The night at Bridgwater was still. I heard little after ten except the clear deep bells of St. Mary’s telling the quarters. They woke me with the first light, and I was glad to be out of the hotel early because the three other guests (I think, commercial travellers) not only did not talk—which may have been a blessing—but took no notice of “Good evening” or “Good morning.” It was a clean, new, and unfriendly place, that caused a sensation as of having slept in linoleum. The charge for supper, bed, and breakfast was the usual one, a few pence over four shillings.
I wandered about the western half of the town. This being built on a slight hill above the river, was older and better worth looking at than the flat eastern half, though it was lacking in trees, as may be guessed from the fact that some rooks had had to nest in horse-chestnut trees, which they avoid[266] if possible. Castle Street is the pleasantest in the town, a wide, straight old street of three-storey brick houses, rising almost imperceptibly away from the quay. The houses, all private, have round-topped windows and are flat-fronted, except for two at the bottom which have bays. Across the upper end a big, sunlit, ivied house, taller than the others and of mellower brick, with a chestnut tree, projects somewhat, and on the pavement below it is a red pillar box.
The quay itself is good enough to recall Bideford. The river is straight for a distance, and separated from the quayside buildings only by the roadway. These buildings, ship-brokers’ and contractors’, port authority’s and customs and excise offices, a steam sawmill, and the “Fountain,” “Dolphin,” and “King’s Head,” are plain enough, mostly with tall flat fronts with scant lettering and no decoration, all in a block, looking over at the low level of the Castle Field north-eastward, where cattle grazed in the neighbourhood of chimney-stacks and railway signals. The Arthur was waiting for a cargo. The Emma was unloading coal. But for the rest the quay was quiet, and a long greyhound lay stretched out across the roadway, every inch of him content in the warm sun.
The next best thing to the quay was the broad[267] sandstone Church of St. Mary and its tall spire, standing on a daisied, cropped turf among thorns and a few tombstones, and walled in on three sides by houses, shops, and the “White Lion” and “Golden Ball.” The walls inside provide recesses for many tombs. The most memorable tomb in the church is that of an Irish soldier named Kingsmill. He is a fine fellow, albeit of stone, leaning on his elbow and looking at the world or nothing as if satisfied with his position. He “sleeps well”—no man, I should say, better. This and his features reminded me of a man still living, a man of brawn and spirit, a despiser of beastly foreigners, and a good sleeper. I have seen him looking like old Kingsmill, with this one difference—that when he was in that stage of wakingness he had a cigarette between his lips invariably. He awoke, smiling at the goodness of sleep and of the world, and lay back, whoever called him, to sleep again. Resurrected at length, or partly so, he would sigh, but not in sorrow, and then swear, and turn over to reach a cigarette from beside the bed. The lighted cigarette regilded the world: he envied no man, any more than Kingsmill does, and certainly no woman. The cigarette, though enchanted, came to an end, even so; and he did what Kingsmill perhaps never did, took a cold bath, but in a[268] manner which Kingsmill would have admired. The bath being filled to within an inch or two of overflowing, he let himself slowly in until he was completely under water, where he lay in a state apparently of bliss lasting many seconds, for beneficent providence had ordained that he should be almost as much aquatic as he was earthly, worldly, and territorial. Then out he came like Mars rising from the foam. After drying himself for ten minutes he lit another cigarette and rambled about his room without artificial covering until he had smoked it. Next he began dressing, an operation not to be described in my style in less than two volumes octavo, and worthy of something incomparably more godlike, for he was as a god and his dressing was godlike.... After Kingsmill’s effigy the chief spectacle of St. Mary’s is the unexpected, big Italianate picture of Christ’s descent from the cross, which forms an altar-piece. The story is that it was taken from a Spanish vessel—some add that it was one of the Great Armada; that it reached Bridgwater after a long seclusion at Plymouth, and was claimed by Plymouth when Bridgwater was seen to have it, but that Bridgwater kept it in a packing case for two years.
With the quay and the church ranks the statue of Robert Blake, if only for the inscription,—
[269]
“Born in this town, 1598.
Died at sea, 1657.”
I am told that there is also a passage quoted from one Edmund Spencer, but I did not see it; nor is it so great an error as the inscription about Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and they have less time in Bridgwater market-place than in Salisbury Cathedral for literary accuracy.
It was half-past ten on a beautiful morning when I rode out of the town by a very suburban suburb of villas, elms, and a cemetery. My road carried me at first along a low ridge, so that over the stone walls I looked down east and northward to the vale of the Parrett; a misty, not quite flat expanse of green, alternating with reddish and already crumbling ploughland, which was interrupted a mile away by the red walls, elms, and orchard of Chilton Trinity, and farther off, by the pale church tower of Cannington. Two horses were drawing a scarifier across the furrows of a field by the roadside. On my left or westward I looked beyond a more broken country, with white linen blowing on cottage garden bushes, to the dim Quantocks still far off. The sun was hot, but the wind blew from behind me, and the dust was not an offence when a motor car was not passing me. A chiff-chaff was singing at Wembdon. Larks crowded[270] their songs into a maze in every quarter. Overhead a single telegraph wire sizzled.
Three miles out of Bridgwater my road had dropped to the level, and proceeded over it to Cannington, but instead of sticking to it I turned at a smithy on my left into a by-road, which wound between low hedges of thorn and maple mounted either on ivied walls or on banks covered with celandines. It passed Bradley Green’s few cottages, the “Malt Shovel” inn, an oak copse with a chiff-chaff in it, and here a robin on a wall, and there a linnet on a thorn tip, in a slightly up and down country of grass, ploughland, and orchard. In a mile the road twisted at right angles to cross the Cannington brook and rejoin the main road; and at this angle, by a green bowered lane, was a stone house and chapel in one. This was Blackmoor Manor Farm, a group that no longer has anything stately or sacred save what it owes to its antiquity and continuous human occupation.
The main road, when I rejoined it, was rising once more between banks of gorse. So bright was the blossom of the gorse that its branches were shadowy and nearly invisible in the brightness. For the sun was now as warm as ever it need be for a man who can move himself from place to place. On both hands the undulating land was[271] warm and misty, but particularly on the right. There, as I approached Swang Farm, at the third milestone from Nether Stowey, a hill, almost as graceful as Ball Hill near Stawell, rose parallel to the road, its long-curving ridge about a third of a mile away. Its smooth flank was apportioned by hedgerows and a few elms among bare ploughland and young corn above, and drabby grass with sheep on it below. Near by, on the other side, was another such hill, a nameless one above Halsey Cross Farm, which I first took notice of when it was cut in two perpendicularly by the signpost pointing to Spaxton. It was but a blunt, conical hillside of green corn, rosy ploughland, sheep-fed pasture, and a few elms in the partitions; and behind it the dim Quantocks. Between these two hills, at a spot where the road twists again at right angles, a brick summer-house perched on the walled roadside bank, at the very corner. Here, as I heard, a few generations ago, ladies from the house near by used to sit to watch for the coaches. I was now two hundred feet up in the foothills of the Quantocks. Three or four miles in front bulked the moorlands of the main ridge.
Nether Stowey begins with a church and a farm and farmyard in a group. Then follows a street of cottages without front gardens, dominated by a[272] smooth green “castle” rampart a third of a mile away. The street ends in a “First and Last Inn” on one side, and a cottage on the other, announced as formerly Coleridge’s by an inscription and a stone wreath of dull reddish brown. Altogether Nether Stowey offered no temptations to be compared with those of the road leading out of it. Immediately outside the village it was walled by deep banks, and on these grew arum, celandine, and nettle, with bushes of new-leaved blackthorn and spindle. Here I saw the first starry, white stitchworts or milkmaids. And henceforward I was always walking steeply up or steeply down one of the medley of lesser hills. Below on the right was chiefly red ploughland; above on the left wilder and wilder heights of sheep-fed moorland. The road was visible ahead, looping half way up the slopes.
Honeysuckle ramped on the banks of the deep-worn road in such profusion as I had never before seen. The sky had clouded softly, and the sun-warmed misty woods of the coombs, the noise of slender waters threading them, the exuberant young herbage, the pure flowers such as stitchwort and the pink and “silver white” cuckoo flowers, but above all the abounding honeysuckle, produced an effect of wildness and richness, purity and softness,[273] so vivid that the association of Nether Stowey was hardly needed to summon up Coleridge. The mere imagination of what these banks would be like when the honeysuckle was in flower was enough to suggest the poet. I became fantastic, and said to myself that the honeysuckle was worthy to provide the honeydew for nourishing his genius; even that its magic might have touched that genius to life—which is absurd. And yet magic alone could have led Coleridge safely through the style of his age, the style of the author of Jolliffe’s epitaph at Kilmersdon, the style of Stephen Duck and his benefactors, the style of his own boyish effusions, where he personified Misfortune, Love, Wisdom, Virtue, Fortune, and Content with the aid of capitals. He fell again when weary into lines like,—
“Thro’ vales irriguous, and thro’ green retreats;”
he rose and fell once more, until finally the conventions had either slipped away or been adopted or subdued. Perhaps it was not in vain, or so fatuous as it seems to us, that he personified, like any lady or gentleman of the day,—
“The hideous offspring of Disease,
Swoln Dropsy ignorant of Rest,
And Fever garb’d in scarlet vest;
[274]
Consumption driving the quick hearse,
And Gout that howls the frequent curse;
With Apoplex of heavy head
That surely aims his dart of lead.”
Whether we can follow him or not into intimacy with those “beings of higher class than man,” Fire, Famine, Slaughter, Woes, and Young-eyed Joys, the more or less than fleshly creatures of his later poems may owe something to that early dressing up, as well as to the honeydew-fed raptures of Nether Stowey.
Some of the early poems reveal underneath the dismal tawdry vesture of contemporary diction the beginnings of what we now know as Coleridge. It is to be seen in the sonnet, “To the Autumnal Moon,” written in 1788 when he was sixteen, which begins,—
“Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night,
Mother of Wildly-working visions hail;”
and then again more subtly in 1795, when he is looking for a Pantisocratic dell,—
“Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,
And dancing to the moonlight roundelay,
The Wizard Passions weave an holy spell” ...
though it is impossible to say that the collocation of calm and careless, wizard and holy, would have[275] arrested us had Coleridge made no advance from it, had he remained a minor poet. The combination of mild and wild is a characteristic one, partly instinctive, partly an intellectual desire, as he shows by speaking of a “soft impassioned voice, correctly wild.” The two come quaintly together in his image of,—
“Affection meek
(Her bosom bare, and wildly pale her cheek),”
and nobly in the picture of Joan of Arc,—
“Bold her mien,
And like a haughty huntress of the woods
She moved: yet sure she was a gentle maid.”
Coleridge loved equally mildness and wildness, as I saw them on the one hand in the warm red fields, the gorse smouldering with bloom, the soft delicious greenery of the banks; and on the other hand in the stag’s home, the dark, bleak ridges of heather or pine, the deep-carved coombs. Mildness, meekness, gentleness, softness, made appeals both sensuous and spiritual to the poet’s chaste and voluptuous affections and to something homely in him, while his spirituality, responding to the wildness, branched forth into metaphysics and natural magic. Some time passed before the combining was complete. There was, for example, a tendency to[276] naiveté and plainness, to the uninspired accuracy of “pinky-silver skin” (of a birch tree), and to the matter of fact—
“The Mariners gave it biscuit worms—”
which he cut out of “The Ancient Mariner.” He cut out of “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” a phrase informing us that he was kept prisoner by a burn. At first he called “the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens” the “dear old ballad,” and the lines,—
“Yon crescent Moon is fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue”
were followed by—
“A boat becalm’d, a lovely sky-canoe”
It was natural to him at first to address Wordsworth as
“O Friend! O Teacher! God’s great gift to me!”
and it became natural to him to cut out the last phrase. Formerly Geraldine said to Christabel, “I’m better now”; and instead of lying entranced she lay “in fits.” The poem still includes the phrase describing Christabel’s eyes,—
“Each about to have a tear;”
while “Frost at Midnight” retains the allusion to[277] the “fluttering stranger” in the fire, the filmy blue flame, as a note instructs us, “supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend.” There is, too, a whole class of homely poems, on receiving the news of his child’s birth, on being warned not to bathe in the sea: “God be with thee, gladsome Ocean,” it begins.
The mildness, meekness, gentleness, beloved of Coleridge’s tender and effusive nature, appear with such diverse company as in “Poverty’s meek woe,” “mild and manliest melancholy,” and “mild moon-mellow’d foliage,” and repeated with variations four times in one verse of the lines written at Shurton Bars, near Bridgwater,—
“I felt it prompt the tender Dream,
When slowly sank the Day’s last gleam;
You rous’d each gentler sense,
As sighing o’er the Blossom’s bloom
Meek Evening wakes its soft perfume
With viewless influence.”
Sometimes the mildness expands to conscious luxury, as in the poem “Composed during Illness, and in Absence,” beginning,—
“Dim Hour, that sleep’st on pillowing clouds afar,
O rise and yoke the Turtles to thy car!
Bend o’er the traces, blame each lingering Dove,
And give me to the bosom of my Love!
[278]
My gentle Love, caressing and carest,
With heaving heart shall carol me to rest!
Shed the warm tear-drop from her smiling eyes—
Lull with fond woe, and medicine me with sighs,
While finely-flushing float her kisses meek,
Like melted rubies o’er my pallid cheek.”
Here he is half laughing at his own tendency, but he had only transitory thoughts of checking it. In “Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement,” he speaks of dreaming,—
“On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart
With feelings all too delicate for use.”
He is in revolt against the tendency, but only with his intellect. The honeysuckle intoxicates his heart too surely under the “indulgent skies” of that summer with Wordsworth.
A marked variety of his luxury is disclosed by his many references to the maiden’s bosom and the swelling of it with emotion. I choose the following example because it includes so much that is characteristic besides,—
“Oft will I tell thee, Minstrel of the Moon,
‘Most musical, most melancholy’ Bird!
That all thy soft diversities of tune,
Tho’ sweeter far than the delicious airs
That vibrate from a white-armed Lady’s harp,
What time the languishment of lonely love
Melts in her eye, and heaves her breast of snow,
[279]
Are not so sweet as is the voice of her,
My Sara—best beloved of human kind!
When breathing the pure soul of tenderness,
She thrills me with the Husband’s promised name!”
This quality is more effective in company with the other quality and relieved by it. I mean the quality which responds to ghostliness and to the wildness of Nature. “The Keepsake” has it perfect, in this picture of a girl,—
“In the cool morning twilight, early waked
By her full bosom’s joyous restlessness,
Softly she rose, and lightly stole along,
Down the slope coppice to the woodbine bower,
Whose rich flowers, swinging in the morning breeze,
Over their dim, fast-moving shadows hung,
Making a quiet image of disquiet
In the smooth, scarcely-moving river-pool.”
It is perfect again, differently combined, in part of “The ?olian Harp,”—
“The long sequacious notes
Over delicious surges sink and rise,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam’d wing!”
The work of this best period, the Quantock[280] sojourn, shows this uniting of richness and delicacy, of sweetness and freshness, of sensuousness and wildness, of spirit and sense, irresistibly intruding on “Religious Musings,” as here,—
“When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massy gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies
And odours snatched from beds of Amaranth,
And they, that from the crystal river of life
Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales;”
or, as in “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner,” both written in the Quantocks, raised again and again to a peculiar harmony from the innermost parts of our poetry’s holy of holies.
Except for Coleridge, I had the road to myself between Nether Stowey and Holford. Sheep were feeding on some of the slopes, and in one coomb woodmen were trimming cordwood among prostrate regiments of oak trees; but these eaters of grass, or of bread and cheese and bacon, were ghosts by comparison with the man who wrote “The Ancient Mariner;” the very hills, their chasms and processions of beeches, were made unforgettable by his May opium dream of—
“That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
[281]
A savage place as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.”
Then the sea. At a mile past Holford the road bent sharp to the left and west, to get between the sea and the Quantocks. A sign-board pointed to the right to Stringston’s red-roofed white church. On the left two converging hillsides framed a wedge of sea, divided into parallel bands of gray and blue. It came as if it were a reward, an achievement, the unsuspected aim of my meanderings. A long drift of smoke lay over it from the seaward edge of the hills. The bottom of the wedge held the village of Kilve, and, a little apart, the cube of Kilve Court. As if to a goal I raced downhill to Kilve and its brook.
I had lunch at the “Hood Arms,” and made up my mind to stay there for that night. Two o’clock had not long passed when I left the inn and the main road and went north to Kilve Church and the sea. The by-road accompanied the brook, and skirted its apple orchards and tall poplars wagging myriads of wine-red catkins. Having passed a mill, a farm, and a cottage or two, the road took me to the church and its big, short-boughed yew tree, and became a farm track only. The small towered church is a poor place, clean and newly repointed[282] outside, the arches filled in which had apparently communicated with a side chapel, and all its possible crosses lacking. Inside it has a cheap rickety gallery at the tower end, and was being stripped of its plaster to show the wood carving at the cornice. Tablets hang on the wall in memory of people named Cunditt and Sweeting, and of Norah Muriel Sweet-Escott, aged twenty, who died in South Africa of yellow fever. As I was leaving the church, entered the Other Man. Laughing nervously at the encounter, he explained that he had come to Kilve to see if it really had a weather-cock. He reminded me of Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers,” where the poet pesters his son of five to give his reason for preferring Liswyn to Kilve, until, a broad, gilded vane catching his eye, the child gives the inspired answer,—
“At Kilve there is no weather-cock;
And that’s the reason why.”
“There is no weather-cock,” said the Other Man, laughing a little more freely and disappearing for the last time. A white-fronted farm-house, the heavily ivy-mantled ruin of a chantry adjacent, green mounds of long submerged masonry, and a big knobby poplar with wine-red catkins, are next neighbours to the church, a stone’s throw from the[283] churchyard. The chantry has come to this by several stages. Part of it, for example, has been used as a dwelling, and adapted to the purpose by makeshift methods, which now add a sordid, contumelious element to the ruins. Fowls pecked about the chambers in the dust, in the bramble, ivy, and nettles. The big poplar stands, or, rather, reclines just off the ground, between the chantry and the brook. The running water led me seaward, through a tangled thicket of scrub oak, gorse, and bramble, filled in with teasel and burdock, and through a small marshy flag-bed. A low cliff, pierced by the stream, separates the beach from the rough, undulating, briery pasture. This cliff of sand and rock gave me shelter from the wind; the flat gray pebbles gave me a seat; and I looked out to sea.
A ragged sky hung threatening over a sea that was placid but corrugated and of the colour of slate, having a margin of black at the horizon. The water was hardly distinguishable, save by its motion, from the broad beach of gray pools, blackened pebbles, and low rock edges. Only the most fleeting and narrow lights fell upon the expanse, now on a solitary sail, now on the pale lighthouse of Flat Holm far out. Between this island, which just broke the surface of the sea on the left, and[284] Brean Down, the last outpost of the mainland on the right, the cloudy pile of Steep Holm towered up.
KILVE.
“A ragged sky hung threatening over a sea that was placid but corrugated, and of the colour of slate, save a margin of black at the horizon.”
Not even the sea could altogether detain the eyes from the land scene westward; for there massed and jostled themselves together the main eminences of Exmoor, of a uniform gray, soft and unmoulded, that was lost from time to time either in the wild, hurrying, and fitfully gleaming sky, or in tawny smoke rolling low down from the Quantocks seaward. Hardly less sublime was the long, clear-cut ridge between me and Exmoor, low but precipitous, projecting into the sea a mile or two distant, and bearing a dark church tower like a horn. The fire on the Quantocks now burnt scarlet.
The Kilve brook on my left was noisily twisting over the pebbles and the slanting, gray, mossy-weeded rock down to the sea, tossing up a light but unceasing spray; and pied wagtails flitted from the fresh water to the salt over the rocks. But what I was most glad to see was the meadow pipit. Feebly, like a minor lark, and silently, he launched himself twenty or thirty feet up from the wet, dark rock; then, with wings uplifted and body curved to a keel like a crescent, he descended slantwise, singing the most passionate and thrilling-sweet of all songs[285] that “o’er inform this tenement of clay” until he alighted. Before one had finished another began, and not a moment was the song silenced. Here, too, and among the briers of the rough pasture behind the cliff, the wheatear, as clean as a star, flirted his tail and showed his whiteness.
Over Exmoor storm and sun quarrelled in the cauldron, but here only one drop fell on each dry, warm pebble and vanished. The wind slackened; the heat grew; the warm, soft gray sky closed in and imprisoned the air which the earth breathed. It was pleasant to get hot out of doors in March. It was pleasant to bicycle up out of Kilve and away west on the Minehead road, which carried me well up round the end of the Quantocks. I took the second turning seaward for East Quantoxhead. The cottage gardens in this lane were rich in wallflowers, daffodils, and jonquils; and japonica was blood-red on the walls. Still better were the hedges past the few cottages, because they were green entirely, and were the first I had seen so in that spring. Nor were they mere thorn or elder hedges, but interwoven elm, thorn, brier, and elder, all with their young leaves expanded. But the heat was already great, and I was going downhill too much not to reflect that I should have to come up again. The pale Court House and con tiguous church of East Quantoxhead, homes of the living and of the dead Luttrells for many centuries, as men go, were still a quarter of a mile away across a wide meadow with oak trees, and I never got nearer. I turned instead along a hedged, stony lane upon the left. It soon created a suspicion that I ought not to have taken it. I stuck to it, however, uphill and then precipitously down under untrimmed hedges, where it was no better than a river bed of mud and stones, until it ceased to exist, having emerged into the fields which it served. As I refused to return, I had to ascend along the edges of several ploughed fields and among sheepfolds and through gateways before I recovered the main road at about the sixth milestone from Nether Stowey. The heat, the climbing with a bicycle, and, above all, the useless, indignant impatience of annoyance, tired me; yet I rode on westward. The gorse was beautiful on the hills above, and in the old sandstone quarries beside the road. The sides of these quarries were bearded with it, their floors were carpeted with gilt moss, out of which rose up straight young larch trees in freshest green. At the head of a deep coomb of oak and foxglove the rock had been cut away for the widening of the road, and from the newly exposed sandstone hundreds of the rough rosettes of foxglove[287] had broken forth; but a smooth slab had been devoted to an advertisement of somebody’s flock of long-woolled Devon sheep.
The approach to West Quantoxhead and the great house of St. Audries was lined by fences, and I rode down past them with dread of the dismal walk back again. But at the foot the fence came to an end. The pale gorsy turf of the deer park fell away on the right to the great house and its protecting woods. Daffodils and primroses were thick on the left-hand slopes. And there was a fountain of ever-running water at the roadside. I took the water inwardly and outwardly, and no longer troubled about the difficulty of ascent and return, even when I found myself slipping down hill for two miles into Williton. The high beacons of Exmoor were hanging before me, scarfed and coifed by clouds of the sunset, and grand were these half-earthly and half-aerial heights, but lovelier was the gentle hill much nearer and a little to the left of my course. For the sun, sinking on the right side of it, blessed and honoured this hill above all other hills. Both its woods and pastures were burning subduedly with a mild orange fire, without being consumed. It was the marriage of heaven and earth. The grim beacons behind guarded the couch. A white farm below was as white as moonlight.
Williton begins with a railway station and a workhouse, yet the first half mile of it is a street without a shop, of white or pale-washed, often thatched cottages and small houses, each separated from the road by flowery gardens of various breadths, some mere flowery strips, all good. To the fact that it was on the main road from Minehead to Bridgwater it was as indifferent as to the marriage of heaven and earth. The straight road was smooth, pale, and empty. Where it runs into another road, as the down stroke runs into the cross stroke of a T, and has a signpost to Watchet on the right, Bicknoller and Minehead on the left, the shops begin. Here, though it was six, and notwithstanding the marriage of heaven and earth, I had tea, and furthermore ate cream with a spoon, until I had had almost as much as I desired.
Now although I had seemed to be riding continually downhill into Williton, I found it nearly all downhill back to Kilve. The road was like a stream on which I floated in the shadows of trees and steep hillsides. The light was slowly departing, and still on some of the slopes the compact gorse bushes were like flocks of golden fleeces. Robins and blackbirds sang while bats were flitting about me. Day was not dead but sleeping, and the few stars overhead asked silence. By the turn[289]ing to East Quantoxhead some cottagers talked in low tones. Kilve, dark and quiet, showed one or two faint lights. Only when I lay in bed did I recognize the two sounds that made the murmurous silence of Kilve—the whisper of its brook, and the bleat of sheep very far off.