rusty iron cable, that glowed red-hot in the light, and then streamed up the glen towards us through the salt misty airin long fans of light, sending fiery bars over the brown transparentoak foliage and the sad beds of withered autumn flowers, andglorifying the wild flakes of foam, as they rushed across the light-stream, into troops of tiny silver angels, that vanished into thenight and hid themselves among the woods from the fierce spirit ofthe storm. And then, just where the glare of the lights and watch-fires was most brilliant, there too the black shadows of the cliffhad placed the point of intensest darkness, lightening graduallyupwards right and left, between the two great jaws of the glen, intoa chaos of grey mist, where the eye could discern no form of sea orcloud, but a perpetual shifting and quivering as if the wholeatmosphere was writhing with agony in the clutches of the wind. 

The ship was breaking up; and we sat by her like hopeless physiciansby a deathbed-side, to watch the last struggle, --and 'the effects ofthe deceased. ' I recollect our literally warping ourselves down tothe beach, holding on by rocks and posts. There was a saddened awe-struck silence, even upon the gentleman from Lloyd's with the penbehind his ear. A sudden turn of the clouds let in a wild gleam ofmoonshine upon the white leaping heads of the breakers, and on thepyramid of the Black-church Rock, which stands in summer in such calmgrandeur gazing down on the smiling bay, with the white sand ofBraunton and the red cliffs of Portledge shining through its two vastarches; and against a slab of rock on the right, for years afterwardsdiscoloured with her paint, lay the ship, rising slowly on everysurge, to drop again with a piteous crash as the wave fell back fromthe cliff, and dragged the roaring pebbles back with it under thecoming wall of foam. You have heard of ships at the last momentcrying aloud like living things in agony? I heard it then, as thestumps of her masts rocked and reeled in her, and every plank andjoint strained and screamed with the dreadful tension. 

A horrible image--a human being shrieking on the rack, rose up beforeme at those strange semi-human cries, and would not be put away--andI tried to turn, and yet my eyes were riveted on the black mass, which seemed vainly to implore the help of man against the sternministers of the Omnipotent. 

Still she seemed to linger in the death-struggle, and we turned atlast away; when, lo! a wave, huger than all before it, rushed up theboulders towards us. --We had just time to save ourselves. --A dull, thunderous groan, as if a mountain had collapsed, rose above the roarof the tempest; and we all turned with an instinctive knowledge ofwhat had happened, just in time to see the huge mass melt away intothe boiling white, and vanish for evermore. And then the very ravingof the wind seemed hushed with awe; the very breakers plunged moresilently towards the shore, with something of a sullen compunction;and as we stood and strained our eyes into the gloom, one black plankafter another crawled up out of the darkness upon the head of thecoming surge, and threw itself at our feet like the corpse of adrowning man, too spent to struggle more. 

There is another subject for a picture for you, my friend Claude:but your gayer fancy will prefer the scene just as you are sketchingit now, as still and bright as if this coast had never seen the baydarkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking acrossthe waves before the northern gale; and the tiny herring-boatsfleeing from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercyeven from those iron walls of rock than from the pitiless howlingwaste of spray behind them; and that merry beach beside the towncovered with shrieking women and old men casting themselves on thepebbles in fruitless agonies of prayer, as corpse after corpse sweptup at the feet of wife and child, till in one case alone a singledawn saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those whohad gone out the night before in the fulness of strength and courage. Hardly an old playmate of mine, but is drowned and gone

'Their graves are scattered far and wide By mount, by stream, and sea. '

One poor little fellow's face starts out of the depths of memory asfresh as ever, my especial pet and bird-nesting companion as a boy--alittle delicate, precocious, large-brained child, who might havewritten books some day, if he had been a gentleman's son: but whenhis father's ship was wrecked, they found him, left alone of all thecrew, just as he had been lashed into the rigging by loving and dyinghands, but cold and stiff, the little soul beaten out of him by thecruel waves before it had time to show what growth there might havebeen in it. We will talk no more of such things. It is thankless tobe sad when all heaven and earth are keeping holiday under the smileof God. 

'And now let us return. At four o'clock to-morrow morning, you know, we are to start for Lundy. '

V. --LUNDY. 

It was four o'clock on an August morning. Our little party had madethe sleeping streets ring with jests and greetings, as it collectedon the pier. Some dozen young men and women, sons and daughters ofthe wealthier coasting captains and owners of fishing-smacks, chaperoned by our old landlord, whose delicate and gentlemanlikefeatures and figure were strangely at variance with the history ofhis life, --daring smuggler, daring man-of-war sailor, and then mostdaring and successful of coastguard-men. After years of fighting andshipwreck and creeping for kegs of brandy; after having seen, too--sight not to be forgotten--the Walcheren dykes and the Walcherenfever, through weary months of pestilence, he had come back with alittle fortune of prize-money to be a village oracle, loving andbeloved, as gentle and courteous as if he had never 'stato alinferno, ' and looked Death in the face. Heaven bless thee, shrewdloyal heart, a gentleman of God's making, not unrecognized either bymany of men's making. 

The other chaperone was a lady of God's making, too; one who mighthave been a St. Theresa, had she been born there and then; but as itwas, had been fated to become only the Wesleyan abbess of the town, and, like Deborah, 'a mother in Israel. ' With her tall, slim, queenly figure, massive forehead, glittering eyes, features beamingwith tenderness and enthusiasm, and yet overcast with a peculiarexpression of self-consciousness and restraint, well known to thosewho have studied the physiognomies of 'saints, ' she seemed to wantonly the dress of some monastic order to make her the ideal of amediaeval abbess, watching with a half-pitying, half-complacentsmile, the gambols of a group of innocent young worldlings. I sawClaude gazing at her full of admiration and surprise, which latterwas certainly not decreased when, as soon as all had settledthemselves comfortably on board, and the cutter was slipping quietlyaway under the magnificent deer-park cliffs, the Lady Abbess, pullingout her Wesleyan hymn-book, gave out the Morning Hymn, apparently asa matter of course. 

With hardly a demur one sweet voice after another arose; then a mangained courage, and chimed in with a full harmonious bass; then arich sad alto made itself heard, as it wandered in and out betweenthe voices of the men and women; and at last a wild mellow tenor, which we discovered after much searching to proceed from the mostunlikely-looking lips of an old dry, weather-bleared, mummifiedchrysalis of a man, who stood aft, steering with his legs, andshowing no sign of life except when he slowly and solemnly filled hisnose with snuff. 

'What strange people have you brought me among?' asked Claude. 'Ihave been wondering ever since I came here at the splendid faces andfigures of men, women, and children, which popped out upon me fromevery door in that human rabbit-burrow above. I have been inraptures at the gracefulness, the courtesy, the intelligence ofalmost everyone I meet; and now, to crown all, everyone among themseems to be a musician. '

'Really you are not far wrong, and you will find them as remarkablemorally as they are physically and intellectually. The simplicityand purity of the women here put one more in mind of the valleys ofthe Tyrol than of an English village. '

'And in proportion to their purity, I suppose, ' said Claude, 'istheir freedom and affectionateness?'

'Exactly. It would do your "naturalist" heart good, Claude, to see ayoung fellow just lauded from a foreign voyage rolling up the streetwhich we have just descended, and availing himself of the immemorialright belonging to such cases of kissing and being kissed by everywoman whom he meets, young and old. You will find yourself hereamong those who are too simple-minded, and too full of self-respect, to be either servile or uncourteous. '

'I have found out already that Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, insuch company as this, are infinitely pleasanter, as well as cheaper, than the aristocratic seclusion of a cutter hired for our ownbehoof. '

'True; and now you will not go home and, as most tourists do, saythat you know a place, without knowing the people who live in it--asif the human inhabitants of a range of scenery were not among itsintegral and most important parts--'

'What! are Copley Fielding's South Down landscapes incomplete withouta half-starved seven shillings a-week labourer in the foreground?'

'Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon? a premise without aconclusion? Is it not partly because the land is down, and not well-tilled arable, that the labourer is what he is? And yet, perhaps, the very absence of human beings in his vast sheets of landscape, when one considers that they are scraps of great, overcrowded, scientific England in the nineteenth century, is in itself thebitterest of satires. But, hush! there is another hymn commencing--not to be the last by many. '

* * * * *

We had landed, and laughed, and scrambled, eaten and drunk, seen allthe sights of Lundy, and heard all the traditions. Are they notwritten in Mr. Bamfield's Ilfracombe Guide? Why has not some onealready written a fire-and-brimstone romance about them? 'MorescoCastle; or, the Pirate Knight of the Atlantic Wave. ' What a title!Or again--'The Seal Fiend; or, the Nemesis of the Scuttled WestIndiaman. '--If I had paper and lubricite enough, and that delightfulcarelessness of any moral or purpose, except that of fine writing andmoney-making, which possesses some modern scribblers--I could talesunfold--But neither pirate legends, nor tales of cheated insuranceoffices, nor wrecks and murders, will make us understand Lundy--whatit is 'considered in its idea, ' as the new argot is. It may bedefined as a lighthouse-bearing island. The whole three miles ofgranite table-land, seals, sea-birds, and human beings, are mereaccidents and appendages--the pedestal and the ornaments of thatgreat white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks allnight long over the night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise manhas said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will falldown and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of their ancestors' science, grown to them mythic andimpossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statuesleft by a nobler and extinct race, then surely there will bepilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers to that white granite tower, withits unglazed lantern and rusting machinery, to light itself up again, and help poor human beings! Really, my dear brothers, I am not injest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to arrive at some suchcatastrophe--sentimental philosophy for the 'enlightened' few, andfetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms are as possible asheathen ones) for the masses. --At that you may only too probablyarrive--unless you repent, and 'get back your souls. '

* * * * *

We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and one ofthe real black English rat, exterminated on the mainland by the greyHanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, wesat down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung three hundredfeet in air above the western main. 

'This is even more strange and new to me, ' said Claude, at length, 'than anything I have yet seen in this lovely West. I now appreciateRuskin's advice to oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devonand Cornwall, instead of lingering about the muddy seas and tamecliffs of the Channel and the German Ocean. '

'How clear and brilliant, ' said I, 'everything shows through thisAtlantic atmosphere. The intensity of colouring may vie with that ofthe shores of the Mediterranean. The very raininess of the climate, by condensing the moisture into an ever-changing phantasmagoria ofclouds, leaves the clear air and sunshine, when we do get a glimpseof them, all the more pure and transparent. '

'The distinctive feature of the scene is, in my eyes, the daringjuxtaposition of large simple masses of positive colour. There arenone of the misty enamelled tones of Lynmouth, or the lusciousrichness of Clovelly. The forms are so simple and severe, that theywould be absolutely meagre, were it not for the rich colouring withwhich Nature has so lovingly made up for the absence of all softness, all picturesque outline. One does not regret or even feel the wantof trees here, while the eye ranges down from that dappled cloud-world above, over that sheet of purple heather, those dells beddedwith dark green fern, of a depth and richness of hue which I neversaw before--over those bright grey granite rocks, spangled with blackglittering mica and golden lichens, to rest at last on that seabelow, which streams past the island in a swift roaring torrent oftide. '

'Sea, Claude? say, ocean. This is real Atlantic blue here beneathus. No more Severn mud, no more grass-green bay-water, but realocean sapphire--dark, deep, intense, Homeric purple, it spreads away, away, there before us, without a break or islet, to the shores ofAmerica. You are sitting on one of the last points of Europe; andtherefore all things round you are stern and strange with a barbaricpomp, such as befits the boundary of a world. '

'Ay, the very form of the cliffs shows them to be the breakwaters ofa continent. No more fantastic curves and bands of slate, such asharmonize so well with the fairyland which we left this morning; thecliffs, with their horizontal rows of cubical blocks, seem built upby Cyclopean hands. '

'Yet how symbolic is the difference between them and that equallyCyclopic masonry of the Exmoor coast. There every fracture is fresh, sharp-edged, crystalline; the worn-out useless hills are dropping topieces with their own weight. Here each cube is delicately roundedoff at the edges, every crack worn out into a sinuous furrow, likethe scars of an everlasting warfare with the winds and waves. '

'Does it not raise strange longings in you, ' said Claude, 'to gazeout yonder over the infinite calm, and then to remember that beyondit lies America!--the new world; the future world; the great Titan-baby, who will be teeming with new Athens and Londons, with newBacons and Shakspeares, Newtons and Goethes, when this old worn-outisland will be--what? Oh! when I look out here, like a bird from itscage, a captive from his dungeon, and remember what lies behind me, to what I must return to-morrow--the over-peopled Babylon of miseryand misrule, puffery and covetousness--and there before me greatcountries untilled, uncivilized, unchristianized, crying aloud forman to come and be man indeed, and replenish the earth and subdue it. "Oh that I had wings as a dove, then would I flee away and be atrest!" Here, lead me away; my body is growing as dizzy as my mind. I feel coming over me that horrible longing of which I have heard, toleap out into empty space. How the blank air whispers, "Be free!"How the broad sea smiles, and calls, with its ten thousand waves, "Befree!"--As I live, if you do not take me away I shall throw myselfover the cliff. '

I did take him away, for I knew the sensation and its danger well. It has nothing to do with physical giddiness. Those who are cliff-bred, and who never were giddy for an instant in their lives, haveoften felt themselves impelled to leap from masts, and tree-tops, andcliffs; and nothing but the most violent effort of will could breakthe fascination. I cannot but think, by the bye, that many apuzzling suicide might be traced to this same emotion acting on aweak and morbid brain. 

We returned to the little landing cove. The red-sailed cutter laysleeping below us--'floating double, ship and shadow. ' Shoals ofinnumerable mackerel broke up, making acres of water foam and sparkleround their silvery sides, with a soft roar (call it 'a bull' if youlike, it is the only expression for that mysterious sound), whileamong them the black head of a huge seal was slowly and silentlyappearing and vanishing, as he got his dinner, in a quiet business-like way, among the unhappy wanderers. 

We put off in the boat, and just halfway from the cutter Claude gavea start, and the women a scream, as the enormous brute quietly raisedhis head and shoulders out of the water ten yards off, with a fishkicking in his mouth, and the water running off his nose, to take adeliberate stare at us, after the fashion of seals, whose rulingpassion is curiosity. The sound of a musical instrument, the sightof a man bathing--anything, in short, which their small wits cannotexplain at first sight, is enough to make them forget all theircunning, and thrust their heads suicidally into any danger; and evenso it fared with the 'black man, ' as the girls, in their firstterror, declared him to be. Some fellow's gun went off--of itself Ishould like to believe--but the whole charge disappeared into hissleek round visage, knocking the mackerel from between his teeth; andhe turned over, a seven-foot lump of lifeless blubber. 

'Wretch!' cried Claude, as we dragged the seal into the boat, wherehe lay with his head and arms hanging helplessly over the bows, likea sea-sick alderman on board a Margate steamer. 'What excuse can hegive for such a piece of wanton cruelty?'

'I assure you his skin and oil are very valuable. '

'Pish!--Was he thinking of skin and oil when he pulled the trigger?or merely obeying the fleshly lust of destructiveness--the puppet oftwo bumps on the back of his head?'

'My dear Claude, man is the microcosm; and as the highest animal, theideal type of the mammalia, he, like all true types, comprises inhimself the attributes of all lower species. Therefore he must havea tiger-vein in him, my dear Claude, as well as a beaver-vein and aspider-vein; and no more shame to him. You are a butterfly; thatgood fellow a beast of prey; both may have their own work to do inthis age just as they had in the old ones; and if you do not likethat explanation, all I can say is, I can sympathise with you andwith him too. Homo sum--humani nihil a me alienum puto. Trim theboat, lads, or the seal will swamp us, and, like Samson, slay more inhis death than ever he slew in his life. '

We slipped on homeward. The cliff-wall of Lundy stood out blackerand blacker every moment against the gay western sky; greens, greys, and purples, dyeing together into one deep rich monotone, for whichour narrow colour-vocabulary has no word; and threw a long coldshadow towards us across the golden sea; suddenly above its darkridge a wild wreath of low rack caught the rays of the setting sun, and flamed up like a volcano towards the dun and purple canopy ofupper clouds. Before us the blue sea and the blue land-line werefading into mournful grey, on which one huge West Indiaman blazedout, orange and scarlet, her crowded canvas all a-flame from thetruck to the water's edge. --A few moments and she, too, had vanishedinto the grey twilight, and a chill night-wind crisped the sea. Itwas a relief to hear the Evening Hymn rise rich and full from onevoice, and then another and another, till the men chimed in one byone, and the whole cutter, from stem to stern, breathed up its melodyinto the silent night. 

But the hymn soon flagged--there was more mirth on board than couldvent itself in old Charles Wesley's words; and one began to hum asong tune, and then another, with a side glance at the expression ofthe Lady Abbess's face, till at last, when a fair wife took courage, and burst out with full pipe into 'The sea, the sea, ' the ice wasfairly broken; and among jests and laughter one merry harmless songafter another rang out, many of them, to Claude's surprise, fashionable London ones, which sounded strangely enough out there onthe wild western sea. At last--'Claude, friend, ' I whispered, 'youmust sing your share too--and mine also, for that matter. '

'What shall I sing?'

'Anything you will, from the sublime to the ridiculous. They willunderstand and appreciate it as well as yourself. Recollect, you arenot among bullet-headed South Saxon clods, but among wits as keen andimaginations as rich as those of any Scotch shepherd or Manchesteroperative. '

And up rose his exquisite tenor. 

This was his first song, but it was not allowed to be his last. German ballads, Italian Opera airs, were all just as warmly, andperhaps far more sincerely appreciated, as they would have been byany London evening-party; and the singing went on, hour after hour, as we slipped slowly on upon the tide, till it grew late, and thesweet voices died away one by one; and then the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which had reigned so pleasantly throughout the daytook a new form, as the women huddled together to sleep in eachother's arms; and the men and we clustered forwards, while from everymouth fragrant incense steamed upwards into the air. 'Man a cookinganimal?' my dear Doctor Johnson--pooh! man is a smoking animal. There is his ergon, his 'differential energy, ' as the Aristotelianssay--his true distinction from the ourang-outang. Ponder it well. 

The men were leaning on the trawl capstan, while our old landlord, with half-a-dozen pipes within a foot of his face, droned out somelong sea-yarn about Ostend, and muds, and snow-storms, and revenue-cruisers going down stern foremost, kegs of brandy and Frenchprisons, which I shall not repeat; for indeed the public has beensurfeited with sea-stories of late, from many sufficiently dull onesup to the genial wisdom of 'Peter Simple, ' and the gorgeous word-painting of 'Tom Cringle's Log. ' And now the subject is stale--theold war and the wonders thereof have died away into the past, likethe men who fought in it; and Trafalgar and the Bellerophon arereplaced by Manchester and 'Mary Barton. ' We have solved the oldsea-going problems pretty well--thanks to wise English-heartedCaptain Marryat, now gone to his rest, just when his work was done;and we must turn round and face a few land-going problems not quiteso easy of solution. So Claude and I thought, as we leant over thesloop's bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor theforty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm. Fortystanzas or so we did count from curiosity; the first line of each ofwhich ended infallibly with

'Says the commodo--ore;

and the third with

'Says the female smuggler;'

and then gave up in despair; and watched in a dreamy, tired, half-sadmood, the everlasting sparkle of the water as our bows threw itgently off in sheets of flame and 'tender curving lines of creamy'fire, that ran along the glassy surface, and seemed to awaken the seafor yards round into glittering life, as countless diamonds, andemeralds, and topazes, leaped and ran and dived round us, while weslipped slowly by; and then a speck of light would show far off inthe blank darkness, and another, and another, and slide slowly up tous--shoals of medusae, every one of them a heaving globe of flame;and some unseen guillemot would give a startled squeak, or ashearwater close above our heads suddenly stopped the yarn, andraised a titter among the men, by his ridiculously articulate, andnot over-complimentary, cry; and then a fox's bark from the cliffscame wild and shrill, although so faint and distant; or the lazy gaffgave a sad uneasy creak; and then a soft warm air, laden with heatherhoney, and fragrant odours of sedge, and birch, and oak, came sighingfrom the land; while all around us was the dense blank of the night, except where now and then some lonely gleam through the southernclouds showed the cliff-tops on our right. --It was all mostunearthly, dreamlike, a strange phantasmagoria, like some scene from'The Ancient Mariner'--all the world shut out, silent, invisible, andwe floating along there alone, like a fairy ship creeping throughChaos and the unknown Limbo. Was it an evil thought that rose withinme as I said to Claude--'Is not this too like life? Our only lightthe sparkles that rise up round us at every step, and die behind us;and all around, and all before, the great black unfathomableeternities? A few souls brought together as it were by chance, for ashort friendship and mutual dependence in this little ship of earth, so soon to land her passengers and break up the company for ever?'

He smiled. 

'There is a devil's meaning to everything in nature, and a God'smeaning, too. Your friends, the zoologists, have surely taught youbetter than that. As I read Nature's parable to-night, I findnothing in it but hope. What if there be darkness, the sun will riseto-morrow. What if there seem a chaos: the great organic world isstill living, and growing, and feeding, unseen by us, all the blacknight through; and every phosphoric atom there below is a sign thateven in the darkest night there is still the power of light, ready toflash out, wherever and however it is stirred. Does the age seem toyou dark? Do you, too, feel as I do at times, the awful sadness ofthat text, --"The time shall come when ye shall desire to see one ofthe days of the Lord, and shall not see it"? Then remember that

"The night is never so longBut at last it ringeth for matin song. "

And even as it is around us here, so it is in the world of men. Thenight is peopled not merely with phantoms and wizards, superstitionsand spirits of evil, but under its shadow all sciences, methods, social energies, are taking rest, and growing, and feeding, unknownto themselves, that they may awake into a new life, and intermarry, and beget children nobler than themselves, when "the day-spring fromon high comes down. " Even now, see! the dawn is gilding the highestsouls, as it is those Exmoor peaks afar; and we are in the night onlybecause we crawl below. What if we be unconscious of all the livingenergies which are fermenting round us now? Have you not shown me inthis last week every moorland pool, every drop of the summer sea, alive with beautiful organizations, multiplying as fast as thethoughts of man? Is not every leaf breathing still, every sap veindrinking still, though we may not see them? "Even so is the kingdomof God; like seed sown in the ground; and men rise, and lie down andsleep; and it groweth up they know not how. "'

We both fell into a reverie. The story and the ballad were finished, and not a sound broke the silence except the screaming of the sea-fowl, which led my thoughts wandering back to nights long past, whenwe dragged the seine up to our chins in water through the shortmidsummer night, and scrambled and rolled over on the beach in boyishglee, after the skate and mullet, with those now gone; and as Ithought and thought, old voices seemed to call me, old faces lookedat me, of playmates, and those nearer than playmates, now sleeping inthe deep deep sea, amid far coral islands; and old figures seemed toglide out of the mysterious dark along the still sea floor, as if theocean were indeed giving up her dead. I shook myself, turned away, and tried to persuade myself that I was dreaming. Perhaps I had beendoing so. At least, I remember very little more, till I was rousedby the rattling of the chain-cable through the hawse-hole, oppositethe pier-head. 

And now, gentle readers, farewell; and farewell, Clovelly, and allthe loving hearts it holds; and farewell, too, the soft still summerweather. Claude and I are taking our last walk together along thedeer-park cliffs. Lundy is shrouded in the great grey fan of dappledhaze which streams up from the westward, dimming the sickly sun. 'There is not a breath the blue wave to curl. ' Yet lo! roundChapman's Head creeps a huge bank of polished swell, and bursts inthunder on the cliffs. --Another follows, and another. --The Atlanticgales are sending in their avant-courriers of ground-swell: sixhours more, and the storm which has been sweeping over 'the still-vexed Bermoothes, ' and bending the tall palms on West Indian isles, will be roaring through the oak woods of Devon. The old black buckis calling his does with ominous croakings, and leading the wayslowly into the deepest coverts of the glens. The stormy petrels, driven in from the Atlantic, are skimming like black swallows overthe bay beneath us. Long strings of sea-fowl are flagging onsteadily at railroad pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes ofBraunton. The herring-boats are hastily hauling their nets--you maysee the fish sparkling like flakes of silver as they come up over thegunwale; all craft, large and small, are making for the shelter ofthe pier. Claude starts this afternoon to sit for six months inBabylonic smoke, working up his sketches into certain unspeakablepictures, with which the world will be astonished, or otherwise, atthe next Royal Academy Exhibition; while I, for whom anotherfortnight of pure western air remains, am off to well-known streams, to be in time for the autumn floods, and the shoals of fresh-runsalmon trout. 

Footnotes:

{1} Fraser's Magazine, June 1867. 

{29} Fraser's Magazine, September 1858. 

{74} The Ripon list of natural flies contains several other speciesof small Nemouridae unknown to me, save one brown one, which is seenin the South, though rarely, in June. 

{103} For these details I am indebted to a paper in the 'Annals ofNatural History, ' for September 1862, by my friend, Professor AlfredNewton, of Cambridge. 

{135} Fraser's Magazine, January 1858. 

{225a} Fraser's Magazine, July 1849. 

{225b} Some years after this was written, the very book which wasneeded appeared, as "The Chase of the Red Deer, " by Mr. Palk Collyns. 

{235} Written before the Volunteer movement. 

{287} Most wise and noble words upon this matter, worth theattention of all thinking men, and above all of clergymen, have beenwritten by Mr. J. S. Mill, in his tract on 'Liberty. '