IN WHICH THE NAME OF A GREAT POET IS CRIED OUT IN A SOLITARYPLACE
As I once more shouldered my pack and went my way, the character of the country side began to change, and, from a semi- pastoral heathiness and furziness, took on a wildness of aspect, which if indeed melodramatic was melodrama carried to the point of genius.
It was a scene for which the nineteenth century has no worthy use.It finds ignoble occupation as a gaping-ground for the vacuous tourist,--somewhat as Heine might have imagined Pan carrying the gentleman's luggage from the coach to the hotel.It suffers teetotal picnic-parties to encamp amid its savage hollows, and it humbly allows itself to be painted by the worst artists.Like a lion in a menagerie, it is a survival of the extinct chaos entrapped and exhibited amid the smug parks and well-rolled downs of England.
I came upon it by a winding ledge of road, which clung to the bare side of the hill like the battlements of some huge castle.
Some two hundred feet below, a brawling upland stream stood for the moat, and for the enemy there was on the opposite side of the valley a great green company of trees, settled like a cloud slope upon slope, making all haste to cross the river and ascend the heights where I stood.Some intrepid larches waved green pennons in the very midst of the turbulent water, here and there a veteran lay with his many-summered head abased in the rocky course of the stream, and here was a young foolhardy beech that had climbed within a dozen yards of the rampart.All was wild and solitary, and one might have declared it a scene untrodden by the foot of man, but for the telegraph posts and small piles of broken "macadam" at punctual intervals, and the ginger-beer bottles and paper bags of local confectioners that lent an air of civilisation to the road.
It was a place to quote Alastor in, and nothing but a bad memory prevented my affrighting the oaks and rills with declamation.As it was, I could only recall the lines "The Poet wandering on, through Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down Indus and Oxus from their icy caves--"and that other passage beginning "At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore He paused--"This last I mouthed, loving the taste of its thunder; mouthed thrice, as though it were an incantation,--and, indeed, from what immediately followed, it might reasonably have seemed so.
"At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore He paused--"I mouthed for the fourth time.And lo! advancing to me eagerly along the causeway seemed the very sprite of Alastor himself!
There was a star upon his forehead, and around his young face there glowed an aureole of gold and roses--to speak figuratively, for the star upon his brow was hope, and the gold and roses encircling his head, a miniature rainbow, were youth and health.
