第8章 SCHOOLS:LLANBLETHIAN;PARIS;LONDON(2)

The peasantry seem indolent and stagnant,but peaceable and well-provided;much given to Methodism when they have any character;--for the rest,an innocent good-humored people,who all drink home-brewed beer,and have brown loaves of the most excellent home-baked bread.The native peasant village is not generally beautiful,though it might be,were it swept and trimmed;it gives one rather the idea of sluttish stagnancy,--an interesting peep into the Welsh Paradise of Sleepy Hollow.Stones,old kettles,naves of wheels,all kinds of broken litter,with live pigs and etceteras,lie about the street:for,as a rule,no rubbish is removed,but waits patiently the action of mere natural chemistry and accident;if even a house is burnt or falls,you will find it there after half a century,only cloaked by the ever-ready ivy.Sluggish man seems never to have struck a pick into it;his new hut is built close by on ground not encumbered,and the old stones are still left lying.

This is the ordinary Welsh village;but there are exceptions,where people of more cultivated tastes have been led to settle,and Llanblethian is one of the more signal of these.A decidedly cheerful group of human homes,the greater part of them indeed belonging to persons of refined habits;trimness,shady shelter,whitewash,neither conveniency nor decoration has been neglected here.Its effect from the distance on the eastward is very pretty:you see it like a little sleeping cataract of white houses,with trees overshadowing and fringing it;and there the cataract hangs,and does not rush away from you.

John Sterling spent his next five years in this locality.He did not again see it for a quarter of a century;but retained,all his life,a lively remembrance of it;and,just in the end of his twenty-first year,among his earliest printed pieces,we find an elaborate and diffuse deion of it and its relations to him,--part of which piece,in spite of its otherwise insignificant quality,may find place here:--"The fields on which I first looked,and the sands which were marked by my earliest footsteps,are completely lost to my memory;and of those ancient walls among which I began to breathe,I retain no recollection more clear than the outlines of a cloud in a moonless sky.But of L----,the village where I afterwards lived,I persuade myself that every line and hue is more deeply and accurately fixed than those of any spot I have since beheld,even though borne in upon the heart by the association of the strongest feelings.

"My home was built upon the slope of a hill,with a little orchard stretching down before it,and a garden rising behind.At a considerable distance beyond and beneath the orchard,a rivulet flowed through meadows and turned a mill;while,above the garden,the summit of the hill was crowned by a few gray rocks,from which a yew-tree grew,solitary and bare.Extending at each side of the orchard,toward the brook,two scattered patches of cottages lay nestled among their gardens;and beyond this streamlet and the little mill and bridge,another slight eminence arose,divided into green fields,tufted and bordered with copsewood,and crested by a ruined castle,contemporary,as was said,with the Conquest.I know not whether these things in truth made up a prospect of much beauty.Since I was eight years old,I have never seen them;but I well know that no landscape Ihave since beheld,no picture of Claude or Salvator,gave me half the impression of living,heartfelt,perfect beauty which fills my mind when I think of that green valley,that sparkling rivulet,that broken fortress of dark antiquity,and that hill with its aged yew and breezy summit,from which I have so often looked over the broad stretch of verdure beneath it,and the country-town,and church-tower,silent and white beyond.

"In that little town there was,and I believe is,a school where the elements of human knowledge were communicated to me,for some hours of every day,during a considerable time.The path to it lay across the rivulet and past the mill;from which point we could either journey through the fields below the old castle,and the wood which surrounded it,or along a road at the other side of the ruin,close to the gateway of which it passed.The former track led through two or three beautiful fields,the sylvan domain of the keep on one hand,and the brook on the other;while an oak or two,like giant warders advanced from the wood,broke the sunshine of the green with a soft and graceful shadow.How often,on my way to school,have I stopped beneath the tree to collect the fallen acorns;how often run down to the stream to pluck a branch of the hawthorn which hung over the water!The road which passed the castle joined,beyond these fields,the path which traversed them.It took,I well remember,a certain solemn and mysterious interest from the ruin.The shadow of the archway,the discolorizations of time on all the walls,the dimness of the little thicket which encircled it,the traditions of its immeasurable age,made St.Quentin's Castle a wonderful and awful fabric in the imagination of a child;and long after I last saw its mouldering roughness,I never read of fortresses,or heights,or spectres,or banditti,without connecting them with the one ruin of my childhood.