From Gretna Green to Land's End Part 15

A mightier spell than any of these was upon us, the spell of Glas...o...b..ry, 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 sh.o.r.es 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. Glas...o...b..ry 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

"pa.s.ses to the Isle Avilion, He pa.s.ses 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 Glas...o...b..ry, 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 pa.s.sed from mortal ken, he was not dead, but still, through the waiting centuries,

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

Yet the mediaeval voices, that we would gladly believe more simply than we may, tell us that Arthur was buried at Glas...o...b..ry 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, ill.u.s.trates 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 Glas...o...b..ry 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, Arimathaean Joseph, journeying brought To Glas...o...b..ry, 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 Glas...o...b..ry, 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 Glas...o...b..ry 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 Arimathaea 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 Glas...o...b..ry 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 Glas...o...b..ry 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 n.o.blemen 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 Glas...o...b..ry 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 t.i.the-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 Glas...o...b..ry 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 Glas...o...b..ry 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 facade 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 Glas...o...b..ry down. The rage of war has pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l's Ladder behind us and came out into an open s.p.a.ce 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 c.o.x'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 a.s.sortment 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 stalact.i.te nearly touch,--only one drop wanting, yet in all these years since Mr. c.o.x, 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 Hyaena Den, when disclosed in 1852, the eyes of geologists could discern the very places where our s.h.a.ggy 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 n.o.blest church-towers in Somerset and on the decorous grave of Hannah More.

All manner of literary a.s.sociations 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 gla.s.s but even of its iron and lead by Henry VIII, and only a bleak framework left to pa.s.s 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 cla.s.sic fragments, among which were mingled bits of mediaeval 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 pa.s.sersby, who found it amusing to pelt the invalid bathers with dead cats--poor p.u.s.s.ies!--and frogs. But Nash secured a band of music for the Pump Room, set orderly b.a.l.l.s on foot, and soon won the t.i.tle 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.ses 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 "a.n.a.logy," 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 lies

"By that broad water of the west,"

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 G.o.dlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature,"

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. PETER'S CHURCH, CLEVEDON]

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

"G.o.d'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 sh.o.r.e, And in the hearing of the wave.

"There twice a day the Severn fills; The salt sea-water pa.s.ses 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 s.e.xton. 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 l.u.s.tre which fell across his bed slipping into the transept window and becoming "a glory on the walls."

"The marble bright in dark appears, As slowly steals a silver flame Along the letters of thy name, And o'er the number of thy years.

"The mystic glory swims away; From off my bed the moonlight dies; And closing eaves of wearied eyes I sleep till dusk is dipt in grey:

"And then I know the mist is drawn A lucid veil from coast to coast, And in the dark church like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn."

From Clevedon, from Bath, from Cheddar, from Wells, the roads lead to Bristol, which must not, if only for the sake of poor Chatterton, be ignored. This worn, dignified old city has had something of a vagrant career. Before the Norman Conquest, and for long after, Bristol stood north of the Avon and was a Gloucestershire town. In course of time it stretched across the river and lay partly in Somerset. And in the fourteenth century, when for wealth and consequence it ranked second only to London, Edward III created it a county by itself. From the dawn of its history it was a trading-mart. Nothing came amiss to it, even kidnapping, so that among its gains it gained the t.i.tle "Stepmother of all England." The merchants and the mariners of Bristol stood in the front of English enterprise. Even in the time of Stephen it was deemed wellnigh the richest city of the kingdom. When a foreign war was in hand, Bristol could be counted on for a large contingent of ships and men. Its merchants lived in towered mansions, with capacious cellars for the storage of their goods, warehouses and shops on the street floor, the family parlours and bedrooms above, and attics for the prentices in the sharp-pitched gables. The banquet-halls, at the rear of these s.p.a.cious dwellings, were splendid with carven roofs, rich tapestries, and plate that would have graced a royal board. Even the critical Pepys, who visited Bristol after its Spanish and West Indian trades were well established, found its quay "a most large and n.o.ble place."

Bristol sailors bear no small part in the tales of English sea-daring and records of discovery. As early as 1480, Bristol merchants were sending out tall ships to search west of Ireland for "the Island of Brazil and the Seven Cities." Sixteen years later the Venetian mariner, John Cabot, probably accompanied by his son Sebastian--"shadow-seekers,"