With the World's Great Travellers Volume Iii Part 6

but the memory of the invalid deaf lady, so loving, so simple, so neighborly, so old in years, so young in heart, is one that will not soon be forgotten, even in the land of Wordsworth and Southey and Arnold.

A little farther, Fox How nestles at the foot of a craggy height. This was for many years the home of Dr. Arnold; and not far away is Fox Ghyll, a beautiful villa belonging to the Right Honorable W. E.

Forster, who, it will be remembered, married a daughter of Dr. Arnold's.

Mr. Forster spends a great deal of his time here, glad to escape the "madding crowd" and the bickering and fever of political life.

A lovely drive through "a spot made for nature by herself" brought us to Rydal Mount, so long the home of Wordsworth. He went there in 1813, and at that time the lakes were hardly known. The poet Gray was the only eminent Englishman who visited them before the present century, and he complained that "the great forests and the total want of communication was a barrier he could not surmount." Upon Goldsmith they made no impression; and Tickell, born within a mile of Derwent.w.a.ter, has not a line in their praise, though he wrote a long poem on Kensington Gardens.

But in 1813 Englishmen were compelled to travel in their own country, for Napoleon had closed the continent of Europe to them, or, as a Westmoreland woman expressed it, "there was sic a deal of uneasiness i'

France."

And here I may notice, in pa.s.sing, the peculiar habit of _understating_ everything, so characteristic of Westmoreland people. Where a Yorks.h.i.+re man would say unequivocally, "The fellow is a scoundrel," the Westmoreland man would remark. "There were a deal o' folks more particler about doin' reet nor him." A bad man is a bad man all the world over, except in Westmoreland: there he is "a varra moderate chap."

All over the world, when it rains as hard as it can, people do not scruple to say, "It rains hard;" but a Westmoreland man only admits, "It's softish."...

At Rydal Mount, Wordsworth lived nearly forty years, roaming over the mountains or sitting down by some lonely tarn to write his "solemn-thoughted idylls;" for he seldom wrote in-doors. A visitor once asked to see his study, and a servant showed her a room containing a number of books. "This is the master's library," she said: "his study is out o' doors and up on t'hill-tops." The house is a lovely spot now, but it owes much to Wordsworth. I have a drawing of it, made soon after he removed there, which represents only a very plain stone house, standing on a natural terrace of turf. The interior has been often described, for no visitor with a respectable claim on the poet's attention was ever turned away. But it is now in the possession of a man who suffers no one to approach it. In fact, he has taken care to post conspicuously the following notice: "No person is allowed in these grounds under any circ.u.mstances." In 1850, Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount,--a sweetly-solemn death, which gave to his mourning heart the glad a.s.surance that he was "going to Dora," his dearly beloved daughter, whose death on the threshold of a beautiful and happy womanhood he had never ceased to mourn.

On the road which skirts Rydal Water is Nab Cottage, forever a.s.sociated with De Quincey and poor Hartley Coleridge. Standing before it, how easy it was to imagine the small, fragile Opium-Eater, with his wrinkled face and arched brows loaded with thought, and those haunted eyes peering out from their dark rings! How vividly we could see him in the small parlor, with its five thousand books and bright fire and decanter of laudanum, or imagine him rambling through the summer nights upon the hills, in solitary possession of the whole sleeping country, when that fine expression he applied to Coleridge in similar situations might so well designate himself,--"an insulated son of revery"!

[The travellers next set out for a tramp to the top of Helvellyn, the loftiest mountain of the lake district. On their way thither they came upon an interesting pastoral scene.]

The farm-yard went straight up the hill, but was surrounded by buildings of every kind. What a busy, merry, picturesque gathering was in it! The old men, in clean, white s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, with long clay pipes in their mouths, were wandering about the yard, watching the shearers, who were working with a silent rapidity that showed a very keen contest. For these "shearings" are a kind of rural Olympics; and proud is the young farmer who has finished his sixscore sheep in a day.

There were seven shearers present, wonderfully handsome, stalwart fellows. Each sat upon a bench, their pillar-like throats uncovered, their arms bare to the shoulder; and, as the sheep were brought to them, they lifted them on to the bench, turned them with the greatest ease, and cut off the wool with amazing rapidity, rarely allowing the shears to injure the animal. If such an accident occurred, it was a blemish on the shearer's fame.

At a long impromptu table women were just as rapidly folding the fleeces ready for market. Some were handsome matrons, some were young la.s.ses, but all wore the snow-white kirtle and the short, striped linsey petticoat that showed their slender ankles and trimly-shod feet. Peals of merry laughter and shafts of harmless satire flew from them to the shearers, who were far too busy to answer just then, but who doubtless promised themselves future opportunities. In a small enclosure at the extreme end there was perhaps the merriest group of all,--about a dozen school-lads, whose duty it was to bring the sheep to the shearers. How the heated air quivered above the panting creatures, and how the lads laughed and shouted and tugged and pulled and pushed and dragged, their brown faces glowing to crimson, their parted scarlet lips and intense blue eyes making them perfect pictures of splendidly healthy, happy boyhood!

And with what indulgent tolerance the sheep-dogs watched them! I am sure the good-natured ones laughed quietly to themselves at all the unnecessary fuss, while others lay with their heads between their paws and opened their eyes sarcastically at the whole affair. They would have taken a sheep by the ear and walked it up to the bench without a bark.

It was a perfect idyllic picture, in which every age of manhood and womanhood blended.

At sundown over six hundred sheep had been sheared, and a number of visitors arrived. Then a feast was spread for more than fifty people, and after it the fiddlers took the place of honor, and dancing began. No one could resist the mirthful infection, and, after a slight hesitation, Christina drew on her gloves and allowed herself to be persuaded to open the ball with "the master." She was just stepping daintily down the middle, with a smile on her face, when the Bailie looked in at the open door. He professed to be "vera weary;" but in half an hour he was taking his part in "Moneymusk" with a lively agility that won him much admiration. "Such hours dinna come every day," he said. And so we stayed until the dancing ceased and the company scattered at the fell foot into parties of twos and threes.

[From Grasmere they made their way to Keswick, the capital town of the lake district, and the home of Southey and Coleridge.]

When Southey came to Greta Hall, in 1803, Coleridge, the "noticeable man with large gray eyes," was living there, delighting the reading world with his vast and luminous intellect and his Miltonic conceptions, reaching "the caverns measureless to man." Here that marvellous boy Hartley ran about, and so charmed Coleridge's landlord that he could scarcely be persuaded to take the rent for Greta Hall, considering the joy of the child's company a full equivalent. For three years Coleridge and Southey occupied the Hall together; then Coleridge became the slave of that opium-habit which made his comings and goings more uncertain than a comet's. He flitted about between Southey and Wordsworth; and never since Shakespeare's time have three men of equal genius lived on such terms. Landor called them "three towers of one castle." Very soon De Quincey made a fourth in this remarkable group. And two of them were wise, and two of them were stranded on the same poppy-covered coast, the land of the Lotos-Eaters.

We wandered about Keswick, but wherever we went the shades of these great men followed us, and half a mile out of it, on the Penrith road, we were suddenly met by another wraith of genius, for there stood the pretty cottage to which Sh.e.l.ley brought his first wife, the lovely woman of humble birth whom he offended society by marrying. Here they were visited by the Southeys and De Quincey, and the latter in his "Sketches"

has a very charming picture of the girl-wife playing gravity before her visitors and running about the garden with Percy when they were tired of the house. Sh.e.l.ley was then nineteen and Southey thirty-seven; and Southey says, "Sh.e.l.ley acts upon me as my own ghost might do; he has all my old dreams and enthusiasms: the only difference is the difference of age."

Many bitter things were said of the handsome, gifted Sh.e.l.ley in his day; but, as Dr. Arnold in his quaint, Luther-like phraseology observes, "Doubtless it is good for a man to have to do with Mr. Posterity," for that impartial judge has done Sh.e.l.ley justice. We bought his "Alastor"

as we went back to the hotel, and in the evening twilight read it, remembering the while that it was written "in the contemplation of death, which he felt to be certain and near."...

The next day we went around Derwent.w.a.ter in a boat,--certainly the best way to see it, for the bays and islands and points of interest on this lovely sheet of water can thus be leisurely visited. Soon after leaving Keswick, Skiddaw appears to rise from within a stone's cast of the sh.o.r.e, and continues a magnificent object during most of the way. At the head of the lake the mountains rise, height above height, from the Lodore crags to the lofty summits of Scawfell Pike and Scawfell, the latter the highest mountain in England. Southey had told us how "the water comes down at Lodore," but we wished to see it for ourselves: so we landed at the long wooden pier belonging to the Lodore Hotel, and, guided by the tremendous roar, scrambled a short distance among the crags and boulders, and saw the wild waters

"Retreating and beating, and meeting and sheeting, Delaying and straying, and playing and spraying, Advancing and prancing, and glancing and dancing, Recoiling, turmoiling, and toiling and boiling, And gleaming and streaming, and steaming and beaming, And rus.h.i.+ng and flus.h.i.+ng, and brus.h.i.+ng and gus.h.i.+ng, And curling and whirling, and purling and twirling, And flapping and rapping, and clapping and slapping, And das.h.i.+ng and flas.h.i.+ng, and splas.h.i.+ng and cras.h.i.+ng, And so never ending, but always descending, Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending, All at once and all over, with mighty uproar, And this way the water comes down at Lodore."

THE ROMAN WALL OF c.u.mBERLAND.

ROSE G. KINGSLEY.

[On the borders of c.u.mberland, at the northern boundary of Roman occupation of England, a wall of defence against the barbarians of Scotland was built, and manned by st.u.r.dy legions.

This wall still exists, and its present condition is described below.]

Half an hour's drive brought us to the farm-house at Birdoswald, and here the real interest of our expedition began. We were now on the Roman Wall; and, except Borcovicus or Housteads, near the Northumberland lakes, Birdoswald is the most perfect station along its line. It is supposed to be the Roman Ambloganna, which was garrisoned by a strong force of Dacians from Wallachia and Moldavia. The camp is five and a half acres in extent. The eastern gate-way is in very perfect preservation, the large blocks on each side of the double portal being in their original position and still containing the pivot-holes. The arch above the gate-way is gone; but some of the stones which formed it lie strewn about. Close to the gate are the ruins of a guard-house, and a portion of the boundary-wall, six feet in breadth. The western and southern gate-ways and walls are all well preserved, the walls having five or six courses of facing-stones, and being seven to eight feet thick.

In the farm-house the buxom farmer's wife showed us an ancient arch in the wall of the pa.s.sage, under which lay a collection of curiosities found from time to time about the camp,--a beautiful stone figure with flowing drapery, small stone altars, such as the soldiers used in their private devotions, and so forth. Outside, pinks, lilies, and roses were filling the air with their perfume, as we made our way through the little garden to the green field where stood the camp. We wandered about round the low stone walls, through the gate-way, where we saw the actual marks of the chariot-wheels on the pavement,--two ruts in the stone. We looked into the remains of the guard-house, where the sweet thyme and delicate clover now creep over stones against which Dacian warriors rested their heavy heads. We tried to trace out the course of streets, temples, and barracks among the gra.s.s-grown heaps in front of the farm-garden; and then I went out to the brow of the hill to see what was there.

What a surprise! The green field fell away abruptly in a great cliff, and down below the Irthing foamed over its stony bed, twisting and winding in sinuous curves of silver along the narrow valley, among wooded slopes and rocky crags. Green ridge and brown fell in endless succession led the eye away into the far distance, where Skiddaw loomed up in the south.

The late Lord Carlisle, in his "Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters,"

compares this view to the first sight of Troy after crossing the tame low plain of the Troad. It was certainly a grand point of vantage which, with their usual wisdom, the Romans pitched upon. The one thing one does not see at first is, where they got their water; and this was always one of the first points they considered in choosing a site. The river is too far off, and no spring now appears inside the camp. Last year my friends showed Birdoswald to the learned head-master of one of our most famous public schools. The absence of water puzzled the wise man not a little, and he asked one of the farm maidens who was showing the party round if she knew where the spring had been. She professed entire ignorance; but another la.s.sie standing by reminded her in broad c.u.mbrian, "It's where t' goose laid her eggs last soummer." We soon found it out to our cost, as, thanks to the rainy season, the ancient Roman well had formed a little quagmire hidden in long gra.s.s, into which we plunged unwittingly and came out with wet boots.

The Roman Wall adapts itself to the northern rampart of the camp, or fort, and runs close to the road for some five hundred yards westward from the farm-house. This wall--seventy-five miles long--has been the subject of many antiquarian discussions, with which we need not meddle.

Those, however, who have gone most thoroughly into the subject now agree that it was erected by the renowned emperor Hadrian, when he came to Britain, in the year 119. The inscribed slabs and altars found at the stations and castles on the line of the wall are undoubtedly of his reign; so are most of the coins that are found with them; and from this fact it appears that the Roman legions received their pay at the wall in his reign.

The conception of this stupendous barrier is singularly simple and effective. The wall, though varying a little in width, according to the nature of the ground it traversed, was about eight feet broad and fourteen feet high. The north side was further crowned by a parapet of four feet, making the total height eighteen feet. The outside stones were regularly-shaped and well-dressed freestone, fifteen to twenty inches long, ten inches broad, and eight inches thick. So well were they cut that one can detect them in an instant in any cottage-wall, from their smooth, finely-chiselled face as compared with the coa.r.s.er dressing of modern stones. Most of them have a wedge shape, tapering towards the end which is set into the wall. Dr. Bruce thinks that stones of this shape would have been conveniently carried on the backs of "the poor enslaved Britons." The present dwellers along the wall say that they were all brought in an old woman's ap.r.o.n and the wall built in one night. Mr. Jenkinson, on the contrary, in his charming and learned guide-book to Carlisle and the Roman Wall, thinks "both these modes of conveyance are too romantic for the practical Romans, who were not unacquainted with horses and carts."

The inside part of the wall consists of rubble-stone, like that found in the ma.s.sive walls of Caesar's Tower at Kenilworth and many other old castles. The stones, evidently picked up on the spot, while the dressed stone for the wall was brought in many instances from a great distance, were cemented together as hard as a rock by pouring fresh lime mixed with sand and gravel upon them.

Every four miles along the wall there was a fortified camp or station, like that at Birdoswald, each capable of containing from six hundred to one thousand foot- or horse-soldiers, as the case might be. "They were generally," says Mr. Jenkinson, "close to the wall, on the southern side, and appear from the remains existing to have formed almost a square, containing three to six acres, surrounded by high thick walls, provided with four gate-ways, and laid out in streets, barracks, temples, baths, etc., some of the buildings having ma.s.sive and occasionally beautifully-sculptured stones. Outside these stations are heaps of gra.s.s-grown rubbish, from which it is inferred that there also existed suburbs, where dwelt natives and camp-followers."

Between the stations were _castella_, or mile-castles, about a mile apart. These were sixty feet square, built also on the south side, of solid masonry, about the same height and thickness as the wall itself.

In each of these were stationed a company of some twenty men, who were yet further distributed singly in stone turrets, or watch-towers, used as sentry-boxes, of which there were four between each mile-castle, about three hundred and fifty yards apart. The sentries, being within call of each other, could thus keep up a complete system of communication along the line, and, as soon as danger threatened, troops could be concentrated at once on any spot from the stations or camps.

Unluckily, none of these turrets remain, though Hodgson says that he saw one opened so lately as 1833, about three hundred yards west of Birdoswald.

Along the northern face of the wall the Romans still further strengthened it by making a ditch below, thirty-six feet wide and fifteen feet deep. It was evidently a dry ditch, as it follows the line of the wall up hill and down dale. In some places the solid rock has been excavated to make it, and occasionally the earth dug from it has been thrown up into a bank on its farther side, thus making a third line of defence. To the south of the stone wall, at a distance perpetually varying from a few yards to half a mile, runs the vallum, or earthwork, consisting, where most perfect, of three ramparts and a fosse. The origin and use of the _vallum_ has also been a moot point among antiquaries. But now there seems little doubt that the vallum was the ancient Roman road running inside the wall. Pavements have been found upon it in various places. At Gilsland, exactly on the spot where the vallum would have to cross the Poltross Burn, the abutment of a Roman bridge has been lately discovered; and the highest authorities are now agreed, from these and many other indications, that this dispute may at last be laid to rest.

Climbing once more into our "heaven chariot," we bade farewell to Birdoswald and its many memories and drove due west along the line of the wall. For five hundred yards it ran close beside us on the left, about seven feet high and seven feet broad,--the stones in some places untouched since the day the Roman legions laid them one on another, clear cut as when they came out of the quarry. The short turf had clothed the top of the ancient barrier with a fragrant carpet, and in crevices where the cement had weathered away, the honeysuckle found root-hold; a tall purple foxglove reared its proud head as if it were acting sentry to the Border, and the fresh green lady-fern brushed the rugged stones lightly with waving plumes.

After a time the wall grew lower, and finally disappeared. Our road, which had been running straight as a bee-line, rose and swerved a few feet to the left, and we found that we were actually driving along the top of the wall. For nearly five miles we followed it. There it ran as straight as an arrow over every obstacle, with the great green ditch to our right and the great earth-bank beyond it, a type of the resistless determination of the great people who made it. High moorland pastures, reclaimed from the Waste, lay on either side. In some, the sweet hay was being cut, and the buzz of an American mowing-machine brought our wits with a sudden shock out of the by-gone ages where they had been wandering. In others, herds of polled Galloways, the sleek black cattle of the Border, were grazing peacefully, without fear of moss-troopers or cattle-thieves. Here stood a mile-castle,--four rude gra.s.s-grown banks marking its outline,--its stones being used to build a little cottage crouching in one corner. There an old lime-kiln, like some troll's dwelling, broke the endless swell of green and brown. The few cottages at the hamlet of Banks Head looked forlorn and dreary, as if they had been dropped by mistake on the desolate wild. They are all built of stone from the wall, which has proved an invaluable quarry to the whole neighborhood, and, in consequence, has been ruthlessly destroyed. A hideous fas.h.i.+on prevails about here. Most of the houses are whitewashed, the stones round the doors and windows are painted black, and, with their cold gray slate roofs or dilapidated thatch, they but add to the dreary look of this district. It is a dismal land up there on the Waste,--a sad, hard country, with its stone walls and boggy uplands, that must have bred a sad, hard race, one would think. But if one looks beyond the dreariness close at hand, what a wondrous view stretches away all round! East, are the greenish swells and conical crests of the Northumberland Fells; south, lie Tindale, Talkin, and Castle Carrock Fells across the valley of the Irthing, which is marked by a line of wood, and beyond them rise the n.o.ble group of Lake mountains. Helvellyn and the two giants Saddleback and Skiddaw, looming up veiled in mystery and golden haze; northward, the line of the Cheviot Hills shows that we are looking right into Scotland; westward, across the fertile plain, where park and pasture, river and forest, are bathed in suns.h.i.+ne, Criffel rears his head above Melrose Abbey; and there, right under the western sun, gleams a line of silver in the flat, extremest distance,--the Solway Firth.

It was with the feeling of parting from a friend that we bade adieu to the Roman Wall and turned downward from the bleak moorland into the rich vegetation of the valley. The glamour of the Roman period had laid hold upon us. We longed to follow up the course of this great barrier, to know more of its builders, of their lives, their works, their history, than we had ever done before. This monument of their almost superhuman power must awaken some kind of enthusiasm in the dullest mind, and one can echo Sir Walter Scott's words in "Guy Mannering:" "And this, then, is the Roman Wall. What a people, whose labors even at this extremity of their empire comprehended such s.p.a.ce, and were executed upon a scale of such grandeur! In future ages, when the science of war shall have changed, how few traces will exist of the labors of Vauban and Coehorn, while this wonderful people's remains will even then continue to interest and astonish posterity! Their fortifications, their aqueducts, their theatres, their fountains, all their public works, bear the grave, solid, and majestic character of their language; while our modern labors, like our modern tongues, seem but constructed out of their fragments."

ENGLISH RURAL SCENERY.

SARAH B. WISTER.

[For a country rich in its verdant beauty and perfect in its grooming, England is unsurpa.s.sed. While containing little of the grand, it has much of the charming, and is abundantly calculated to rest the eyes of the sight-weary traveller. We append an enthusiastic description of this garden-land from an American visitor.]

When we got into the country we grudged the time we had spent in London.

The true English landscape has a great and peculiar charm until the stranger learns its secret and wearies of its sameness. Never shall I forget the journey from Southampton to London on the day we landed.

Something must be allowed for the delight of eyes that had been looking over endless ridges of sea-waves to the blank horizon for so long; but what a blus.h.i.+ng, smiling land it was that greeted them! The verdure was the first thing that struck us,--very different from ours. There is more blue and less yellow in it, resting and refres.h.i.+ng the eyes with a cooler, deeper tone; the trees are denser in foliage too, and fuller in form; the whole scene had a boskiness and boweriness due to innumerable hedges, orchards, shrubberies, and plantations. Woodland, strictly speaking, there was none,--only here and there little triangular bits, not an acre in extent, for game-covers, or lines of tall feathery elms with bushy heads along the hedgerows, clipped close that they might not shut out the scanty suns.h.i.+ne from the farmer's field. The hawthorn was covered with its pink-and-white blossoms, May as they call it; acres of the gently-rolling country were crimson with Dutch clover; the laburnum, a small, graceful tree, was full of drooping strings of delicate yellow flowers; the banks were ablaze with scarlet poppies and golden broom.

Low-arched stone bridges spanned small br.i.m.m.i.n.g streams; quaint old gate-ways opened into shady avenues; thatched cottages, beautiful ancient parish churches with gray towers, pretty, quiet hamlets peeped out from the luxuriant leafiness; comfortable, solid, old-fas.h.i.+oned farmhouses reigned among their outbuildings and orchards; in the distance were grand country-places, scarcely visible in the depths of their stately parks; and, what raised our enthusiasm to the utmost, we pa.s.sed a beautiful Gothic ruin half hidden in ivy. Everything looked trim and orderly; not an inch of ground wasted; all turned to account for use or beauty; little vegetable-gardens on the slopes of the railway-embankments and along the edges of the track; little flower-gardens on both sides the station-houses, and roses and honeysuckle trained over their porches.