North Devon

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Title:     North Devon
Author: Charles Kingsley [More Titles by Kingsley]

NORTH DEVON {1}

Note: {1} Fraser's Magazine, July 1849.

I.--EXMOOR.

We were riding up from Lynmouth, on a pair of ragged ponies, Claude Mellot and I, along the gorge of Watersmeet. And as we went we talked of many things; and especially of some sporting book which we had found at the Lyndale Hotel the night before, and which we had not by any means admired. {2} I do not object to sporting books in general, least of all to one on Exmoor. No place in England is more worthy of one. There is no place whose beauties and peculiarities are more likely to be thrown into strong relief by being looked at with a sportsman's eye. It is so with all forests and moorlands. The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. They are remnants of the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated to the genius of animal excitement and savage freedom; after all, not the most ignoble qualities of human nature. Besides, there is no better method of giving a living picture of a whole country than by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all other observations into harmony with that original key. Even in merely scientific books this is very possible. Look, for instance, at Hugh Miller's 'Old Red Sandstone,' 'The Voyage of the Beagle,' and Professor Forbes's work (we had almost said epic poem) on 'Glaciers.' Even an agricultural writer, if he have a real insight in him--if he have anything of that secret of the piu nel' uno, 'the power of discovering the infinite in the finite;' of seeing, like a poet, trivial phenomena in their true relation to the whole of the great universe into which they are so cunningly fitted; if he has learned to look at all things and men, down to the meanest, as living lessons written with the finger of God; if, in short, he has any true dramatic power: then he may impart to that apparently muddiest of sciences a poetic or a humorous tone, and give the lie to Mephistopheles when he dissuades Faust from farming as an occupation too mean and filthy for a man of genius. The poetry of agriculture remains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the comedy of it also; though its farce-tragedy has been too often extensively enacted in practice--unconsciously to the players. As for the old 'pastoral' school, it only flourished before agriculture really existed--that is, 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 man with so stubborn a subject as 'turnips, barley, clover, wheat,' it is worth while to look at old Arthur Young's books, both travels and treatises; and also at certain very spirited 'Chronicles of a Clay Farm,' by Talpa, which teem with humour and wisdom.

Note:
{2} Some years after this was written, the very
book which was needed appeared, as "The Chase of
the Red Deer," by Mr. Palk Collyns.

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

Claude smiled at some such words of mine that day. 'You talk often of the poetry of sport. I can see nothing in it but animal excitement, and a certain quantity, I suppose, of that animal cunning which the Red Indian possesses in common with the wolf and the cat, and any other beast of prey. As a fact, the majority of sportsmen are 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 the contrary, that for most of them it is sport which at once keeps alive and satisfies what you would call their aesthetic faculties, and so-- smile if you will--helps to make them purer, simpler, more genial men.'

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

'Esau is a dumb soul, especially here in England; but he has as deep a heart in him as Jacob, nevertheless, and as tender. Do you fancy that the gentleman over whose book we were grumbling last night, attached no more to his own simple words than you do? His account of a stag's run looks bald enough to you: but to him (unless Diana struck him blind for intruding on her privacy) what a whole poem of memories there must be in those few words,--"Turned down * * Water for a mile, and crossed the forest to Watersmeet, where he was run into 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 "Found at * * * * cover, held away at a slapping pace for * * * * Barn, then turned down the * * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest; made for * * * 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 his outline for him, wherever the stag was roused. Do you think that he never marked how the panting cavalcade rose and fell on the huge mile-long waves of that vast heather sea; how one long brown hill after another sunk down, greyer and greyer, behind them, and one long grey hill after another swelled up browner and browner before them; and how the sandstone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as the great horses, like Homer's of old, "devoured up the plain;" and how they struggled down the hill-side, through bushes and rocks, and broad slipping rattling sheets of screes, and saw beneath them stag and pack galloping down the shallow glittering river-bed, throwing up the shingle, striking out the water in long glistening sheets; and how they too swept after them, down the flat valley, rounding crag and 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 grim lifeless mountain walls? Did he feel no pleasant creeping of the flesh that day at the sound of his own horse-hoofs, as they swept through the long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman's tresses, and then rang down on the spongy, black, reverberating soil, chipping the honey-laden fragrant heather blossoms, and tossing them out in a rosy shower? Or, if that were really too slight a thing for the observation of an average sportsman, surely he must recollect the dying away of the hounds' voices, as the woodland passes engulfed them, whether it were Brendon or at Badger-worthy, or any other place; how they brushed through the narrow forest paths, where the ashes were already golden, while the oaks still kept their sombre green, and the red leaves and berries of the mountain-ash showed bright beneath the dark forest aisles; and how all of a sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop and concentrate, thrown back, louder and louder as they rode, off the same echoing crag; till at a sudden turn of the road there stood the stag beneath them in the stream, his back against the black rock with its green cushions of dripping velvet, knee-deep in the clear amber water, the hounds around him, some struggling and swimming in the deep pool, some rolling and tossing and splashing in a mad, half- terrified ring, as he reared into the air on his great haunches, with the sparkling beads running off his red mane, and dropping on his knees, plunged his antlers down among them, with blows which would have each brought certain death with it if the yielding water had not broken 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, when the horn-note and the voices rang through the autumn woods, and rolled up the smooth flat mountain sides; and Brendon answered Countisbury, and Countisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, till it swept 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 of sadness and littleness, almost of shame, as he looked up for the first time--one can pardon his not having done so before--and saw where he was, and the beauty of the hill-sides, with the lazy autumn clouds 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 with their weight, and the circular sweeps of down, flecked with innumerable dark spots of gorse, each of them guarded where they open into the river chasm by two fortresses of "giant-snouted crags,"-- delicate pink and grey sandstone, from which blocks and crumbling boulders have been toppling slowly down for ages, beneath the frost and the whirlwind, and now lie in long downward streams upon the slope, 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 over him an awe at the silence of the woods, not broken, but deepened, by the unvarying monotone of the roaring stream beneath, which flashed and glittered, half-hidden in the dark chasm, in clear brown pools reflecting every leaf and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam, ever changing, and yet for ever the fleeting on past the poor dead reeking stag and the silent hounds lying about on the moss- embroidered stones, their lolling tongues showing like bright crimson sparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the green sombre shades; while the startled water-ousel, with his white breast, flitted a few yards and stopped to stare from a rock's point at the strange intruders; and a single stock-dove, out of the bosom of the wood, began calling sadly and softly, with a dreamy peaceful moan? Did he not 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 of seeing; and all I shall say of him is, that a certain apparition in white leathers was at one period of its appearance dimly conscious of equestrian motion towards a certain brown two-horned phenomenon, and other spotted phenomena, at which he had been taught by habit to make the articulate noises "stag" and "hounds," among certain grey, and green, and brown phenomena, at which the same habit and the example of 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 the monopoly of all the intellect, and all the taste, because you earn your livings by talking about pretty things, and painting pretty things: little do you suspect, shut up together in your little literary worlds, and your artistic worlds, how many thousands of us outside barbarians there are who see as clearly, and enjoy as deeply as you do: but hold their tongues about their own feelings, simply because they have never been driven by emptiness of pocket to look round for methods of expressing them. And, after all--how much of nature can you express? You confest yourself yesterday baffled by all the magnificence around you.'

'Yes! to paint it worthily one would require to be a Turner, a Copley Fielding, 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 understand and cannot?'

He smiled.

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

'Then it should beget in him, too, something of merciful indulgence towards the seeming stupidity of those who see, after all, only a very little shallower than he does into the unfathomable depths of nature.'

'Well, sporting books and sportsmen seem to me, by their very object, not to be worth troubling our heads about. Out of nothing, comes nothing. See, my hands are as soft as any lady's in Belgravia. I could not, to save my life, lift a hundredweight a foot off the ground; while you have been a wild man of the woods, a leaper of ditches, 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, and chivalrous, and truly manly emotions?'

'What think you?'

'That you are far worthier in such matters than I, friend. But do not forget that it may be your intellect, and your profession--in one word, Heaven's mercy--which have steered you clear of shoals upon which you will find the mass of our class founder. Woe to the class or the nation which has no manly physical training! Look at the manners, the morals, the faces of the young men of the shopkeeping classes, if you wish to see the effects of utterly neglecting the physical development of man; {3} of fancying that all the muscular activity he requires under the sun is to be able to stand behind a counter, or sit on a desk-stool without tumbling off. Be sure, be sure, that ever since the days of the Persians of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of cowardice and dishonesty, has always gone hand in hand with them. To that utter neglect of any exercises which call out fortitude, patience, self-dependence, and daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity, the want of a high sense of honour, which is increasing just now among the middle classes; and from which the navigator, the engineer, the miner, and the sailor are comparatively free.'

Note: {3} Written before the Volunteer movement.

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

'Seriously, Claude, I believe you are not far wrong. But we are getting on delicate ground there: however I have always found, that of 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 other Englishmen who never handled rod or gun; or you would not be steering for Exmoor to-day. If a lad be a genius, you may trust him to find some original means for developing his manly energies, whether in art, agriculture, science, or travels, discovery, and commerce. But if 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 they were with the old Persians, "To speak the truth, and to draw the bow."'

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

I commenced my sport at once, while Claude wandered up the glen to sketch a knoll of crags, on which a half-wild moorland pony, the only living 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 since disappeared among the hills; I fancied myself miles from any human being, 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 and spade on shoulder, who had crept on me unawares beneath the wall of the neighbouring deer-cover. Keen honest eyes gleamed out from his brown, scarred, weather-beaten face; and as he settled himself against a rock with the deliberate intention of a chat, I commenced by asking after the landlord of those parts, well known and honoured both 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 a sailor: he had seen the landing in Egypt, and heard the French cannon thundering vainly from the sand-hills on the English boats. He had himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the ship's side to the death-bed of the brave. He had seen Caraccioli hanging at his own yard-arm, and heard (so he said, I know not how correctly) Lady Hamilton order out the barge herself, and row round the frigate of the murdered man, to glut her eyes with her revenge. He had seen, too, the ghastly corpse floating upright, when Nelson and the enchantress met their victim, returned from the sea-depths to stare at them, as Banquo's ghost upon Macbeth. But she was 'a mortal fine woman, was Lady Hamilton, though she was a queer one, and cruel kind to the sailors; and many a man she saved from flogging; and one from hanging, 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; and quite right he, sir; for there be such rascals on board ship, that if you 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 wrong worth, much maudlin unmerciful indulgence which we hear in these days: and yet not going to the bottom of the matter either, as we shall see in the next war. But, rambling on, he told me how he had come 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 death to 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 crawled away, with a sort of stunned surprise. And he had actually seen Nelson sit by Lady Hamilton! It was so strange, to have that gay Italian bay, with all its memories,--the orgies of Baiae, and the unburied wrecks of ancient towns, with the smoking crater far above; and the world-famous Nile-mouths and those great old wars, big with the destinies of the world; and those great old heroes, with their awful deeds for good and evil, all brought so suddenly and livingly before me, up there in the desolate moorland, where the deer, and birds, and heath, and rushes were even as they had been from the beginning. 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 pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.
. . . and when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.'

Just then I heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude toiling down to me over the hill-side. He joined me, footsore and weary, but in great excitement; for the first minute or two he could not speak, and at 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 my antipathy to game and those who live thereby: but there was a wild, bold, self-helping look about him and his gun alone there in the waste--and after all he was a man and a brother. Well, we fell into talk, and fraternized; and at last he offered to take me to a neighbouring 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 their heads again." At which speech I wondered; but was silent, and followed him, I, Claude the Cockney, such a walk as I shall never take again. Behold these trousers--behold these hands! scratched to pieces by crawling on all-fours through the heather. But I saw them.'

'A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers?'

'Worth Saint Chrysostom's seven years' nakedness on all-fours! And so 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, some hundred yards off, the whole herd stood, stags, hinds--but I can't describe them. I have not brought away a scrap of sketch, though we watched them full ten minutes undiscovered; and then the stare, and the toss of those antlers, and the rush! That broke the spell with me; for I had been staring stupidly at them, trying in vain to take in the sight, with the strangest new excitement heaving and boiling up 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 verily believe, had something very like a tear in these excitable eyes of mine.'

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

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

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

'"Do manus," I have been vilifying them, as one does most things in the world, only for want of understanding them. How shall I do penance? 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 one whose works will become, as centuries roll on, more and more valuable to art and to science, and, possibly, to something higher than either.'

'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 the shallow before us, and the soft, south-eastern clouds slid lazily across the sun, and the little trout snapped and dimpled at a tiny partridge hackle, with a twist of orange silk, whose elegance for shape and colour reconciled Claude's heart somewhat to my everlasting whipping of the water. When as last:-

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

Too true; and what could be the cause? Had that impudent sand-piper frightened all the fish on his way up? Had an otter paralysed them with terror for the morning? Or had a stag been down to drink? We saw the fresh slot of his broad claws, by the bye, in the mud a few yards 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 non sequitur.'

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

'Fish and deer, friend, see us purblind sons of men somewhat more quickly than we see them, fear sharpening the senses. Perhaps, after all, the fault is in your staring white-straw hat, a garment which has 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 is at hand, while the breeze, awe-stricken, falls dead calm before his march. Behold, climbing above that eastern ridge, his huge powdered cauliflower-wig, barred with a grey horizontal handkerchief of mist.'

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

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

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

'And now, since your heart is softened towards these wild, stag- hunting, trout fishing, jovial west-countrymen, consider whether it should not be softened likewise toward those old outlaw ballads which I have never yet been able to make you admire. They express feelings not 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 poaching counties, and on the edges of one forest after another,--feelings which must be satisfied, even in the highest development of the civilization of the future, for they are innate in every thoughtful and energetic race,--feelings which, though they have often led to crime, have far oftener delivered from swinish sensuality; the feelings which drove into the merry greenwood "Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John;" "Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William of Cloudislee;" the feelings which prompted one half of his inspiration to the nameless immortal who wrote the "Nutbrown Maid;"--feelings which could not then, and cannot now, be satisfied by the drudgery of a barbaric agriculture, which, without science, economy, or enterprise, offers no food for the highest instincts of the human mind, its yearnings after Nature, after freedom, and the noble excitement of self-dependent energy.'

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

II.--THE COAST LINE.

It is four o'clock on a May morning, and Claude and I are just embarking on board a Clovelly trawling skiff, which, having disposed of her fish at various ports along the Channel, is about to run leisurely homewards with an ebb tide, and a soft north-easterly breeze.

So farewell, fair Lynmouth; and ye storm-spirits, send us a propitious day; and dismiss those fantastic clouds which are coquetting with your thrones, crawling down one hill-side, and whirling and leaping up another, in wreaths of snow, and dun, and amber, pierced every minute by some long glittering upward arrow from the rising sun, which gilds grey crags and downs a thousand feet above, while underneath the gorges still sleep black and cold in shade.

There, they have heard us! The cap rises off the 'Summer-house hill,' that eight hundred feet of upright wall, which seems ready to topple down into the nest of be-myrtled cottages at its foot; and as we sweep out into the deeper water the last mist-flake streams up from the Foreland, and vanishes in white threads into the stainless blue.

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

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

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

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

'Confest: and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth! Farewell to the charming contrast of civilized English landscape-gardening, with its villas, and its exotics, and its evergreens, thus strangely and yet harmoniously 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 of the Future. How its alternations of Art and Savagery at once startle and relieve the sense, as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses of piled boulders, and torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern- fringed waterfalls, into "trim walks, and fragrant alleys green; and the door of a summer-house transports you at a step from Richmond to the Alps. Happy he who "possesses," as the world calls it, and happier still he whose taste could organize, that fairy bower.'

So he, magniloquently, as was his wont; and yet his declamations always flowed with such a graceful ease,--a simple, smiling earnestness,--an unpractised melody of voice, that what would have been rant from other lips, from his showed only as the healthy enthusiasm of the passionate, all-seeing, all-loving artist.

'Look yonder, again,' said he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewn hill-side above us. 'One wonders at that sight, whether the fable of the giants be not true after all,--and that "Vale of Rocks," hanging five hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and tottering battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, which hang sloping, caught in act to fall, be not some enormous Cyclopean temple left half-disinterred: or is it a fragment of old Chaos, left unorganized?--or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, after the rest of England had been made, some angel put up a notice for his fellows, "Dry rubbish shot here"?'

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

What a sea-wall they are, those Exmoor hills! Sheer upward from the sea a thousand feet rise the downs; and as we slide and stagger lazily along before the dying breeze, through the deep water which never leaves the cliff, the eye ranges, almost dizzy, up some five hundred feet of rock, dappled with every hue; from the intense dark of the tide-line, through the warm green and brown rock-shadows, out of which the horizontal cracks of the strata loom black, and the breeding gulls show like lingering snow-flakes; up to the middle cliff, where delicate grey fades into pink, pink into red, red into glowing purple; up to where the purple is streaked with glossy ivy wreaths, and black-green yews; up to where all the choir of colours vanishes abruptly on the mid-hill, to give place to one yellowish- grey sheet of upward down, sweeping aloft smooth and unbroken, except by a lonely stone, or knot of clambering sheep, and stopped by one great rounded waving line, sharp-cut against the brilliant blue. The sheep hang like white daisies upon the steep; and a solitary falcon rides, a speck in air, yet far below the crest of that tall hill. Now he sinks to the cliff edge, and hangs quivering, supported, like a kite, by the pressure of his breast and long curved wings, against the 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 wrists of kings. And now he is full proud of any mouse or cliff-lark; like an old Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans, he lingers round 'the hunting-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 huge High Vere shall be crowned with golden wheat, and every rock-ledge on Trentishoe, like those of Petra and the Rhine, support its garden-bed of artificial soil.'

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

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

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

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

'The Hangman.'

'An ominous name. What is its history?'

'Some sheep-stealer, they say, clambering over a wall with his booty slung round his neck, was literally hung by the poor brute's struggles, and found days after on the mountain-side, a blackened corpse on one side of the wall, with the sheep on the other, and the ravens--You may fill up the picture for yourself.'

But, see, as we round the Hangman, what a change of scene--the square-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under dark slate-beds, fantastically bent and broken by primeval earthquakes. Wooded combes, and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and slope towards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked harbours. There shines among the woods the Castle of Watermouth, on its lovely little salt-water loch, the safest harbour on the coast; and there is Combe-Martin, mile-long man-stye, which seven centuries of fruitless silver-mining, and of the right (now deservedly lost) of 'sending a talker to the national palaver,' have neither cleansed nor civilized. Turn, turn thy head away, dear Claude, lest even at this distance some foul odour taint the summer airs, and complete the misfortune already presaged by that pale, sad face, sickening in the burning calm! For this great sun-roasted fire-brick of the Exmoor range is fairly burning up the breeze, and we have nothing but the tide to drift us slowly down to Ilfracombe.

Now we open Rillage, and now Hillsborough, two of the most picturesque of headlands; see how their round foreheads of glistening grey shale sink down into two dark, jagged moles, running far out to seaward, 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 the solid mass which rests upon them! Look, too, at the glaring lights and Tartarean shadows of those chasms and caves, which the tide never leaves, or the foot of man explores; and listen how, at every rush of the long ground-swell, mysterious mutterings, solemn sighs, sudden thunders, as of a pent-up earthquake, boom out of them across the glassy swell. Look at those blasts of delicate vapour that shoot up from hidden rifts, and hang a moment, and vanish; and those green columns of wave which rush mast-high up the perpendicular walls, and then fall back and outward in a waterfall of foam, lacing the black rocks with a thousand snowy streams. There they fall, and leap, and fall again. And so they did yesterday, and the day before; and so they did centuries ago, when the Danes swept past them, battleworn, and sad of heart for the loss of the magic raven flag, from the fight at 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 the ichthyosaur paddled beneath the shade of tropic forests--now scanty turf and golden gorse. And so they will leap and fall on, on, through the centuries and the ages. O dim abyss of Time, into which we peer shuddering, what will be the end of thee, and of this ceaseless coil and moan of waters? It is true, that when thou shalt be no more, then, too, 'there shall be no more sea;' and this ocean bed, this great grave of fertility, into which all earth's wasted riches stream, day and night, from hill and town, shall rise and become fruitful soil, corn-field and meadow-land; and earth shall teem as thick with living men as bean-fields with the summer bees? What a consummation! At least there is One greater than sea, or time: and the Judge of all the earth will do right.

But there is Ilfracombe, with its rock-walled harbour, its little wood of masts within, its white terraces, rambling up the hills, and its capstone sea-walk, the finest 'marine parade,' as Cockneydom terms it, in all England, except that splendid Hoe at Plymouth, 'Lam Goemagot,' Gog-magog's leap, as the old Britains called it, over which Corineus threw that mighty giant. And there is the little isolated rock-chapel, where seven hundred years ago, our west-country forefathers used to go to pray St. Nicholas for deliverance from shipwreck,--a method lovingly regretted by some, as a 'pious idea of the Ages of faith.' We, however, shall prefer the method of lighthouses and the worthy Trinity Board, as actually more godly and 'faithful,' as well as more useful; and, probably, so do the sailors themselves.

But Claude is by this time nearly sick of the roasting calm, and the rolling ground-swell, and the smell of fish, and is somewhat sleepy also, between early rising and incoherent sermons; wherefore, if he takes good advice, he will stay and recruit himself at Ilfracombe, before he proceeds further with his self-elected cicerone on the grand tour of North Devon. Believe me, Claude, you will not stir from 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 or cheaper place of cure (to indulge in a puff of a species now well nigh obsolete, the puff honest and true) than this same Ilfracombe, with its quiet nature and its quiet luxury, its rock fairyland and its sea-walks, its downs and combes, its kind people, and, if possible, its still kinder climate, which combines the soft warmth of South Devon with the bracing freshness of the Welsh mountains; where winter has slipped out of the list of the seasons, and mother Earth makes up for her summer's luxury by fasting, 'not in sackcloth and ashes, but in new silk and old sack;' and instead of standing three months chin-deep in ice, and christening great snowballs her 'friends and family,' as St. Francis of Assisi did of old, knows no severer asceticism 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 I went, through a country which owes its civilization and tillage to the spirit of one man, who has found stag-preserving by no means incompatible with large agricultural improvements; among a population who still evince an unpleasant partiality for cutting and carrying farmers' crops by night, without leave or licence, and for housebreaking after the true classic method of Athens, by fairly digging holes through the house walls; a little nook of primeval savagery fast reorganizing itself under the influences of these better days. I had been on Dartmoor, too; but of that noble moorland range so much has been said and sung of late, that I really am afraid it is becoming somewhat cockney and trite. Far and wide I had wandered, rod in hand, becoming a boy again in the land of my boyhood, till, once more at Ilfracombe, opposite me sat Claude Mellot, just beginning to bloom again into cheerfulness.

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

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

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

And now behold us on our way up lovely combes, with their green copses, ridges of rock, golden furze, fruit-laden orchards, and slopes of emerald pasture, pitched as steep as house-roofs, where the red 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 little snug farms and homesteads of the Damnonii, 'dwellers in the valley,' as we West-countrymen were called of old. Now we are leaving them far below us; the blue hazy sea is showing far above the serrated ridge of the Tors, and their huge bank of sunny green: and before us is a desolate table-land of rushy pastures and mouldering banks, festooned with the delicate network of the little ivy-leaved campanula, loveliest of British wild-flowers, fit with its hair-like stems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the temples of Titania. Alas! we have passed out of the world into limbum patrum, and the region of ineffectuality and incompleteness. The only cultivators here, and through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, are the rook and mole: and yet the land is rich enough--the fat deep crumbling of the shale and ironstone returning year by year into the mud, from whence it hardened ages since. There are scores of farms of far worse land in mid-England, under 'a four-course shift,' yielding their load of wheat an acre. When will that land do as much? When will the spirit of Smith of Deanston and Grey of Dilston descend on North Devon? When will some true captain of industry, and Theseus of the nineteenth century, like the late Mr. Warnes of Trimmingham, teach the people here to annihilate poor-rates by growing flax upon some of the finest flax land, and in the finest flax climate, that we have in England? The shrewd Cornishmen of Launceston and Bodmin have awakened long ago to 'the new gospel of fertility.' When will North Devon awake?

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

'We will not talk politics, Claude. Our modern expediency mongers have made them pro tempore an extinct science. "Let the dead bury their dead." The social questions are now-a-days becoming far more important 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 greater part of that land will be only broken up to be exhausted by corn-crop after corn-crop, till it can bear no more, and the very manure which is drawn home from it in the shape of a few turnips will be wasted by every rain of heaven, and the straw probably used to mend bad places in the road with; while the land returns to twenty years of worse sterility than ever; on the ground that -

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

'But here is Morte below us. "The little grey church on the windy shore," which once belonged to William de Tracy, one of your friend Thomas a Becket's murderers. If you wish to vent your wrath against those who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, there is a tomb in the church which bears De Tracy's name; over which rival Dryasdusts contend fiercely with paper-arrows: the one party asserting that he became a priest, and died here in the wilderness; the others that the tomb is of later date, that he fled hence to Italy, under favour of a certain easy-going Bishop of Exeter, and died penitent and duly shriven, according to the attestations of a certain or uncertain Bishop of Cosenza.'

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

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

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

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

'All the fitter for a misanthrope. But where are the trees? I have not seen one for the last four miles.'

'Nor will you for a few miles more. Whatever will grow here (and most 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 a south-westerly gale here, when the foam-flakes are flying miles inland, and you are fain to cling breathless to bank and bush, if you want to get one look at those black fields of shark's-tooth tide- rocks, champing and churning the great green rollers into snow. Wild folk are these here, gatherers of shell-fish and laver, and merciless to wrecked vessels, which they consider as their own by immemorial usage, or rather right divine. Significant, how an agricultural people is generally as cruel to wrecked seamen, as a fishing one is merciful. I could tell you twenty stories of the baysmen down there to the westward risking themselves like very heroes to save strangers' lives, and beating off the labouring folk who swarmed down for plunder from the inland hills.'

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

'Hardly a winter passes without a wreck or two. You see there lying about the timbers of more than one tall ship. You see, too, that black rock a-wash far out at sea, apparently a submarine outlier of the north horn of this wide rock-amphitheatre below us. That is the Morte 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 conceive being entrapped between it and the cliffs, on some blinding, whirling winter's night, when the land is shrouded thick in clouds, and the roar of the breakers hardly precedes by a minute the crash of your bows against the rocks.'

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

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

'Look at that sheet of yellow sand below us now, banked to the inland with sand-hills and sunny downs, and ending abruptly at the foot of that sombre wall of slate-hill, which runs out like a huge pier into the 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 with sand. Those are shells; the sweepings of the ocean bed for miles around, piled there, millions upon millions, yards deep, in every stage of destruction. There they lie grinding to dust; and every gale brings in fresh myriads from the inexhaustible sea-world, as if Death could be never tired of devouring, or God of making. The brain grows dizzy and tired, as one's feet crunch over the endless variety of their forms.'

'And then one recollects that every one of them has been a living thing--a whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, and death. Waste it cannot be, or cruelty on the part of the Maker: but why this infinite development of life, apparently only to furnish out of 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 put together as in one little child: and it may die the hour that it is born! What we call life is but an appearance and a becoming; the true life of existence belongs only to spirits. And whether or not we, or the sea-shell there, are at any given moment helping to make up part of some pretty little pattern in this great kaleidoscope called the material universe, yet, in the spirit all live to Him, and shall do so for ever.'

And thereon he rambled off into a long lecture on 'species-spirits,' and 'individual-spirits,' and 'personal spirits,' doubtless most important. But I, what between the sun, the luncheon, and the metaphysic, sank into soft slumbers, from which I was only awakened by the carriage stopping, according to our order, on the top of Saunton hill.

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

At our feet was a sea of sand--for the half-mile to the right smooth as a floor, bounded by a broad band of curling waves, which crept slowly shorewards with the advancing tide. Right underneath us the sand was drifted for miles into fantastic hills, which quivered in the heat, the glaring yellow of its lights chequered by delicate pink shadows and sheets of grey-green bent. To the left were rich alluvial marshes, covered with red cattle sleeping in the sun, and laced with creeks and flowery dykes; and here and there a scarlet line, which gladdened Claude's eye as being a 'bit of positive colour in the foreground,' and mine, because they were draining tiles. Beyond again, two broad tide-rivers, spotted with white and red-brown sails, gleamed like avenues of silver, past knots of gay dwellings, and tall lighthouses, and church-towers, and wandered each on its own road, till they vanished among the wooded hills. On the eastern horizon the dark range of Exmoor sank gradually into lower and more broken ridges, which rolled away, woodland beyond woodland, till all outlines were lost in purple haze; while, far beyond, the granite peaks of Dartmoor hung like a delicate blue cloud, and enticed the eye away into infinity. From hence, as our eyes swept round the horizon, the broken hills above the river's mouth gradually rose into the table-land of the 'barren coal-measures' some ten miles off,--a long straight wall of cliffs which hounded the broad bay, buried in deepest shadow, except where the opening of some glen revealed far depths of sunlit wood. A faint perpendicular line of white houses, midway along the range, marked our destination; and far to the westward, the land ended sheer and suddenly at the cliffs of Hartland, 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 the opposite cape, that it required no scientific imagination to supply the vast gap which the primeval currents had sawn out. There it all lay beneath us like a map; its thousand hues toned down harmoniously into each other by the summer haze, and 'the eye was not filled with seeing,' nor the spirit with the intoxicating sight of infinitely various 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 Cockney but would burst out with some enthusiastic commonplace at such a sight--surely one or other of them must be appropriate.'

'Silence, profane! and take me away from this. Let us go down, and hide 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 what they mean?'

So down we went upon the burrows, among the sands, which hid from us every object but their own chaotic curves and mounds. Above, a hundred skylarks made the air ring with carollings; strange and gaudy plants flecked the waste round us; and insects without number whirred over our heads, or hung poised with their wings outspread on the tall stalks of marram grass. All at once a cloud hid the sun, and a summer whirlwind, presage of the thunderstorm, swept past us, carrying up with it a column of dry sand, and rattling the dry bents over our heads.

'What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds!' said Claude. 'I can conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter's sky instead of this 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 the dead shells are rolling and crawling up the beach in wreaths before the gale, with a ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the "Valley of Vision," and when not a flower shows on that sandcliff, which is now one 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 give a tone to the colouring of the whole landscape, as they are said to do in the prairies of Texas. And look how flowers and cliff are both glowing in a warm green haze, like that of Cuyp's wonderful sandcliff picture in the Dulwich Gallery,--wonderful, as I think, and true, let some critics revile it as much as they will.'

'Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here; its curious resemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years ago, a living interest in landscape-painting. But look there; even in these grand summer days there is a sight before us sad enough. There are the ribs 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 are those two ravens rising, stirring up with their obscene wings a sickly, putrescent odour? A corpse?'

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

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

'Say rather, the beginning thereof,' Claude answered, stepping into the 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 will be so. Take care of that huge boom, landsman Claude, swaying and sweeping backwards and forwards across the deck, unless you wish to be knocked overboard. Take care, too, of that loose rope's end, unless you wish to have your eyes cut out. Take my advice, lie down here across the deck, as others are doing. Cover yourself with great-coats, like an Irishman, to keep yourself cool, and let us meditate little on this strange thing, and strange place, which holds us now.

Look at those spars, how they creak and groan with every heave of the long glassy swell. How those sails flap, and thunder, and rage, with useless outcries and struggles--only because they are idle. Let the wind take them, and they will be steady, silent in an instant--their deafening dissonant grumbling exchanged for the soft victorious song of the breeze through the rigging, musical, self-contented, as of bird on bough. So it is through life; there is no true rest but labour. "No true misery," as Carlyle says, "but in that of not being able to work." Some may call it a pretty conceit. I call it a great worldwide law, which reaches from earth to heaven. Whatever the Preacher may have thought it in a moment of despondency, what is it but a blessing that "sun, and wind, and rivers, and ocean," as he says, 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 and out here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay, more, in the very water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls may have hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath glaring white-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and cocoa- nuts, and shaddock groves. For on those white sands there to the left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and tropic seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their fragile shells of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously in fleets from the far west out of the passing Gulf Stream, where they have been sailing out their little life, never touching shore or ground, but buoyed each by his cluster of air-bubbles, pumped in at will under the skin of his tiny foot, by some cunning machinery of valves--small creatures truly, but very wonderful to men who have learned to reverence not merely the size of things, but the wisdom of their idea, and raising strange longings and dreams about that submarine ocean-world which stretches, teeming with richer life than this terrestrial one, away, away there westward, down the path of the sun, toward the future centre of the world's destiny.

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

I do not know, Tom: but I, too, suspect not; and I do know that honest men's guesses are sometimes found by science to have been prophecies, and that there is no smoke without fire, and few universal legends without their nucleus of fact. After all, those sea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a hurry, at the mere despotic fiat of stern old Dame Analysis, divine and reverend as she 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 wonders which she herself reveals daily? Perhaps, too, according to the Duke of Wellington's great dictum, that each man must be the best judge in his own profession, sailors may know best whether mermaids exist or not. Besides, was it not here on Croyde Sands abreast of us, this very last summer, that a maiden--by which beautiful old word West- country people still call young girls--was followed up the shore by a mermaid who issued from the breakers, green-haired, golden-combed, and all; and, fleeing home, took to her bed and died, poor thing, of sheer terror in the course of a few days, persisting in her account of the monster? True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown Lundy Island seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring-tides and a school of fish. Be it so. Lundy and its seals are wonderful enough in all reason to thinking men, as it looms up there out of the Atlantic, with its two great square headlands, not twenty miles from us, in the white summer haze. We will go there some day, and pick up a 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: there they come; the great white horses, that 'champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.' That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels over, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the weight of her heavy 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 a superstition somewhat beneath both his years and his religion, but cannot help pursing up his lips into a sly 'whe-eugh' when he has got well 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 rise again like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Father and sons are struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken squaresail forward; while we haul away upon the main-sheet.

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

Exquisite motion! more maddening than the smooth floating stride of the race-horse, or the crash of the thorn-hedges before the stalwart hunter, or the swaying of the fir-boughs in the gale, when we used to climb as schoolboys after the lofty hawk's nest; but not so maddening as the new motion of our age--the rush of the express-train, when the live iron pants and leaps and roars through the long chalk cutting; and white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky and vanish; and rocks, and grass, and bushes, fleet by in dim blended lines; and the long hedges revolve like the spokes of a gigantic wheel; and far below, 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 and helplessness, we are swept on by that great pulse of England's life- blood, rushing down her iron veins; and dimly out of the future looms the fulfilment of our primaeval mission, to conquer and subdue the earth, and space too, and time, and all things,--even, hardest of all tasks, yourselves, my cunning brothers ever learning some fresh lesson, except that hardest one of all, that it is the Spirit of God which 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 rushes matter, more swiftly rushes mind; more swiftly still rushes the heavenly dawn up the eastern sky. 'The night is far spent, the day is 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 deep subjects; so let us while away the time by picking the brains of this tall handsome boy at the helm, who is humming a love-song to himself sotto voce, lest it should be overheard by the grey-headed father, who is forward, poring over his Wesleyan hymn-book. He will have something to tell you; he has a soul in him looking out of those wild dark eyes, and delicate aquiline features of his. He is no spade- drudge or bullet-headed Saxon clod: he has in his veins the blood of Danish rovers and passionate southern Milesians, who came hither from Teffrobani, the Isle of Summer, as the old Fenic myths inform us. Come and chat with him. You dare not stir? Perhaps you are in the right. I shall go and fraternize, and bring you reports.

* * * *

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

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

'Oh, you must not forget the halo of glory and excitement which in a sailor's eyes surrounds the delights of horseback. But he gave me besides 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 city were 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 were coming swiftly to an end. The rock clefts grew sharper and sharper before us. The soft masses of the lofty bank of wooded cliff rose higher and higher. The white houses of Clovelly, piled stair above stair up the rocks, gleamed more and more brightly out of the green round bosoms of the forest. As we shut in headland after headland, one tall conical rock after another darkened with its black pyramid the bright orb of the setting sun. Soon we began to hear the soft murmur of the snowy surf line; then the merry voices of the children along the shore; and running straight for the cliff-foot, we shipped into the little pier, from whence the red-sailed herring-boats were swarming forth like bees out of a hive, full of gay handsome faces, and all the busy blue-jacketed life of seaport towns, to their night's fishing in the bay.

IV.--CLOVELLY.

A couple of days had passed, and I was crawling up the paved stairs inaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly denominated 'Clovelly-street,' a landing-net full of shells in one hand, and a couple 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, 200 feet below, and in front, another hundred feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak, and ash, and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs, and bright green railings, packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the tall tree-fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps of court-yard, calling the rich faint odour out of the verbenas and jessamines, and, alas! out of the herring-heads and tails also, as they lay in the rivulet; and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies, almost unknown in our colder eastern climate, which fluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up to woodland, and seemed to form the connecting link between that swarming hive of human industry and the deep wild woods in which it was embosomed. So up I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my own catching,--excellent fish, despised by deluded Cockneys, who fancy that because its head is large and prickly, therefore its flesh is not as firm, and sweet, and white, as that of any cod who ever gobbled shell-fish,--when down the stair front of me, greasy as ice from the daily shower, came slipping and staggering, my friend Claude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio.

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

'Not I. I have been roaming up and down this same "New Road" above us; and find there materials for a good week's more work, if I could afford it. Indeed, it was only to-day, for the first time, that I got as far as the lodge at the end of it, and then was glad enough to turn back shuddering at the first glimpse of the flat, dreary moorland beyond,--as Adam may have turned back into Eden after a peep out of the gates of Paradise.'

He should have taken courage and gone a half-mile further,--to the furze-grown ruins of a great Roman camp, which gives its name to the place, 'Clovelly,'--Vallum Clausum, or Vallis Clausa, as antiquarians derive it; perhaps, 'the hidden camp,' or glen,--perhaps something else. Who cares? The old Romans were there, at least 10,000 strong: and some sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough to perch his summer-house out on a conical point of the Hartland Cliffs, now tumbling into the sea, tesselated pavement, baths and all. And strange work, no doubt, went on in that lonely nook, looking out over the Atlantic swell,--nights and days fit for Petronius's own pen, among a seraglio of dark Celtic beauties. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. An ugly state of things--as heathen conquests always must have been; yet even in it there was a use and meaning. But they are past like a dream, those 10,000 stalwart men, who looked far and wide over the Damnonian moors from a station which would be, even in these days, a first-rate military position. Gone, too, are the old Saxon Franklins who succeeded. Old Wrengils, or some such name, whoever he was, at last found some one's bill too hard for his brain-pan; and there he lies on the hill above, in his 'barrow' of Wrinklebury. And gone, too, the gay Norman squire, who, as tradition says, kept his fair lady in the old watch-tower, on the highest point of the White Cliff--'Gallantry Bower,' as they call it to this day--now a mere ring of turf-covered stones, and a few low stunted oaks, shorn by the Atlantic blasts into the shape of two huge cannon, which form a favourite landmark for the fisherman of the bay. Gone they all are, Cymry and Roman, Saxon and Norman; and upon the ruins of their accumulated labour we stand here. Each of them had his use,--planted a 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 of improvement, which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, swifter and swifter still as it goes on, to stop, just because it is not convenient to us just now to move on? It will not take another nineteen hundred years, be sure, to make even this lovely nook as superior to what it is now as it is now to the little knot of fishing huts where naked Britons peeped out, trembling at the iron tramp of each insolent legionary from the camp above. It will not take another nineteen hundred years to develope the capabilities of this place,--to make it the finest fishery in England, next to Torbay,-- the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, along sixty miles of ruthless coast,--and a commercial centre for a vast tract of half- tilled land within, which only requires means of conveyance to be as fertile and valuable as nine-tenths of England. Meanwhile Claude ought to have seen the deer-park. The panorama from that old ruined 'bower' of cliff and woodland, down and sea, is really unique in its way.

'So is the whole place, in my eyes,' said Claude. 'I have seen nothing in England to be compared to this little strip of paradise between two great waste worlds of sea and moor. Lynmouth might be matched among the mountains of Wales and Ireland. The first three miles of the Rheidol, from the Devil's Bridge towards Aberystwith, or the gorge of the Wye, down the opposite watershed of the same mountains, from Castle Dufferin down to Rhaiadyr, are equal to it in magnificence of form and colour, and superior in size. But I question whether anything ever charmed me more than did the return to the sounds of nature which greeted me to-day, as I turned back from the dreary, silent moorland turnpike into this new road, terraced along the cliffs and woods--those who first thought of cutting it must have had souls in them above the herd--and listened to a glorious concert in four parts, blending and supporting each other in exquisite harmony, from the shrill treble of a thousand birds, and the soft melancholy alto of the moaning woods, downward through the rich tenor hum of innumerable insects, who hung like sparks of fire beneath 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 inland character of the deep woods, luxuriant ferns, and gaudy flowers. It is that very contrast which makes the place so unique. One is accustomed to connect with the notion of the sea bare cliffs, breezy downs, stunted shrubs struggling for existence: and instead of them behold a forest wall, 500 feet high, of almost semi-tropic luxuriance. At one turn, a deep glen, with its sea of green woods, filled up at the mouth with the bright azure sheet of ocean.--Then some long stretch of the road would be banked on one side with crumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden hawkweed, and London pride, like velvet cushions covered with pink lace, and beds of white bramble blossom alive with butterflies; while above my head, and on my right, the cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded me so close, that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried in some glen unknown to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere between green 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 fall down, down, through the abyss of perpendicular wood, tree below tree clinging to and clothing the cliff, or rather no cliff; but perpendicular sheet of deep wood sedge, and broad crown ferns, spreading their circular fans.--But there is no describing them, or painting them either.--And then to see how the midday sunbeams leapt past one down the abyss, throwing out here a grey stem by one point of burnished silver, there a hazel branch by a single leaf of glowing golden green, shooting long bright arrows down, through the dim, hot, hazy atmosphere of the wood, till it rested at last upon the dappled beach of pink and grey pebbles, and the dappled surge which wandered up and down among them, and broke up into richer intricacy with its chequer-work of woodland shadows, the restless net of snowy foam.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I can well believe it. Simple lines in a landscape are of the same value as the naked parts of a richly-clothed figure. They act both as contrasts and as indications of the original substratum of the figure; but to say that severe simplicity is the highest ideal is mere 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 the thirteenth century. But let that pass. This craving after so-called classic art, whether it be Manicheism or not, is certainly a fighting against God,--a contempt of everything which He has taught us artists since the introduction of Christianity. I abominate this setting up of Sculpture above Painting, of the Greeks above the Italians,--as if all Eastern civilization, all Christian truth, had taught art nothing,--as if there was not more real beauty in a French cathedral or a Venetian palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more soul in one Rafaelle, or Titian either, than in all the Greek statues of the Tribune or Vatican.'

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

'Yes, as long as I believed in Fuseli's "Lectures;" but when I saw at Pompeii the ancient paintings which still remain to us, my faith in their powers received its first shock; and when I re-read in the Lectures of Fuseli and his school all their extravagant praises of the Greek painters, and separated their few facts fairly out from among the floods of rant on which they floated, I came to the conclusion that the ancients knew as little of colour or chiaroscuro as they did of perspective, and as little of spiritual expression as they did of landscape-painting. What do I care for the birds pecking at Zeuxis's grapes, or Zeuxis himself trying to draw back Parrhasius's curtain? Imitative art is the lowest trickery. There are twenty men in England now capable of the same sleight of hand; and yet these are recorded as the very highest triumphs of ancient art 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, that classic sculpture has finished its work on earth. You know that it has taught you what Gothic art could never teach,--the ideal of physical health and strength. Believe that it exists, and will exist, to remind the puny town-dweller of the existence of that ideal; to say to the artisan, every time he looks upon a statue--such God intended you to be; such you may be; such your class will be, in some future healthy state of civilization, when Sanitary Reform and Social Science shall be accepted and carried out as primary duties of a government toward the nation.

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

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

Claude and I went forth along the cliffs of a park, which, though not of the largest, is certainly of the loveliest in England,--perhaps unique, from that abrupt contact of the richest inland scenery with the open sea, which is its distinctive feature. As we wandered along the edge of the cliff, beneath us on our left lay wooded valleys, lawns spotted with deer, stately timber trees, oak and beech, birch and alder, growing as full and round-headed as if they had been buried in some Shropshire valley fifty miles inland, instead of having the Atlantic breezes all the winter long sweeping past a few hundred feet above their still seclusion. Glens of forest wound away into the high inner land, with silver burns sparkling here and there under their deep shadows; while from the lawns beneath, the ground sloped rapidly upwards towards us, to stop short in a sheer wall of cliff, over which the deer were leaning to crop the shoots of ivy, where the slipping of a stone would have sent them 400 feet perpendicular into the sea. On our right, from our very feet, the sea spread out to the horizon; a single falcon was wheeling about the ledges below; a single cormorant was fishing in the breakers, diving and rising again like some tiny water-beetle;

'The murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered pebbles idly chafed
Could not be heard so high.'

The only sound beside the rustle of the fern before the startled deer was the soft mysterious treble of the wind as it swept over the face of the cliff beneath us; but the cool air was confined to the hill- tops round beneath, from within a short distance of the shore, the sea was shrouded in soft summer haze. The far Atlantic lay like an ocean of white wool, out of which the Hartland Cliffs and the highest point of Lundy just showed their black peaks. Here and there the western sun caught one white bank of mist after another, and tinged them 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, and seemed to vanish hundreds of miles off into the void of space, so completely was all notion of size or distance destroyed by the soft gradations of the mist. Suddenly, as we stood watching, a breeze from the eastward dived into the basin of the bay, swept the clouds out, packed them together, rolled them over each other, and hurled them into the air miles high in one Cordillera of snowy mountains, sailing slowly out into the Atlantic; and behold, instead of the chaos of mist, the whole amphitheatre of cliffs, with their gay green woods and spots of bright red marl and cold black ironstone, and the gleaming white sands of Braunton, and the hills of Exmoor bathed in sunshine, so near and clear we almost fancied we could see the pink heather-hue upon them; and the bay one vast rainbow, ten miles of flame-colour and purple, emerald and ultramarine, flecked with a thousand spots of flying snow. No one knows what gigantic effects of colour even our temperate zone can show, till they have been in Devonshire and Cornwall; and last, but not least, in Ireland--the Emerald Isle, in truth. No stay-at-home knows the colour of the sea till he has seen the West of England; and no one, either stay-at-home or traveller, I suspect, knows what the colour of a green field can be till he has seen it among the magic smiles and tears of an Irish summer shower in county Down.

Down we wandered from our height through 'trim walks and alleys green,' where the arbutus and gumcistus fringed the cliffs, and through the deep glades of the park, towards the delicious little cove which bounds it.--A deep crack in the wooded hills, an old mill half buried in rocks and flowers, a stream tinkling on from one rock- basin to another towards the beach, a sandy lawn gay with sea-side flowers over which wild boys and bare-footed girls were driving their ponies with panniers full of sand, and as they rattled back to the beach for a fresh load, standing upright on the backs of their steeds, with one foot in each pannier, at full trot over rocks and stones where a landsman would find it difficult to walk on his own legs.

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

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

Yes; there must have been strange work here when all these strata were being pressed and squeezed together like a ream of wet paper between the rival granite pincers of Dartmoor and Lundy. They must have suffered enough then in a few years to give them a fair right to lie quiet till Doomsday, as they seem likely to do. But it is only old Mother Earth who has fallen asleep hereabouts. Air and sea are just as live as ever. Ay, lovely and calm enough spread beneath us there the broad semicircle of the bay; but to know what it can be, it should be seen as I have seen it, when, in the roaring December morning, we have been galloping along the cliffs, wreck-hunting.--One morning I can remember well, how we watched from the Hartland Cliffs a great barque, which came drifting and rolling in before the western gale, while we followed her up the coast, parsons and sportsmen, farmers and Preventive men, with the Manby's mortar lumbering behind us in a cart, through stone gaps and track-ways, from headland to headland.--The maddening excitement of expectation as she ran wildly towards the cliffs at our feet, and then sheered off again inexplicably;--her foremast and bowsprit, I recollect, were gone short off by the deck; a few rags of sail fluttered from her main and mizen. But with all straining of eyes and glasses, we could discern no sign of man on board. Well I recollect the mingled disappointment and admiration of the Preventive men, as a fresh set of salvors appeared in view, in the form of a boat's crew of Clovelly fishermen; how we watched breathlessly the little black speck crawling and struggling up in the teeth of the gale, under the shelter of the land, till, when the ship had rounded a point into smoother water, she seized on her like some tiny spider on a huge unwieldy fly; and then 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, and again, and almost fancied we could hear the thunder of its flappings above the roar of the gale, and the mountains of surf which made the rocks ring beneath our feet;--and how we stood silent, shuddering, expecting every moment to see whirled into the sea from the plunging yards one of those same tiny black specks, in each one of which was a living human soul, with sad women praying for him at home! And then how they tried to get her head round to the wind, and disappeared instantly in a cloud of white spray--and let her head fall back again--and jammed it round again, and disappeared again--and at last let her drive helplessly up the bay, while we kept pace with her along the cliffs; and how at last, when she had been mastered and fairly taken in tow, and was within two miles of the pier, and all hearts were merry with the hopes of a prize which would make them rich, perhaps, for years to come--one-third, I suppose, of the whole value of her cargo--how she broke loose from them at the last moment, and rushed frantically in upon those huge rocks below us, leaping great banks of slate at the blow of each breaker, tearing off masses of ironstone which lie there to this day to tell the tale, till she drove up high and dry against the cliff, and lay, like an enormous stranded whale, grinding and crashing herself to pieces against the walls of her adamantine cage. And well I recollect the sad records of the log-book which was left on board the deserted ship; how she had been waterlogged for weeks and weeks, buoyed up by her timber cargo, the crew clinging in the tops, and crawling down, when they dared, for putrid biscuit-dust and drops of water, till the water was washed overboard and gone; and then notice after notice, 'On this day such an one died,' 'On this day such an one was washed away'--the log kept up to the last, even when there was only that to tell, by the stern business-like merchant skipper, whoever he was; and how at last, when there was neither food nor water, the strong man's heart seemed to have quailed, or perhaps risen, into a prayer, jotted down in the log--'The Lord have mercy on us!'--and then a blank of several pages, and, scribbled with a famine-shaken hand, 'Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth;'--and so the log and the ship were left 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 has really, as sailors feel, a personality, almost a life and soul of her own; and as long as her timbers hold together, all is not over. You can hardly call her a corpse, though the human beings who inhabited her, and were her soul, may have fled into the far eternities; and so we felt that night, as we came down along the woodland road, with the north-west wind hurling dead branches and showers of crisp oak-leaves about our heads; till suddenly, as we staggered out of the wood, we came upon such a piece of chiaroscuro as would have baffled Correggio, or Rembrandt, himself. Under a wall was a long tent of sails and spars, filled with Preventive men, fishermen, Lloyd's underwriters, lying about in every variety of strange attitude and costume; while candles, stuck in bayonet-handles in the wall, poured out a wild glare over shaggy faces and glittering weapons, and piles of timber, and rusty iron cable, that glowed red-hot in the light, and then streamed up the glen towards us through the salt misty air in long fans of light, sending fiery bars over the brown transparent oak foliage and the sad beds of withered autumn flowers, and glorifying the wild flakes of foam, as they rushed across the light- stream, into troops of tiny silver angels, that vanished into the night and hid themselves among the woods from the fierce spirit of the storm. And then, just where the glare of the lights and watch- fires was most brilliant, there too the black shadows of the cliff had placed the point of intensest darkness, lightening gradually upwards right and left, between the two great jaws of the glen, into a chaos of grey mist, where the eye could discern no form of sea or cloud, but a perpetual shifting and quivering as if the whole atmosphere was writhing with agony in the clutches of the wind.

The ship was breaking up; and we sat by her like hopeless physicians by a deathbed-side, to watch the last struggle,--and 'the effects of the deceased.' I recollect our literally warping ourselves down to the beach, holding on by rocks and posts. There was a saddened awe- struck silence, even upon the gentleman from Lloyd's with the pen behind his ear. A sudden turn of the clouds let in a wild gleam of moonshine upon the white leaping heads of the breakers, and on the pyramid of the Black-church Rock, which stands in summer in such calm grandeur gazing down on the smiling bay, with the white sand of Braunton and the red cliffs of Portledge shining through its two vast arches; and against a slab of rock on the right, for years afterwards discoloured with her paint, lay the ship, rising slowly on every surge, to drop again with a piteous crash as the wave fell back from the cliff, and dragged the roaring pebbles back with it under the coming wall of foam. You have heard of ships at the last moment crying aloud like living things in agony? I heard it then, as the stumps of her masts rocked and reeled in her, and every plank and joint strained and screamed with the dreadful tension.

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

Still she seemed to linger in the death-struggle, and we turned at last away; when, lo! a wave, huger than all before it, rushed up the boulders towards us.--We had just time to save ourselves.--A dull, thunderous groan, as if a mountain had collapsed, rose above the roar of the tempest; and we all turned with an instinctive knowledge of what had happened, just in time to see the huge mass melt away into the boiling white, and vanish for evermore. And then the very raving of the wind seemed hushed with awe; the very breakers plunged more silently towards the shore, with something of a sullen compunction; and as we stood and strained our eyes into the gloom, one black plank after another crawled up out of the darkness upon the head of the coming surge, and threw itself at our feet like the corpse of a drowning 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 sketching it now, as still and bright as if this coast had never seen the bay darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking across the waves before the northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy even from those iron walls of rock than from the pitiless howling waste of spray behind them; and that merry beach beside the town covered with shrieking women and old men casting themselves on the pebbles in fruitless agonies of prayer, as corpse after corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child, till in one case alone a single dawn saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those who had 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 as fresh as ever, my especial pet and bird-nesting companion as a boy--a little delicate, precocious, large-brained child, who might have written books some day, if he had been a gentleman's son: but when his father's ship was wrecked, they found him, left alone of all the crew, just as he had been lashed into the rigging by loving and dying hands, but cold and stiff, the little soul beaten out of him by the cruel waves before it had time to show what growth there might have been in it. We will talk no more of such things. It is thankless to be sad when all heaven and earth are keeping holiday under the smile of 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 made the sleeping streets ring with jests and greetings, as it collected on the pier. Some dozen young men and women, sons and daughters of the wealthier coasting captains and owners of fishing-smacks, chaperoned by our old landlord, whose delicate and gentlemanlike features and figure were strangely at variance with the history of his life,--daring smuggler, daring man-of-war sailor, and then most daring and successful of coastguard-men. After years of fighting and shipwreck and creeping for kegs of brandy; after having seen, too-- sight not to be forgotten--the Walcheren dykes and the Walcheren fever, through weary months of pestilence, he had come back with a little fortune of prize-money to be a village oracle, loving and beloved, as gentle and courteous as if he had never 'stato al inferno,' and looked Death in the face. Heaven bless thee, shrewd loyal heart, a gentleman of God's making, not unrecognized either by many of men's making.

The other chaperone was a lady of God's making, too; one who might have been a St. Theresa, had she been born there and then; but as it was, 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 beaming with tenderness and enthusiasm, and yet overcast with a peculiar expression of self-consciousness and restraint, well known to those who have studied the physiognomies of 'saints,' she seemed to want only the dress of some monastic order to make her the ideal of a mediaeval abbess, watching with a half-pitying, half-complacent smile, the gambols of a group of innocent young worldlings. I saw Claude gazing at her full of admiration and surprise, which latter was certainly not decreased when, as soon as all had settled themselves comfortably on board, and the cutter was slipping quietly away under the magnificent deer-park cliffs, the Lady Abbess, pulling out her Wesleyan hymn-book, gave out the Morning Hymn, apparently as a matter of course.

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

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

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

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

'Exactly. It would do your "naturalist" heart good, Claude, to see a young fellow just lauded from a foreign voyage rolling up the street which we have just descended, and availing himself of the immemorial right belonging to such cases of kissing and being kissed by every woman whom he meets, young and old. You will find yourself here among 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, in such company as this, are infinitely pleasanter, as well as cheaper, than the aristocratic seclusion of a cutter hired for our own behoof.'

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

'What! are Copley Fielding's South Down landscapes incomplete without a half-starved seven shillings a-week labourer in the foreground?'

'Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon? a premise without a conclusion? 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 the bitterest 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 all the sights of Lundy, and heard all the traditions. Are they not written in Mr. Bamfield's Ilfracombe Guide? Why has not some one already written a fire-and-brimstone romance about them? 'Moresco Castle; or, the Pirate Knight of the Atlantic Wave.' What a title! Or again--'The Seal Fiend; or, the Nemesis of the Scuttled West Indiaman.'--If I had paper and lubricite enough, and that delightful carelessness of any moral or purpose, except that of fine writing and money-making, which possesses some modern scribblers--I could tales unfold--But neither pirate legends, nor tales of cheated insurance offices, nor wrecks and murders, will make us understand Lundy--what it is 'considered in its idea,' as the new argot is. It may be defined as a lighthouse-bearing island. The whole three miles of granite table-land, seals, sea-birds, and human beings, are mere accidents and appendages--the pedestal and the ornaments of that great white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night long over the night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of their ancestors' science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues left by a nobler and extinct race, then surely there will be pilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers to that white granite tower, with its unglazed lantern and rusting machinery, to light itself up again, and help poor human beings! Really, my dear brothers, I am not in jest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to arrive at some such catastrophe--sentimental philosophy for the 'enlightened' few, and fetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms are as possible as heathen ones) for the masses.--At that you may only too probably arrive--unless you repent, and 'get back your souls.'

* * * * *

We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and one of the real black English rat, exterminated on the mainland by the grey Hanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we sat down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung three hundred feet 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 appreciate Ruskin's advice to oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, instead of lingering about the muddy seas and tame cliffs of the Channel and the German Ocean.'

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

'The distinctive feature of the scene is, in my eyes, the daring juxtaposition of large simple masses of positive colour. There are none of the misty enamelled tones of Lynmouth, or the luscious richness of Clovelly. The forms are so simple and severe, that they would be absolutely meagre, were it not for the rich colouring with which Nature has so lovingly made up for the absence of all softness, all picturesque outline. One does not regret or even feel the want of trees here, while the eye ranges down from that dappled cloud- world above, over that sheet of purple heather, those dells bedded with dark green fern, of a depth and richness of hue which I never saw before--over those bright grey granite rocks, spangled with black glittering mica and golden lichens, to rest at last on that sea below, which streams past the island in a swift roaring torrent of tide.'

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

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

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

'Does it not raise strange longings in you,' said Claude, 'to gaze out yonder over the infinite calm, and then to remember that beyond it lies America!--the new world; the future world; the great Titan- baby, who will be teeming with new Athens and Londons, with new Bacons and Shakspeares, Newtons and Goethes, when this old worn-out island will be--what? Oh! when I look out here, like a bird from its cage, a captive from his dungeon, and remember what lies behind me, to what I must return to-morrow--the over-peopled Babylon of misery and misrule, puffery and covetousness--and there before me great countries untilled, uncivilized, unchristianized, crying aloud for man 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 at rest!" 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, to leap out into empty space. How the blank air whispers, "Be free!" How the broad sea smiles, and calls, with its ten thousand waves, "Be free!"--As I live, if you do not take me away I shall throw myself over 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, have often felt themselves impelled to leap from masts, and tree-tops, and cliffs; and nothing but the most violent effort of will could break the fascination. I cannot but think, by the bye, that many a puzzling suicide might be traced to this same emotion acting on a weak and morbid brain.

We returned to the little landing cove. The red-sailed cutter lay sleeping below us--'floating double, ship and shadow.' Shoals of innumerable mackerel broke up, making acres of water foam and sparkle round their silvery sides, with a soft roar (call it 'a bull' if you like, it is the only expression for that mysterious sound), while among them the black head of a huge seal was slowly and silently appearing 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 gave a start, and the women a scream, as the enormous brute quietly raised his head and shoulders out of the water ten yards off, with a fish kicking in his mouth, and the water running off his nose, to take a deliberate stare at us, after the fashion of seals, whose ruling passion is curiosity. The sound of a musical instrument, the sight of a man bathing--anything, in short, which their small wits cannot explain at first sight, is enough to make them forget all their cunning, and thrust their heads suicidally into any danger; and even so it fared with the 'black man,' as the girls, in their first terror, declared him to be. Some fellow's gun went off--of itself I should like to believe--but the whole charge disappeared into his sleek round visage, knocking the mackerel from between his teeth; and he turned over, a seven-foot lump of lifeless blubber.

'Wretch!' cried Claude, as we dragged the seal into the boat, where he lay with his head and arms hanging helplessly over the bows, like a sea-sick alderman on board a Margate steamer. 'What excuse can he give 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 of two bumps on the back of his head?'

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

We slipped on homeward. The cliff-wall of Lundy stood out blacker and blacker every moment against the gay western sky; greens, greys, and purples, dyeing together into one deep rich monotone, for which our narrow colour-vocabulary has no word; and threw a long cold shadow towards us across the golden sea; suddenly above its dark ridge 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 of upper clouds. Before us the blue sea and the blue land-line were fading into mournful grey, on which one huge West Indiaman blazed out, orange and scarlet, her crowded canvas all a-flame from the truck to the water's edge.--A few moments and she, too, had vanished into the grey twilight, and a chill night-wind crisped the sea. It was a relief to hear the Evening Hymn rise rich and full from one voice, and then another and another, till the men chimed in one by one, and the whole cutter, from stem to stern, breathed up its melody into the silent night.

But the hymn soon flagged--there was more mirth on board than could vent itself in old Charles Wesley's words; and one began to hum a song tune, and then another, with a side glance at the expression of the 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 was fairly broken; and among jests and laughter one merry harmless song after another rang out, many of them, to Claude's surprise, fashionable London ones, which sounded strangely enough out there on the wild western sea. At last--'Claude, friend,' I whispered, 'you must sing your share too--and mine also, for that matter.'

'What shall I sing?'

'Anything you will, from the sublime to the ridiculous. They will understand and appreciate it as well as yourself. Recollect, you are not among bullet-headed South Saxon clods, but among wits as keen and imaginations as rich as those of any Scotch shepherd or Manchester operative.'

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, and perhaps far more sincerely appreciated, as they would have been by any London evening-party; and the singing went on, hour after hour, as we slipped slowly on upon the tide, till it grew late, and the sweet voices died away one by one; and then the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which had reigned so pleasantly throughout the day took a new form, as the women huddled together to sleep in each other's arms; and the men and we clustered forwards, while from every mouth fragrant incense steamed upwards into the air. 'Man a cooking animal?' my dear Doctor Johnson--pooh! man is a smoking animal. There is his ergon, his 'differential energy,' as the Aristotelians say--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 some long sea-yarn about Ostend, and muds, and snow-storms, and revenue- cruisers going down stern foremost, kegs of brandy and French prisons, which I shall not repeat; for indeed the public has been surfeited with sea-stories of late, from many sufficiently dull ones up to the genial wisdom of 'Peter Simple,' and the gorgeous word- painting of 'Tom Cringle's Log.' And now the subject is stale--the old war and the wonders thereof have died away into the past, like the men who fought in it; and Trafalgar and the Bellerophon are replaced by Manchester and 'Mary Barton.' We have solved the old sea-going problems pretty well--thanks to wise English-hearted Captain 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 quite so easy of solution. So Claude and I thought, as we leant over the sloop's bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor the forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm. Forty stanzas or so we did count from curiosity; the first line of each of which 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-sad mood, the everlasting sparkle of the water as our bows threw it gently off in sheets of flame and 'tender curving lines of creamy' fire, that ran along the glassy surface, and seemed to awaken the sea for yards round into glittering life, as countless diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, leaped and ran and dived round us, while we slipped slowly by; and then a speck of light would show far off in the blank darkness, and another, and another, and slide slowly up to us--shoals of medusae, every one of them a heaving globe of flame; and some unseen guillemot would give a startled squeak, or a shearwater close above our heads suddenly stopped the yarn, and raised a titter among the men, by his ridiculously articulate, and not over-complimentary, cry; and then a fox's bark from the cliffs came wild and shrill, although so faint and distant; or the lazy gaff gave a sad uneasy creak; and then a soft warm air, laden with heather honey, and fragrant odours of sedge, and birch, and oak, came sighing from the land; while all around us was the dense blank of the night, except where now and then some lonely gleam through the southern clouds showed the cliff-tops on our right.--It was all most unearthly, dreamlike, a strange phantasmagoria, like some scene from 'The Ancient Mariner'--all the world shut out, silent, invisible, and we floating along there alone, like a fairy ship creeping through Chaos and the unknown Limbo. Was it an evil thought that rose within me as I said to Claude--'Is not this too like life? Our only light the sparkles that rise up round us at every step, and die behind us; and all around, and all before, the great black unfathomable eternities? A few souls brought together as it were by chance, for a short 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's meaning, too. Your friends, the zoologists, have surely taught you better than that. As I read Nature's parable to-night, I find nothing in it but hope. What if there be darkness, the sun will rise to-morrow. What if there seem a chaos: the great organic world is still living, and growing, and feeding, unseen by us, all the black night through; and every phosphoric atom there below is a sign that even in the darkest night there is still the power of light, ready to flash out, wherever and however it is stirred. Does the age seem to you dark? Do you, too, feel as I do at times, the awful sadness of that text,--"The time shall come when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Lord, and shall not see it"? Then remember that

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

And even as it is around us here, so it is in the world of men. The night is peopled not merely with phantoms and wizards, superstitions and spirits of evil, but under its shadow all sciences, methods, social energies, are taking rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to themselves, that they may awake into a new life, and intermarry, and beget children nobler than themselves, when "the day-spring from on high comes down." Even now, see! the dawn is gilding the highest souls, as it is those Exmoor peaks afar; and we are in the night only because we crawl below. What if we be unconscious of all the living energies which are fermenting round us now? Have you not shown me in this last week every moorland pool, every drop of the summer sea, alive with beautiful organizations, multiplying as fast as the thoughts of man? Is not every leaf breathing still, every sap vein drinking still, though we may not see them? "Even so is the kingdom of God; like seed sown in the ground; and men rise, and lie down and sleep; 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, when we dragged the seine up to our chins in water through the short midsummer night, and scrambled and rolled over on the beach in boyish glee, after the skate and mullet, with those now gone; and as I thought and thought, old voices seemed to call me, old faces looked at me, of playmates, and those nearer than playmates, now sleeping in the deep deep sea, amid far coral islands; and old figures seemed to glide out of the mysterious dark along the still sea floor, as if the ocean were indeed giving up her dead. I shook myself, turned away, and tried to persuade myself that I was dreaming. Perhaps I had been doing so. At least, I remember very little more, till I was roused by the rattling of the chain-cable through the hawse-hole, opposite the pier-head.

And now, gentle readers, farewell; and farewell, Clovelly, and all the loving hearts it holds; and farewell, too, the soft still summer weather. Claude and I are taking our last walk together along the deer-park cliffs. Lundy is shrouded in the great grey fan of dappled haze which streams up from the westward, dimming the sickly sun. 'There is not a breath the blue wave to curl.' Yet lo! round Chapman's Head creeps a huge bank of polished swell, and bursts in thunder on the cliffs.--Another follows, and another.--The Atlantic gales are sending in their avant-courriers of ground-swell: six hours 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 buck is calling his does with ominous croakings, and leading the way slowly into the deepest coverts of the glens. The stormy petrels, driven in from the Atlantic, are skimming like black swallows over the bay beneath us. Long strings of sea-fowl are flagging on steadily at railroad pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes of Braunton. The herring-boats are hastily hauling their nets--you may see the fish sparkling like flakes of silver as they come up over the gunwale; all craft, large and small, are making for the shelter of the pier. Claude starts this afternoon to sit for six months in Babylonic smoke, working up his sketches into certain unspeakable pictures, with which the world will be astonished, or otherwise, at the next Royal Academy Exhibition; while I, for whom another fortnight of pure western air remains, am off to well-known streams, to be in time for the autumn floods, and the shoals of fresh-run salmon trout.

[The end]
Charles Kingsley's essay: North Devon

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