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Many visitors come to this attractive old town, with its timbered houses and pleasant river-walks, for the sake of "John Halifax, Gentleman." The scenes of Mrs. Craik's tender romance, Abel Fletcher's dwelling, the mill on the Avon, the tannery, the remains of the famous hedge, the garden where the two lads talked, are pointed out as soberly and simply as that ancient house in Church Street whose floor is said still to keep the stain of princely blood, or the cross where the Duke of Somerset and his companions, dragged from the shelter of the Abbey in violation of the king's own promise, were beheaded.

But the Severn, with ever-broadening flow, a tidal river now that fills and shallows twice a day, bears onward to the sea. Her course lies for a while through orchards and wheat-fields. The Cotswolds, separating the Severn valley from the basin of the Thames and constituting the bulk of Gloucestershire, rise in billowy outlines on the east and, presently, Dean Forest, one of the few remaining patches of England's formerly abundant woods, uplifts its "broad and burly top" on the west. The earth beneath those oaks and beeches has hoards of mineral wealth, and furnaces are scattered through the forest glades. At Gloucester the Severn divides, that

 
"with the more delight
She might behold the towne of which she's wondrous proud."
 

And a fine old town it is, still keeping, in its four right-angled streets, the original Roman plan. Large vessels can make their way up the Severn as far as Gloucester, which Elizabeth, to Bristol's neighbourly disgust, chartered as a seaport, though the Berkeley Canal, opened in 1827, is now the regular channel. The cathedral stands upon ground hallowed since the seventh century. This building, for all the solemn grandeur of its Norman nave, is of most interest, from an architectural point of view, because of its gradual development of the Perpendicular style, gloriously manifest in choir and cloister. Its masons seem to have been particularly ingenious, for the building abounds in original and fanciful features of which the Whispering Gallery is only an example. Its martyr is John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. One of Mary's earliest victims, he was sent from London back to Gloucester, where he was greatly beloved, to be burned before the eyes of his own flock. Many royal prayers have been murmured beneath these vaulted roofs, and many royal feasts of Severn salmon and lamprey-pie held in the grey city. The Saxon kings were much at Gloucester; William the Conqueror spent his Yule-tides here whenever he could, and here, in the chapter house, he ordered the compilation of Domesday Book; Rufus, Henry I, Henry II, and John often visited the town, and Henry III, as a boy of ten, was crowned in the cathedral. Parliaments were held in Gloucester by Edward I, Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V, and from Gloucester Richard III, with whom murder had grown to be a habit, is supposed to have sent secret orders to the Tower for the smothering of his little nephews. In a side-chapel is the tomb of Robert, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the conqueror. The effigy, of Irish oak, is so instinct with force and vigour in its only half recumbent posture that the iron screen seems really necessary to hold the Norman down. But the royal burial that made the fortunes of the cathedral was that of the wretched Edward II, whose canopied tomb in the choir became a favourite shrine of pilgrimage.

Still the Severn, now with a burden of heavily freighted barges, a mighty flood that has left more than one hundred miles behind the tiny pool, three inches deep, in which it rose, sweeps on, past the stern walls of Berkeley Castle, where Edward II was cruelly done to death, toward the Somerset boundary. Here it receives the waters of the lower Avon, on which the great port of Bristol stands, and so the proud Sabrina leads her retinue of streams into the Bristol Channel,

 
"Supposing then herself a sea-god by her traine."
 

SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE

The three southwestern counties of England, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, reach out, like the hearts of their sons, into the wild Atlantic. Many a Westward Ho adventure was sped from Bristol, Bideford, Plymouth, Dartmouth, and even from Topsham, which long served as the port of Exeter. The far-sea Elizabethan sailors and their dauntless commanders, those "Admirals All" whose praises a living poet of these parts, Henry Newbolt, has sung, came largely from this corner of England. The father of Sir Francis Drake was a Tavistock tar. That dreamer of illimitable dreams, Sir Walter Raleigh, was born in the little Devon village of East Budleigh. Another Devon village, familiar to Raleigh's boyhood, Ottery St. Mary, is the native place of Coleridge, whose immortal sea-ballad came into being just over the Somerset border, in those radiant days when he and Wordsworth, two young poets in the fulness of their friendship and the freshness of their inspiration, would go wandering together, from their homes in Nether Stowey, off on the Quantock Hills, – days commemorated by Wordsworth in "The Prelude."

 
"Upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge we roved,
Unchecked we loitered 'mid her sylvan courts;
Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart,
Didst chant the vision of that Ancient Man,
The bright-eyed Mariner."
 

My first view of the Quantocks was had, some years ago, from Exmoor. Coming through North Devon, we had been walking for hours, knee-deep in heather, over that high, rolling moorland where the red deer still run wild. The pollen rose in clouds about our heads. Black-faced sheep and white-tailed rabbits and startled, flurrying heath-cocks shared, but did not break, the rapture of that solitude. Bell-heather and rose-heather and white heather mingled their hues, at a little distance, in a rippling sea of purple. We lay down in it, and the fragrant sprays closed warm about us, while the soft sky seemed almost to touch our faces. We were supremely happy and we hoped that we were lost. We had long been out of sight of human habitation, but our compass served us better than we wished, and when, with a covert sense of disappointment, though the sun was red on the horizon, we came at last upon a woman and child gathering whortleberries in a dimple of the moor, we learned that we were, as we should have been, in the heart of the Lorna Doone country.

All lovers of Blackmore's delectable romance remember that its modest hero, John Ridd, of the parish of Oare, was a Somerset man. "Zummerzett thou bee'st, Jan Ridd, and Zummerzett thou shalt be." But the Doone glen, which actually was, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the hold of a marauding band of outlaws, lies on Badgeworthy Water, a part of the Devon boundary. We ate our handful of whortleberries in Devon, but soon, following directions, found ourselves on the brow of a steep incline, peering over upon a farmhouse, known as Lorna's Bower, in the valley below. Scrambling down the declivity as best we might, we crossed the Badgeworthy by means of a log and a hand-rail, climbed a fence inhospitably placed at the end of this rude bridge, and thus made unceremonious entrance into Somerset. They were gruff of speech at Lorna's Bower, but kind of heart, and treated the belated wanderers well, feasting us on the inevitable ham and eggs, with a last taste of Devonshire cream, and giving us the warm corner of the settle by the great, peat-burning fireplace. A sheepskin waistcoat, with the wool yet on, lay across the rheumatic knees of our host, and hams and sides of bacon dangled from the rafters overhead.

According to the saying "It always rains on Exmoor," the next morning broke in storm, and we made slow progress under the rain and over the mud along the Badgeworthy. All our path was a Waterslide, yet we came at last to the Doone valley, where tumbled heaps of stone mark the site of the felons' houses. Foxglove and bracken and heather would have whispered us the gossip of the place, but a sudden spurt of especially violent rain drove us on to a shepherd's hut for refuge. Two sportsmen, booted and spurred, with their horses saddled in the shed, all ready to mount and ride if the Exmoor hunt should sweep that way, were there before us. One of them told us that his own house had the dints of the Doones' terrible blows on one of its oak doors. As the weather had gone from bad to worse, we abandoned our walking trip, bestowed ourselves in a creakity cart, the only vehicle there obtainable, and drove past the little Oare church, where John and Lorna were so tragically wedded, over "Robbers' Bridge," and on to the top of Oare Hill. Here we paused for a memorable view of the rain-silvered landscape, with Dunkery Beacon glimmering above. On through blurred pictures of beautiful scenery we went, into the village of Porlock, sweet with roses, and plunging down Porlock Hill, we held on our gusty way to Minehead. The hostelries of this favourite watering-place being full, we pushed on by an evening train to Taunton, a fair town of heroic history. In the stormy times of Charles I, it was twice gallantly defended by Admiral Blake, himself a son of Somerset, against the cavalier forces. Forty years later, when the unpopular James II had succeeded to his brother's throne, Taunton frankly embraced the perilous cause of the Duke of Monmouth, welcoming him with joyous ceremonies. In Taunton market-place he was proclaimed king, and from Taunton he issued his royal proclamations. The Duke was utterly defeated at Sedgemoor, three miles to the east of Bridgewater, in what Macaulay designates as "the last fight deserving the name of a battle that has been fought on English ground." The simple Somerset folk who had followed the banners of Monmouth were punished with pitiless severity. The brutal officers made a jest of the executions. A range of gibbets, with their ghastly burdens, crossed the moor, but Taunton was the especial victim of the royal vengeance. A hundred prisoners were put to death there by Kirke and his "lambs," and wellnigh another hundred hanged by such process of law as was embodied in Jeffrey's "Bloody Assize."

But we would not linger in Taunton, – no, not even for the sake of its gentle Elizabethan poet, Samuel Daniel, nor would we stay our journey for trips to the places of varied interest on either side. A little to the southwest is Wellington, which gave The Iron Duke his title. Going north from there one would come soon to Milverton, the birthplace of Dr. Thomas Young, that ingenious linguist who first began to read the riddle of the Sphinx; for he had deciphered some half dozen of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in advance of Champollion's great announcement. A few miles further to the north is Combe Flory, the pleasant parsonage which Sidney Smith made so gay, even binding his books, and theological books at that, in brightest colours. To get a tropical effect, and to hoax his guests, he hung oranges from his garden shrubs, and to gratify a lady who hinted that deer would ornament the little park, he fitted out his two donkeys – who doubtless had their opinion of him and of his doings – with branching antlers, and stationed them before the windows for a pastoral effect. Well away to the east of Taunton is Ilchester, the birthplace of that illustrious thirteenth-century friar, Roger Bacon, a necromancer to his own generation, and a pioneer in scientific method to ours; and near by Ilchester is Odcombe, where Tom Coryatt, stoutest-soled of travellers, was born. He claimed to have walked, between May and October of 1608, no less than nineteen hundred and seventy-five miles over the continent of Europe, and had just achieved a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and a call on the Great Mogul when, under the eastern stars, he died. England profited by his travels in the entertaining volume commonly known as Coryatt's "Crudities," as well as in that foreign elegance of table-forks which he is said to have introduced.

A mightier spell than any of these was upon us, the spell of Glastonbury, but I do not know why we did not give a few hours to Athelney, which lay directly in our route. It was here, on an alder-forested island in a waste of fens and marshes, at the confluence of the Parrett and the Tone, that King Alfred took shelter when the Danes had overrun the land. Here he lost that "Alfred's Jewel" which is now the treasure of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; here this otherwise impeccable monarch burned the cakes; and from here he made such successful sallies against the enemy that he delivered England and regained his throne.

The county of Somerset, a land of broad, green valleys enclosed by rugged ranges of hill and upland, has been compared in form to an arm slightly bent about the eastern and southern shores of Bristol Channel. The river Parrett crosses it at the elbow, dividing it into a southern section, – moors, bogs, mountains, with the deep vale of the river Tone – and a northern part, larger and more populous, but hardly less broken. Above the Parrett, and almost parallel with it, runs the river Brue, draining that once vast peat swamp known as the Brent Marshes. Glastonbury now stands on the north bank of the Brue, but at some remote period was islanded in the midst of the river. The Britons – if the wise say true – called it The Appletree Isle, or Avalon, – a name caught up in the golden meshes of Arthurian romance. The wounded king but

 
"passes to the Isle Avilion,
He passes and is heal'd and cannot die."
 

The Britons in their heathen days had dreamed of a fairyland where death and sorrow entered not, the Celtic Tir-na-n'Og, an Island of Immortal Youth hid somewhere in the flushed, mysterious west, and the Christian faith, that came so early to Glastonbury, did not destroy but gathered to itself the wistful hope, so that the site of one of the earliest churches in England became the centre of strangely blended legends. It was in the Isle of Avalon, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the sword Excalibur was forged, and after Arthur had passed from mortal ken, he was not dead, but still, through the waiting centuries,

 
"Mythic Uther's deeply wounded son
In some fair space of sloping greens
Lay, dozing, in the vale of Avalon,
And watched by weeping queens."
 

Yet the mediæval voices, that we would gladly believe more simply than we may, tell us that Arthur was buried at Glastonbury in a sarcophagus hollowed out of the trunk of an oak, that the penitent Guinevere was laid at his feet, that the skeletons were uncovered and removed to the church in the reign of Henry II, and were seen by so sane a witness as Leland so late as the middle of the sixteenth century. But in King Arthur, death is life, and not his reputed grave, nor the giant bones folk wondered at, nor the golden lock of Guinevere that crumbled at a monk's too eager clutch, could shake the faith in his second coming. Malory, writing in the fifteenth century, illustrates even in his half denial the persistency of that expectation:

"Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place, and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather, I will say, – here in this world he changed his life, but many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quondam Rexque futurus."

Arthurian legends are attached to other places in Somersetshire, notably to Cadbury, whose earlier name was Camelot, and to its adjacent village of Queen's Camel. Here on the river Camel cluster Arthurian names, – King Arthur's Palace, a moated mound; King Arthur's Well, a spring of magic virtues; King Arthur's Hunting Causeway, an old track across the fields; and here the tradition of a great battle lingers. But Glastonbury is not only an Arthurian shrine; it was once, in purer days than ours, the keeper of the Holy Grail.

 
"To whom the monk: 'The Holy Grail! …
… What is it?
The phantom of a cup that comes and goes?'
"'Nay, monk, what phantom?' answer'd Percivale.
'The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with his own.
This, from the blessed land of Aromat —
After the day of darkness, when the dead
Went wandering o'er Moriah – the good saint,
Arimathæan Joseph, journeying brought
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.
And there awhile it bode; and if a man
Could touch or see it, he was healed at once,
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times
Grew to such evil that the holy cup
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear'd.'
 
 
"To whom the monk: 'From our old books I know
That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury,
And there the heathen prince, Arviragus,
Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build;
And there he built with wattles from the marsh
A little lonely church.'"⁹
 

Dreamy hours were those we spent under the shadow of Glastonbury Tor, among the tranquil ruins of that once so glorious abbey, strolling about with a motley company of sheep, chickens, and tourists over what is perhaps the most ancient consecrated ground in England. Hither came St. Joseph of Arimathæa with his eleven companions and here the staff of the saint, as he thrust it into the ground, put forth leaf and blossom as a signal that the resting-place was reached. The little wattled oratory that the Archangel Gabriel commanded and the pagan king permitted them to build on a waste island of the marsh was succeeded, in course of time, by a primitive form of monastery, where St. Patrick, his mission to Ireland accomplished, dwelt many years and died. Here in a later century great St. Dunstan held the post of abbot and waged at his forge stern warfare against the Devil. And it is sober history that here a Christian church and brotherhood lived on in unbroken peace from British times to English. "What Glastonbury has to itself, alone and without rival," says Freeman, "is its historical position as the tie, at once national and religious, which binds the history and memories of our race to those of the race which we supplanted."

The after-story of Glastonbury is as tragic as that of Whalley. A mitred abbey, enlarged and enriched from generation to generation, it became a court whither the sons of noblemen and gentlemen were sent for nurture in gracious manners; a school of learning whose library was one of the most precious in the realm; a seat of princely hospitalities and lavish charities. When the storm burst, Abbot Whiting strove to hide from the spoilers some of the abbey plate. He was forthwith arrested at his manor of Sharpham – the very house where Fielding the novelist was afterwards born, – sentenced at Wells, dragged on a hurdle to the top of Glastonbury Tor, and there hanged and butchered, his head being spiked above the abbey gate. The magnificent church and extensive conventual buildings, stripped and abandoned, long served the neighbourhood as a quarry. Richly sculptured blocks were built into barns and garden-walls and even broken up for making a road over the marshes. Little is left for the gazer now save a few weed-crowned columns, an exquisite Early English chapel on the site of St. Joseph's wattled church, a gabled tithe-barn, an old pilgrim inn, and the Abbot's Kitchen, a witchcap structure whose four vast fireplaces must all have roared with jollity when Abbot Whiting chanced to be entertaining five hundred "persons of fashion" at a single dinner-party. As we wandered over the daisied pastureland from one grey fragment to another, we realised the invisible Glastonbury all the more in the peace that has come with the perishing of the visible. "Time the Shadow" has but softened the splendour. More than ever is this

 
"the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows."
 

It is only six miles from Glastonbury to Wells, one of the loveliest cathedral cities of England, not a place to hurry through, but to settle in and quietly enjoy. Lodgings in Vicar's Close, leisurely strolls through the gardens of the Bishop's Palace, hours of revery in choir and chapter-house and Lady Chapel, – it is so that one is taken to the heart of all this holy beauty. The foundation dates back to the beginning of the eighth century, but Saxon church melted into Norman, and Norman into Early English, – substantially the cathedral of to-day, with that wonderful façade of which Fuller truly said: "England affordeth not the like." The story of the city is the story of the church, and the story of the church is one of honour and untroubled peace. Not being a monastery, it was untouched by the blow that smote Glastonbury down. The rage of war has passed it by. Its bishops have left saintly memories. Above this matchless group of ecclesiastical buildings tender benignities brood like outspread wings. There is blessing in the very air.

Wells lies in a basin at the foot of the Mendip Hills, which offer tempting points for excursions. Our most uncanny trip was to Wookey Hole, where, according to a ballad in Percy's "Reliques," "a blear-eyed hag" used to dwell. A farmer, groaning with rheumatism, guided us along a rocky footpath to the cavern entrance, where an impish boy met us, gave us lighted tapers and himself literally blazed the way with a can of some lurid-burning oil. After scrambling up and scrambling down, frequently abjured by our little leader to "mind yer 'eads," we left Hell's Ladder behind us and came out into an open space known as the Witch's Kitchen. Here was the Witch herself, a sphinx-like figure made by the petrifaction of the water dripping from the roof. She received us with a stolid stare, the graceless urchin threw a pebble at her flat nose, and we gladly scrambled back to upper day.

I have a pleasanter recollection of Cox's Cave at Cheddar, with its clearly defined pillars and pinnacles, some amber, some olive, some transparent, some musical. It requires but little imagination to distinguish in this fantastic world the queer assortment of "Hindoo Temple," "Mummy," "Bat's Wings," "Eagle's Wings," "Loaf of Bread," "Hanging Goose," "Rat running up a Rock," "Turkeys," "Carrots," and the splendid "Draperies." There is a place where stalagmite and stalactite nearly touch, – only one drop wanting, yet in all these years since Mr. Cox, while prosaically digging for a coach-house, discovered this elfin grotto, in 1837, that drop has not crystallised, – so slow is the underground sculptor.

All this region of the Mendip Hills, whose limestone cliffs rise sheer, terrace above terrace, is full of fascination. Traces of prehistoric man, as well as of extinct animal species, have been found in its deep caverns. In the Hyæna Den, when disclosed in 1852, the eyes of geologists could discern the very places where our shaggy forbears had lighted their fires and cooked their food. It seems a far cry from those low-browed cave-folk to Lord Macaulay, who loved this West Country so well, and to John Locke, who was born in the village of Wrington, – a village which furthermore prides itself on one of the noblest church-towers in Somerset and on the decorous grave of Hannah More.

All manner of literary associations jostle one another in the town of Bath, to which at home I have heard English visitors liken our Boston. They meant it as a compliment, for Bath is a handsome city, even ranked by Landor, one of its most loyal residents, above the cities of Italy for purity and consistent dignity of architecture. To reach Bath we have journeyed east from the Mendip Hills into the valley of the Lesser Avon. Here "the Queen of all the Spas" holds her court, the tiers of pale stone terraces and crescents climbing up the steep sides of the valley to a height of some eight hundred feet.

Of the sights of Bath, the Abbey is most disappointing, and well it may be, for it was despoiled not only of its glass but even of its iron and lead by Henry VIII, and only a bleak framework left to pass through a series of purchasers to the citizens. The west front wears a curious design of ladders on which battered angels clamber up and down. The interior has no "dim religious light," but gilt and colour and such a throng of gaudy monuments that the wits have made merry at the expense of the vaunted mineral springs.

 
"These walls, adorned with monument and bust,
Show how Bath waters serve to lay the dust."
 

The healing quality of the waters is attributed, by the veracious Geoffrey of Monmouth, to the British king Bladud, father of King Lear. This Bladud, being skilled in sorcery, placed in the gushing spring a cunning stone that made the water hot and curative. The wizard met an untimely end in a flight on wings of his own devising. He rode the air safely from Bath to London, but there fell and was dashed in pieces on the roof of the temple of Apollo. The Romans knew the virtue of these waters, and modern excavation has disclosed, with other remnants of a perished splendour, elaborate Roman baths, arched and columned and beautifully paved. It is so long since the hour when I went wandering down into those buried chambers that I but dimly recall a large central basin, where languid gold-fish circled in a green pool, begirt by a stone platform, old and mossy. This was set about with pilasters and capitals and all manner of classic fragments, among which were mingled bits of mediæval carving. For a Saxon monastery was founded here, where, according to the Exeter Book, still stood "courts of stone," and the baths were known and frequented throughout the Middle Ages and in Tudor and Stuart times. But the Bath of the eighteenth-century society-novel, the Bath of which Miss Burney and Miss Austen, Fielding and Smollet have drawn such graphic pictures, owed its being chiefly to Beau Nash. The city to which this gallant Oxonian came in 1703 was a mean, rough place enough. The baths were "unseemly ponds," open to the weather and to the view of the passersby, who found it amusing to pelt the invalid bathers with dead cats – poor pussies! – and frogs. But Nash secured a band of music for the Pump Room, set orderly balls on foot, and soon won the title of King of Bath, which he made such a focus of fashion that the place grew during his lifetime from its poor estate into the comely city of to-day. This arbiter of elegance maintained a mimicry of royal pomp. His dress glistened with lace and embroidery and he travelled in a chaise drawn by six grey horses, with a full complement of outriders, footmen, and French horns.

The Pump Room is worth a visit. It is an oblong saloon, with a semicircular recess at either end. At the west end is a music gallery, and at the east a statue of Beau Nash. A three-fourths square of cushioned seats occupies the middle of the room and opens toward a counter. Here a white-capped maid dispenses, at twopence a glass, the yellow fluid which hisses up hot from a fountain just behind her and falls murmuring into a marble vase. And all about, a part of the spectacle, sit the health-seekers, sipping the magic water from glasses in decorated saucers and looking a trifle foolish.

Here, or in steering one's course among the Bath chairs that claim a native's right of way in park and promenade, fancy may choose almost any companion she will. Pope hated Bath, to be sure, and called it "the sulphurous pit," but not even Pope kept out of it; Beckford, the author of "Vathek," lived here; Butler, author of the "Analogy," died here; Pepys scribbled a page of his "Diary" here; Herschel the astronomer played a chapel-organ here; Lord Chesterfield's manners and Sheridan's wit found here an apt field of exercise; but for my part – and it was a scandalous choice, with the ghosts of Pitt and Burke, Wolfe and Nelson, Cowper and Scott and Goldsmith and Moore ready to do escort duty – I wished for the company of Chaucer's Wife of Bath, for such a piquant gossip could not have failed to add some entertaining items to the story of the town.

Our final pilgrimage of last summer was made to Clevedon, a lonely village which has within half a century become a popular summer resort. It

 
"By that broad water of the west,"
 

lies where the Severn merges into the Bristol Channel. Here is Myrtle Cottage, where Coleridge and his bride had their brief season of joy.

 
"Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rose
Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn
The sea's faint murmur. In the open air
Our myrtle blossomed; and across the porch
Thick jasmines twined."
 

It was here that this poet of boundless promise,

 
"The rapt one of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature,"
 

wrote his "Æolian Harp," his "Frost at Midnight," and other lyrics touched with an unwonted serenity and sweetness, and here that Hartley Coleridge was born.

But our first walk took us by the beach and across the fields to that "obscure and solitary church" where lies Tennyson's Arthur, son of Henry Hallam the historian, and himself a poet. He was in Vienna when

 
"God's finger touch'd him and he slept,"
 

and Tennyson linked the Austrian and the English rivers in his elegy.

 
"The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken'd heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
 
 
"There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills."
 

The ancient church, now but seldom opened for service, was locked, and we had to hunt for the sexton. It was dusk when he arrived, but we groped our way to the south transept and, by the light of a lifted taper, made out the pathetic farewell:

VALE DULCISSIME

VALE DILECTISSIME

DESIDERATISSIME

REQUIESCAS IN PACE

It was this tablet that haunted the restlessness of Tennyson's grief as, on moonlight nights, he would seem to see that lustre which fell across his bed slipping into the transept window and becoming "a glory on the walls."