Prose Idylls

DEVON.

Exm

g 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 più 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 sci

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

l excitement, and a certain quantity, I suppose, of that animal cunning which the Red Indian possesses in common with the wo

believe, on the contrary, that for most of them it is sport which at once keeps alive and satisfies what you wo

appears either in their con

g 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 pr

ole p

there be less, if

rn, then turned down the * * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest; made for * * * Hill, but being headed, went by ** ** wood

hy, 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

f 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,

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

require to be a Turner, a Copley Fi

meet" stir up a feeling of shame, almost of peevishness, before the s

smi

eel it, I fancy, at last sublime itself into an habitually gentle, reverent, almost melancholy tone of mind, as of a man

owards the seeming stupidity of those who see, after all, only a very

othing. 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;

e as open as me to all noble, and ch

thin

ping classes, if you wish to see the effects of utterly neglecting the physical development of man; [235] 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 al

our, which seems, from the religious periodicals, to pervad

tting on delicate ground there: however I have always found, that

hath not sport

eason's dires

so f

il t

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

ting silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veined snow; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in with heather

gs, on which a half-wild moorland pony, the only living thing in sight, stood staring an

ce disappeared among the hills; I fancied myself miles fr

ce for fishi

bouring deer-cover. Keen honest eyes gleamed out from his brown, scarred, weather-beaten face; and as he settled himself against a rock with the

lta-a warmer place

e you been

milton 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 t

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 tim

buried 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 l

alking thus, th

ape, and speech-

eye I seemed

eary moors

bout alone

d when h

aughed myself

epit man so

over the hill-side. He joined me, footsore and weary, but in great ex

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 stag

many pairs of p

ole 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

needn't be afeard; it's only at the

nk 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 sover

, 'will you ever speak contemp

world, only for want of understanding them. How shall I do penance? Go a

hose works will become, as centuries roll on, more and more valuable t

s your meaning,'

fore 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

ish in this last two pools, except that little saucy yellow shrimp, wh

n his way up? Had an otter paralysed them with terror for the morning? Or had a stag been dow

g himself, if he had been

well by this time that

han you are," answered the Corn

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

l next, I presume, liken the coming hailsto

d thank your stars that there is one at hand; for these mountain tornadoes

als; 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; an

ges 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 o

eet) 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

e Coas

lly trawling skiff, which, having disposed of her fish at various ports along the Channel

rawling 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 up

ich seems ready to topple down into the nest of be-myrtled cottages at its foot; and as we sweep out into the dee

en only at intervals by blood-red stains, where the turf has slipped and left the fresh rock bar

ke the hot breath of a limekiln, from the drying stones. Talk of "glazings and scumblings," ye artists! and

and broken spirit, and had nearly forsworn the audacity of

ed you as much as the only somewhat bigger in

ds 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 tr

,-a simple, smiling earnestness,-an unpractised melody of voice, that what would have been rant from oth

d 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-disinter

nd the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as you do bits of ochre, for his "Continental Sketches," found in it the

cks 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 unbro

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 clif

hangeth, giving

ils Himself

ustom should co

ere shall be crowned with golden wheat, and every rock-ledge on Trentishoe,

may be clothed with the white mulberry, and the summer limestone-skiffs shall g

in the late Mrs. W

arbarous clods, she persevered in her silk-growing, and succeeded; and I should like to p

d digest, before they are allowed to take possession of their estates. In the meantime, what is that noble conical hill, which has increased

Han

ame. What is

hung by the poor brute's struggles, and found days after on the mountain-side, a blackened corpse on on

ere 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

ll. 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 b

oemagot,' 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 shipwre

e, 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

.-M

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 nob

nds beyond it; where a Clovelly trawler, which we had chartered for the occasion, had

oubt was not whether we should be able to get on board through the surf, b

painte

painted

nd 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 far

; 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 agains

ro tempore an extinct science. "Let the dead bury their dead." The social question

'some sign of improvement. I see the pari

p, 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

er did zo, and why shouldn'

rite 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 othe

dless precaution to a man who owned this corner of the world. A bailiff woul

cod in two hours after his arrival. Nevertheless

ping out through every field and down; and on three sides of us, the sullen thunder of

"is the place on earth which heaven mad

But where are the trees? I have not

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. Significa

ds sympathy and love. But

-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 conc

l, and yet so irrelievable. Yet why does not your

jambs of the Channel, and the deep water and the line of

d-hills and sunny downs, and ending abruptly at the foot of that sombre wall o

an 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

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 exi

its,' doubtless most important. But I, what between the sun, the luncheon, and the metaphysic, sank into soft slu

amid huge walnuts in its southward glen; while before us spread a panorama

, 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 de

rst to break

oved, will you no

ans

of such words in worldlings' mouths-not a Cockney but would burst out with some enthu

those sand-hills, and so forget the whole. What use standing here to be maddened by this tan

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.

I can conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter's sky instead

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

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,

. 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,

d half-effaced gilding contrasting mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle-shells, which cluste

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

g into the boat. 'This wreck is but a torn scrap of the chrys

*

k, 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

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 shell

n 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 Indi

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

ll char

touch of col

n-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

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 o

*

d dive and vanish; and rise again like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Father and sons ar

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

nd 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 s

ftly as rushes matter, more swiftly rushes mind; more swiftly still rushes the heavenly dawn up the eastern sky. 'The

er, 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 b

*

Palermy' and the Sicilians. But, for his imagination, what seems to have struck it most was that it

t out of him?' asked Cla

eyes surrounds the delights of horseback. But he gave me besides a long glowin

s catechism

ein, dried and dressed out in their finest clothes, 'every sect and age,' as Tom said, '

d 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 child

Clov

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 f

you yet been as far as the park, which, as I told you

t. 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 shudde

n 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 ha

ntains, 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 m

and dreadful

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

Claude, to be able to give birth to such a piece of

ose thousand things into words? And what do you mean by sneering at Mr. Ruskin? Are there not in his books more and finer p

ision 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

nd like, too, the Norman cathedrals of which he is so fond, is rather magnified than

d, 'the very highest achi

s men are still ignorant of Nature's art of draping her forms with colour, chiaroscuro, ornament, not at the expense of th

g 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

ichly-clothed figure. They act both as contrasts and as indications of the original substratum of t

is Manicheism wi

f 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 t

converts, are somewhat fierce and fanatical. You us

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 g

lth 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; su

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 th

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 tow

urmuri

numbered pebbl

be heard

rey-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

lls, 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 f

d people, Claude pulled out

e these rich purple and olive ironstone layers, with their sharp serrated lines and polished slabs, set up on edge, snapped, be

bove 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

am 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 sl

n cries, and would not be put away-and I tried to turn, and yet my eyes were riveted on the black

st; 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 sho

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

are scattere

by stream,

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

o'clock to-morrow morning, you k

Lun

s 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, thro

asm, 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 medi?val abbess, watching with a half-pitying, half-complacent smile, the gambols of a group of innocent young worldlings.

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

res 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

hey are physically and intellectually. The simplicity and purity of the women he

y, I suppose,' said Claude, 'is t

ave just descended, and availing himself of the immemorial right belonging to such cases of kissing and being kissed by every woman whom he meets, y

such company as this, are infinitely pleasanter, as well as cheaper,

w a place, without knowing the people who live in it-as if the human inhabitan

capes incomplete without a half-starved seven

bourer 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, overcro

*

rance 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 m

*

inated on the mainland by the grey Hanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we

s lovely West. I now appreciate Ruskin's advice to oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devon and

that of the shores of the Mediterranean. The very raininess of the climate, by condensing the moisture into an ever-changing ph

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, t

k, 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

ic curves and bands of slate, such as harmonize so well with the fairyland which we left this mor

, sharp-edged, crystalline; the worn-out useless hills are dropping to pieces with their own weight. Here each cube is delicately rou

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, t

y 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 wil

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 a

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 fare

s head and arms hanging helplessly over the bows, like a sea-sick alderman on boar

s skin and oil a

e trigger? or merely obeying the fleshly lust of destruc

de, 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

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

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 t

shall

as well as yourself. Recollect, you are not among bullet-headed South Saxon clods, but among

e his exqu

n 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 fo

ter 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; a

he comm

e thir

female s

rtled 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 st

smi

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

t is neve

t ringeth for

ren 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 moo

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

ground-swell: six hours more, and the storm which has been sweeping over 'the still-vexed Bermo?thes,' 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 ha

TNO

s Magazine,

Magazine, Se

er species of small Nemourid? unknown to me, save one bro

the 'Annals of Natural History,' for September 1862,

's Magazine,

r's Magazine

very book which was needed appeared, as "The

before the Vol

attention of all thinking men, and above all of clergymen, h