Kitabı oku: «Prose Idylls, New and Old», sayfa 12

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 primæval 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°, 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 primæval 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. ⁹  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.’

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;