IN THE WEST COUNTRY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3566, 18 July 1922, Page 61

IN THE WEST COUNTRY.

By

Jessie Mackay.

There should be restful eyes in England if the old idea be true tnat a bath of green is medicine for the sight. In April there is no other word that descnoes the vistas of England but a bath, a sea, of dewy greenness; after the sepia tones of New Zealand this contrast is compelling, and the traveller wonders if sight can really tire of a prospect so welcome, as some colour enthusiasts tell us, who profess to find the summer green of England glaring and hard. Perhaps the greenness of tile meadows is thrown up in softer, richer relief by t-lie strange (lead, winter-brown of what they call “the wood. An Antipodian would rather say, the wood,’’ for a more lifeless thing than these leafless expanses of thin, outstanding, brown skeletons, or grey, gnarled, and licliened veterans that will “ken nae second spring,” it would be difficult to find. True, before the end of April there are bursting blooms and fronds, and hopeful spray-tips of those “black ashbuds” that comforted Tennyson in the winds of March. All this melts into the magic of the western spring, with yet another strange colour-wane that completes an enchanting panorama, ltound about Bristol, one has first seen those smooth fields that bring home suddenly what Eden Philpotts means by the “good red earth.” For these hills over and among which our char-a-banc flies are the Mendip Hills of which the western novelist writes ; and again the Antipodian admires the paint brush of Nature, who has here graced the dull earthfronts, known to other regions with this curious restful tinting all of the dreamy west—a colour that tsembles between softest tan and darkest apricot. And Bristol, dusty Bristol, begins to soften into romance from the moment its allotments are seen upon the low downs beyond the suburbs. Those pocket-handerchief plots unfenced, but clear-cut with spade and line, speak of a new home-thrift unknown before the war, and not practised before time, for one judges England a poorly vegetable-fed country compared with the opulence of New Zealand’s herbal spaces. In this respect, the English cow would seem to have preference as against her master. And, indeed, in the land of Devonshire cream, and that even thicker, vcllower glorv which is sold as Cornish cre‘am, one tends to cultivate an almost Hindu reverence for the western cow. But. here again, is that balance dipping on the cow side which strikes the ontlander in his count of human gain about these' parts. That which the western man gains in eyesight he surely loses in foothold. Easter rains have been copious, as the tourist knows to his cost, but it is plain that these green meadows must be-a sponge at lea t half the year, whatever the seasdn. Furtively, one glances at the natives for signs of incipient web feet. Whether these be on the way in Nature’s good time one knows not, but certainly full-blown rheumatism is Nature's offset in all her times about the western and southern meadows of our present pilgrimage. But it is the pride of the eyes that has betrayed us into so long a colour chat when there are so many clamant appeals to the historic and the literary sense in every vista that opens to the questing stranger. It is the nearness of places that strikes the Australasian first, where economic Nature may plant a- hundred humdrum miles or two, or three between each beauty-land or spot of story. Suppose we leave the high streets where Cabot paced and tarried while a cautious Tudor King thought out the risks of western seafaring, and make sunny Clevedon our first objective. Curious English names they are down that fifteen-mile run by rail—Yatton, Nailsea, and the vest, but a Tennysonian glamour deepens as we near the soft, green sea-fields swelling on the ridge above the Bristol Channel. Tennyson walked these fields, and looked with a reverence (one imagines) at this grayish-yellow dwelling on the outskirts of the little, trim garden town such as he never felt either for Dove Cottage in the north, or for the Lake Laureate, his predecessor, with whom he exchanged some uneasy courtesies characteristic of the first lion ana the last., according to Sheridan—was it Sheridan whose “first lion thought the last a bore ?” There is, indeed, an odd similarity in prosaic exterior between Wordsworth’s honeymoon cottage by Grasmere, and. this Myrtle Cottage where Coleridge honeymooned with his Sara in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Of the two, Dove Cottage has the advantage both in size and setting : we have left the environs of Clevedon town behind before we begin the gentle fairy climb that takes us to St. Andrew’s Church, the shrine of all good pilgrims here. For it is within these walls that the beloved form was laid which The. Danube to the Severn gave in the sorrowful early “thirties’’ of last century, and here was buried that part of Tennyson’s soul which had its resurrection seventeen years later in his published “In Memoriam” of Arthur Hallam. Inside the soft, rich lea (flight glow with outer sunlight, and Easter lilies are still white over the altar, while the font is also filled with white blooms in English fashion. Slowly we move from one memorial to another in the dim and quiet house of prayer, till we reach that recess which holds the mortal dust of Arthur Hallam and his famous father, with the precise old-world tablets above this family restingplace—the names, the dates, the honours, the virtues of this house so typical of England’s best, father, mother, and children. We read of that young brother of Arthur Hallam, graced after a like fashion, as we gather, and also fated to perish suddenly and young in a place beyond the sea. Beneath the high window, rich in saintly presentment and imagery, at right angles to the Hallam memorials, there is a large and singularly well-plirased tablet of other days, erected over two young brothers who were drowned together, the elder trying to save the

younger, “In their lives they were lovely and pleasant, and in their death they were%at divided.’’ Oat into the sunlight, the fir. t England has deigned to show us this month, we fare towards that lofty, green ridge overlooking the Bristol Channel. Faint and far are the hills of South W ales across the tranquil flood, and we take in breaths of sea 6zoue and memory ; not only was Tennyson drawn hither; another of the Victorian giants found inspiration here, and not the inspiration of grief. For Clevedon Court was the “Castlewood” of Thackeray’s “Esmond” and “Virginians,” and a series of ghosts flit through the vistas that are ennobled bv few or none of the solid Hallam virtues, save, indeed, the. grave of young Esmond himself—the piquant, peccant Beatrix, that incipient “sair saint,” her mother, the unspeakable Oastlewood youths of the second generation, with Maria, their sister, forever hovering betwixt bathos and pathos. Altogether, the Oastlewood spectres are intruders in this little paradise of western main and meadow, intruders on the Ancient Mariner, on the English sanctities of “In Memoriam,” and no less on the irreproachable modern domesticities of this favourite haunt of the world-wearied. The knightly, patient Henry Esmond himself is in company here, and his sensitive Lady, wooed and won so late; hut certainly their acidulous Virginian daughter could never have fitted into'This soft evening picture of rosy sky and tranquil seameadow, which is our last memory of Clevedon.

(To be Continued.)