Memorials of Old Dorset

by Unknown

THE LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF DORSET

By Miss M. Jourdain

ORSET has continued Dorset alone from time immemorial,” and its special character has been more carefully preserved and fixed than that of any other English county in the work of two Dorset poets, William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, one of whom has succeeded, like Mistral in France, in making its native language a literary medium known beyond its spoken limits.

Dorset’s earlier poets,[61] however, have not been “local”; and it is characteristic of Matthew Prior that, in the account drawn up by himself for Jacobs’ Lives of the Poets, he describes his father as a “citizen of London,” and that though the first entry against his name on his admission as pensioner at St. John’s College, Cambridge, is Dorcestr, it has been altered by a later hand into Middlesexiensis. In spite of conflicting entries, it is now generally admitted that Prior, perennis et fragrans—the motto upon the modern brass to his memory in Wimborne Minster[62]—was born at or near Wimborne, in East Dorset, the son of George Prior, who is said to have been a joiner.

“With regard to the family of Prior, the tradition of Wimborne says that his father was a carpenter, and one house he lived in is pointed out: it is close to the present Post Office, and is called the house in which the poet was born. The other was pulled down, but its site is known.”[63]

Local tradition makes Prior a pupil at the free Grammar School; and of the unusually large library of chained books in the old church, one was said to be a standing testimony to his carelessness—a chained folio copy of Ralegh’s History of the World, in which a hole is said to have been burned by the boy when dozing over the book by the light of a smuggled taper. Unfortunately for the floating tradition, it has been stated that this particular defacement is the work, not of a candle, but of a red-hot poker. Still more unfortunately, it has been proved that the History, with other books, was placed in the library[64] at a much later date than Prior’s boyhood.[65]

Almost a century later a poetic “Court” was held at Eastbury, in North Dorset, by George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, who is not interesting as a poet[66] himself, but as the cause of poetry in others, the last of the patrons, a curious, gorgeous, tawdry figure, fit to be seen through the coloured glass of Macaulay’s ridicule. He was the easy mark for dedications and compliments from many of the best-known writers of the day—poets utterly discrowned, and those on whose brows the laurel grows very thin and brittle; Edward Young, Thomson, and Fielding mention him; while his Great House at Eastbury is celebrated by Thomson, Young, and Christopher Pitt,[67] who writes, somewhat oddly, of this “new Eden in the Wild.” The pleasures of this “Eden” appear, from an epistle of Pitt, to have been smoking and drinking, with conversational intervals. Dr. Young (of the Night Thoughts) sits with “his Dodington,”

Charm’d with his flowing Burgundy and wit,

By turns relieving with the circling draught

Each pause of chat and interval of thought;

Or, through the well-glazed tube, from business freed,

Draw the rich spirit of the Indian weed.

Thomson’s “Eastbury”—

Seat serene and plain

Where simple Nature reigns,

is as bad, in its way, as Pitt’s “Eden”—serenity, plainness, and simple nature being the most unlikely characteristics of Dodington,[68] whose heavy figure was arrayed in gorgeous brocades; and whose equally magnificent State bed was “garded and re-garded” with gold and silver embroideries showing by the remains of pocket-holes, button-holes and loops that they came from old coats and breeches. This great house, after Dodington’s death, was taken down all but one wing and sold piecemeal by Earl Temple, his heir.

Henry Fielding, one of the Eastbury circle—he dedicated to Dodington an epistle on “True Greatness”—was brought up as a boy in the manor-house at East Stower,[69] where he was taught by the Reverend Mr. Oliver, curate of the neighbouring village of Motcombe, said to have been the original of Trulliber, a portrait drawn “in resentment of some punishment inflicted on him,” according to Hutchins.[70] Fielding was fortunate in another portrait, for it is generally admitted that the prototype of Parson Abraham Adams was William Young, Incumbent of West Stower, who had many of Adams’ eccentricities. As an instance of Young’s absence of mind, it is said that when chaplain to a regiment in Flanders he “wandered in a reverie into the enemy’s camp, and was only aroused from his error by his arrest. The commanding officer, perceiving the good man’s simplicity, allowed him to return to his friends.”

At East Stower, too, Fielding lived for a time with his first wife.

William Crowe, though like Fielding only a short time resident in Dorset, is admitted on the strength of his topographical poem, Lewesdon Hill, of which Rogers thought so much that when travelling in Italy he made two authors his constant study for versification, Milton and Crowe.[71] Crowe’s Lewesdon Hill is a perfect example of an eighteenth century didactic and descriptive poem, with all the heaviness due to the requirements of an age which, like Horace Walpole, called for “edification” in its art. As in Goldsmith’s Traveller the person who speaks the verses sits pensively on an Alpine height, so Crowe in his poem is supposed to be walking on the top of the hill on a May morning—a hill, it has been suggested, that Fuller[72] may have climbed before him, and where the wide prospect, “standing where Moses stood when the Lord showed him all the land,” may have prompted the title of his book, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, which he wrote when at Broadwindsor. Upon this hill, where

The lonely thorn

Bends from the rude south-east with top cut sheer,

Crowe surveys the outspread map of the county—Shipton Hill, Burton Cliff, Eggardon Hill, the rich Marshwood Vale—in winter

Cold, vapourish, miry, wet,

to the “rampire” of Pillesdon, even the “nameless rivulet” (the minutest trickle of a stream at the foot of Lewesdon Hill), which, he rejoices,

Yet flows along

Untainted with the commerce of the world.

William Lisle Bowles, author of faint and forgotten verses, is remembered by Coleridge’s early admiration for his sonnets. His father, the Rev. W. Bowles (rector of Uphill), planted and improved Barton Hill House, in Dorset, which the poet sold. On leaving it the poet wrote verses full of regret for

These woods, that whispering wave

My father rear’d and nurst.

An author unknown outside his county is John Fitzgerald Pennie (buried July 17th, 1848). He was born at East Lulworth, March 25th, 1782, and is known as a dramatic writer. He published Scenes in Palestine, or Dramatic Sketches from the Bible, 1825; Ethelwolf, a tragedy, 1821, etc. He followed in his early years the profession of an actor, but after a chequered and unsuccessful career, settled in his native village and devoted himself to literary pursuits. He published his autobiography in 1827, The Tale of a Modern Genius, or the Miseries of Parnassus. In 1810 he married Cordelia Elizabeth, daughter of Jerome Whitfield, a London attorney. He and his wife died within a few days of each other, and were buried in the same grave.

Wordsworth’s connection with Dorset is of short duration, but is of interest as occurring at a critical period in his career. On his receiving Raisley Calvert’s legacy, he was able to live with his sister Dorothy at a farmhouse at Racedown,[73] which he was allowed to occupy rent free on condition that the owner might spend a few weeks there from time to time. It was in the autumn of 1795 that he settled there. His house is set upon the north-west slope of the “rampire” Pillesdon, in a hollow among hills cultivated to their summits, or patched with gorse and broom, which open here and there to allow glimpses of the sea. The Dorset peasants in Wordsworth’s time were wretchedly poor, their shapeless cottages “not at all beyond what might be expected in savage life,” as Dorothy Wordsworth wrote. Very little trace of the peculiar quality of the place is to be found in Wordsworth’s poems, but it was here he wrote the first of his poems of country life, modelled with an experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly accurate.

It was here that he watched[74] the “unquiet widowhood” of Margaret, drawing out the hemp which she had wound round her waist like a belt, and spinning, as she walked backwards before her cottage door. Here, no doubt, he saw her ruined cottage—there are many crumbling shells and ruined cottages in the district to-day—with the red stains and tufts of wool in the corner-stone of the porch where the sheep were permitted to come and “couch unheeded.” The garden, run wild, too, is to be met with to-day:

Its matted weeds

Marked with the steps of those, whom, as they passed,

The gooseberry trees that shot in long, lank slips,

Or currants, hanging from their leafless stems

In scanty strings, had tempted to o’erleap

The broken wall. I looked around, and there,

Where two tall hedge-rows of thick alder-boughs

Joined in a cold damp nook, espied a well,

Shrouded with willow-flowers and plumy fern.

Here, too, was Goody Blake’s cabin:—

On a hill’s northern side...

Where from sea-blasts the hawthorns lean

And hoary dews are slow to melt.

“The muffled clamour of the outside world only reached the secluded farmhouse at Racedown after long delay”—in other words, letters were delivered there but once a week; and on one occasion at least Wordsworth asks to have a book franked, otherwise he will “not be able to release it from the post-office.” A part of this time was given to gardening, and, no doubt from motives of economy, almost all the meals consisted of vegetables. “I have been lately living,” he writes, “upon air and the essence of carrots, cabbages, turnips, and other esculent vegetables, not excluding parsley.”[75] At another time he sets forth to warm himself, like Goody Blake, by gathering sticks strewn upon the road by the gale; and his habit was to take a two hours’ stroll every morning, and now and then a long expedition on foot. He and his sister, as the Cumberland peasants said, were “a deal upo’ the road,” and many times they must have walked more than forty miles in the day. There is a story still current in the neighbourhood that Wordsworth once borrowed a horse to ride into Lyme Regis, and returned on foot, having forgotten the horse! With all its hardships and frugalities, Dorothy Wordsworth loved Racedown. It was “the place dearest to (her) recollections upon the whole surface of the island,” and she speaks warmly of the scenery on Pillesdon, Lewesdon, and the view of the sea from Lambert’s Castle—which is said by some to be the view of the county.

Landor’s thought, that “when a language grows up all into stalk, and its flowers begin to lose somewhat of their character, we must go forth into the open fields, through the dingles, or among the mountains, for fresh seed,” would have been endorsed by both Wordsworth and Barnes alike, but with very different ideas as to what was considered fresh seed. Barnes’ innovation was an innovation of the letter rather than the spirit, the literary use of the local dialect which he heard in his boyhood, and which, he said, was spoken in the greatest purity in villages and hamlets of the secluded Vale of Blackmore, a valley so secluded that its life was practically the life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the nineteenth was far advanced. He attributes his poems’ freedom from “slang and vice” to this seclusion; but it is as much due to his personal[76] preference of light to darkness. His rustics are, as a rule, happy people.

William Barnes.

At Rushay, William Barnes spent his early days, and he was educated at the day school at Sturminster Newton. Somewhere along the road from Bagber to Sturminster was a haunted house, about the exact locality of which he gave no information beyond that a “dark, gloomy lane led to it.” He once pointed out the lane to grand-children as the place their “great-grandfather was riding down, when all at once he saw the ghost in the form of a fleece of wool, which rolled along mysteriously by itself till it got under the legs of his horse, and the horse went lame from that hour, and for ever after.” Barnes was of pure Dorset[77] stock. His long life was lived almost entirely in Dorset; and when at Mere, in Wiltshire, a stone’s throw from his own county, he “always yearned for Dorset and Dorchester.” Latterly he lived near Dorchester, where, until 1882, “few figures were more familiar to the eye in the county town of Dorset on a market day than an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand. He seemed usually to prefer the middle of the street to the pavement, and to be thinking of matters which had nothing to do with the scene before him. He plodded along with a broad, firm tread, notwithstanding the slight stoop occasioned by years. Every Saturday morning he might have been seen thus trudging up the narrow South Street, his shoes coated with mud according to the state of the roads between his rural home and Dorchester, and a little grey dog at his heels, till he reached the four crossways in the centre of the town. Halting there, opposite the public clock, he would pull his old-fashioned watch from its deep fob and set it with great precision to London time.”

An unusual union of scholar and poet, his little Dutch pictures are free from the dull undertone of the conventional manner that Burns occasionally fell into. Indeed, he has more affinity with the Provençal poet and lexicographer, Mistral, than with Burns or Béranger, with whom he is usually compared. He is perhaps mistaken in his belief that the Dorset dialect is “altogether as fit a vehicle of rustic feeling and thought as the Doric as found in the Idyllics of Theocritus.” But, after making this exception about the “fitness” of his Doric, there remains in his clear, untroubled poems of still life, in his unaffected eclogues, no small affinity with Theocritus. There is a charm in his limitations; he belongs not to England, but to Dorset; not to Dorset, but to the Vale of Blackmore, where the slow, green river, his “cloty” Stour, with its deep pools whence leaps the may-fly undisturbed by anglers, is the stream dearest to his memory.

Barnes was Mr. Hardy’s near neighbour and personal friend—Mr. Hardy’s house is less than a mile from the Rectory of Winterborne Came—and both have been interpreters of the life—especially of the vanished life—and character of their pastoral county. In every other respect they are as different as is “Egdon” Heath from Blackmore Vale.

It is difficult to say in what form of topography Mr. Hardy is at his best within his “kingdom”—his patient and precise creation of a town such as “Casterbridge” (Dorchester), the architectural individuality of his great houses, or his knowledge of “those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world,” and of woodlands and wildernesses. He has the knowledge with which he credits Angel Clare of “the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, in their temperaments; winds in their several dispositions; trees, waters, and clouds, shades and silence, ignes fatui; constellations and the voices of inanimate things.” In most cases, the birthplace of a novelist has no particular significance in relation to his work. Very often a writer’s county is like Matthew Prior’s, exchanged for Middlesex. But in the case of Mr. Hardy it is different. The fact that he was born in a “mere germ of a village” near Dorchester, and within sound of a heath; that his life has been spent, for the most part, in Dorset; that he now lives on the outskirts of Dorchester, and that he comes of a Dorset stock—tracing his descent, however, from John le Hardy (son of Clement, Governor of Jersey in 1488), who settled in the West of England before the end of the fourteenth century—are significant points in his biography.[78] By the circumstances of birth and lifelong residence the background of his novels, Wessex, has become mainly limited to Dorset (South Wessex), and especially to the neighbourhood of Dorchester.

The interest of Mr. Hardy’s backgrounds is twofold. There is their purely artistic interest as intensifying action and character; there is also their topographical interest. Mr. Hardy’s imaginary kingdom was so unlike the photographer’s “studio backgrounds” of other novelists that long before sketch-maps of Wessex were prepared and published in the uniform edition of his works the identity of many of his scenes afforded no manner of doubt to Dorset readers. The precision with which he describes a building or a neighbourhood, notes position, distance, proportion, has been a clue and a perpetual interest to those who follow the intricacies of Wessex geography, in spite of Mr. Hardy’s half-discouragement of those who sought to localise the horizons and landscapes of his “merely realistic dream country.”

His “illuminative surnames” have been spoken of by some writers. His place-names are no less illuminative, and his quaint or sonorous substitutes might be transferred to the map of Dorset with little loss. In some cases an older name is revived, such as Shaston, Middleton Abbey, and Kingsbere. Sometimes he has made a slight modification of the real name, or received a suggestion from it, as in Sherton Abbas, Emminster, Port Bredy, Chaseborough, Casterbridge. Other names are downright inventions, often a précis of the natural features of the town, such as Aldbrickham for Reading; or made with a fine ear for local probability.[79]

Mr. Thomas Hardy.

The county town of Dorset, with its core of old houses, and too many that are new, is the centre of the Hardy district, as it is the “pole, focus, or nerve-knot,” of the surrounding country. Its memories of Rome are preserved in Mr. Hardy’s name for it, “Casterbridge”; and its outward appearance in the days when Dorchester had no suburbs, and was “compact as a box of dominoes” behind its stockade of limes and chestnuts. A description of the old-fashioned place, in the mouth of one of Mr. Hardy’s characters, always quoted in the guide-books to Dorchester, is that “it is huddled all together, and it is shut in by a square wall of trees like a plot of garden-ground by a box edging”; and the unusual way the country came up to the town and met in one line is best described in his words:—

The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley mow and pitch a stone into the office window of the town clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the spectators room.

It has been said that the Dorchester in the Wessex novels had no suburbs; the North Street ended abruptly in a mill by the river; the South Street came to an end in a cornfield—but these bounds have been leaped over in several places, and to-day the east, or Fordington side of the town (Mr. Hardy’s Durnover) alone remains unchanged; and here the flat water-meadows stretch up to the garden-hedges and the actual walls of the houses. In spite of changes without the escarpments, the curfew still sounds at the stroke of eight from St. Peter’s with its “peremptory clang,” the signal for shop-shutting throughout the town. The brick bridge over the Frome, and the stone bridge over a branch of the same stream in the meads, have their well-defined peculiarities in Dorchester as in “Casterbridge.” The neighbourhood of “Mixen” Lane (Mill Lane), the “mildewed leaf” in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant, is recognisable at the east end of the town, near the town bridges.

Lucetta’s house, “High Place Hall,” at the corner of Durngate Street, has a modern shop-front inserted; while the most significant feature of her house is to be found at Colyton House, where, in the centre of the wall flanking the garden, is an archway, now bricked up, surmounted by a battered mask in which the open-mouthed, comic leer can hardly be discerned to-day. Without the town, on the Weymouth Road, is the immense Roman “Ring”—“Maumbury Ring, melancholy, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town”—which was to Dorchester what the ruined Colosseum is to modern Rome.

“Some old people said that at certain moments in the summer time, in broad daylight, persons sitting with a book, or dozing in the arena, had, on lifting their eyes, beheld the slopes lined with a gazing legion of Hadrian’s soldiery as if watching the gladiatorial combat, and had heard the roar of their excited voices; that the scene would remain but a moment, like a lightning flash, and then disappear.” The ancient square earthwork where Henchard planned his entertainment is Poundbury Camp, where the annual sheep-fair is held—“Square Pommerie” of the poems.

Dorchester is interesting from the fact that it is the only full-length portrait of a town drawn in the Wessex novels, and is the almost unshifting scene of one, the Mayor of Casterbridge, where the dramatic unity of place is preserved. In other novels the characters are wanderers and the scenes shifted; or the towns and villages are sketched in half-lengths or in small thumbnail sketches. Of these, certainly the most important historically is Shaftesbury, the Shaston of the novels, which seems to be set upon “a dominant cape or a far-venturing headland.” It is a town of shrunken importance, “familiar with forgotten years,” the ancient British Palladour, “which was, and is, in itself, the city of a dream.”

The houses now composing Shaftesbury are held high up above the Vale of Blackmore by the height, or cliff, upon which it is built; and Barnes, no less than Mr. Hardy, was alive to the vision of the old city on watch, straining her eyes to Blackmore’s “blue-hilled plain,” or shining “so bright” to those down miles below in the Vale.

Another ancient, shrunken town is Wareham, which reminds one to a certain extent of Dorchester, for it is square, ramparted, and defended by water on one side; but these are the only points of resemblance. The little diminished town “where only the presence of the river and the shallow barges on its bosom suggest the ocean,” goes by the name of “Anglebury”[80] in the Wessex novels, for it was a noted town in the Saxon age, when it was a place of strength. Sherborne, the “Sherton Abbas” of the novels, takes its fictitious name, like many other Wessex towns, from its most prominent feature, the Abbey. Cerne Abbas—called “Abbot’s Cernel” in the novels, one of its old names being Cernel—is a village “still loitering in a mediæval atmosphere”; while Bere Regis, which appears in the novels under the older form, “Kingsbere,” is another of the diminished places that Mr. Hardy delights to honour, a “blinking little one-eyed place” of thatched cottages, the measure of whose earlier magnificence is the fine church of St. John the Baptist that holds the dust of the Turbervilles. “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” to give it its full Wessex title, owes the last limb of that compound name to Woodbury Hill (Greenhill)—a green hill partly covered with trees that overlooks Bere. Its ancient fair, now much decayed, is described rather as it was than as it is, as the “Nijni-Novgorod of South Wessex.” The fair is, however, still held in September, beginning on the eighteenth of the month. “Marlott,” really Marnhull, also connected with Tess of the D’Urbervilles, lies embedded in Blackmore Vale, “where the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,” between Sturminster and Shaftesbury.

Some six miles distant from Mr. Hardy’s home is the village of Piddletown, known by the name of Weatherbury in Far from the Madding Crowd. The church described there remains, but, as the novelist expressly warns us, “Warren’s Malthouse” disappeared years ago, with some of the village’s characteristic peculiarities.

Stinsford, a parish of which the Bockhamptons are hamlets, the original of “Mellstock,” is so carefully described by Mr. Hardy that each cottage might well be a literary landmark, while Sutton Poyntz, the “Overcombe” of The Trumpet-Major, like Piddletown, has lost one of Mr. Hardy’s landmarks, for the mill is demolished, but the colossal figure of George III. upon the chalk downs, which in the novel was being cut, is still to be seen.

Mr. Hardy’s special quality of precision that comes of knowledge is nowhere more closely shown than in his pictures of great houses, or, indeed, of buildings of any kind. They are all drawn from the real, from their cellars and foundations to their leads and chimney-pots. The only liberty he takes with the originals is to remove them, in one or two cases, to another position. For instance, Lower Waterstone Farm, the original of Bathsheba Everdene’s house in Far from the Madding Crowd—“a hoary building of the Jacobean stage of classic Renaissance”—is nearly two miles from “Weatherbury” (Piddletown). Again, Poxwell Hall, the “Oxwell Hall” of The Trumpet-Major, is really three miles from “Overcombe” (Sutton Poyntz), and, therefore, not the close neighbour of the Lovedays it is made to be. The original of “Welland House” is Charborough; but the “Tower,” as Mr. Hardy writes, “had two or three originals—Horton, Charborough, etc.”

Wool Manor-house, or “Well Bridge,” as Mr. Hardy, reverting to the older name, calls it, once a possession of the Turbervilles, is set on the bank of the rush-grown Frome, near the great Elizabethan bridge that gives the place half its name. The paintings of two women are actually, as in the novel, on the walls of the staircase, but they are now rapidly fading away, and can only with difficulty be made out to-day by the light of a candle.

“Enkworth Court” (Encombe), deep in the Glen of Encombe, approached by a long road gradually dropping into the cup-like crater by the only expedient of winding round it, is a “house in which Pugin would have torn his hair.” “Great Hintock House,” however, another house in a hole, has no original, though it has somewhat hastily been identified with Turnworth House, near Blandford. The situation is similar, but Turnworth House is largely a modern building, while the “Great Hintock House” of The Woodlanders had a front which was an “ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-coloured free-stone from local quarries.”

The sea-coast towns of Dorset, southern outposts of Wessex, make an occasional appearance in the novels and tales. The original of “Knollsea” is Swanage, which would scarcely now be described as the sea-side village “lying snug within its two headlands as between a finger and thumb.” With Bridport (“Port Bredy”) and its neighbour, West Bay, Mr. Hardy takes one of his rare liberties in altering the configuration of the country; for one story opens with the statement that “the shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence to the shepherd on the west hill,” over the intervening chimneys. The cleft, however, in which the town is sunk is not so exiguous.

Georgian Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of The Trumpet-Major; while Portland, “the Isle of Slingers”—

The Isle of the Race

Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face,

—is especially the district of The Well Beloved. It is a “wild, herbless, weather-worn promontory,” sour and treeless, with its beak-like point stretching out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. On the east side is an unexpected wooded dell, narrow and full of shade, on the summit of which rises Pennsylvania Castle—“Sylvania Castle” of the novel—a modern castellated house, built in 1800 for John Penn, Governor of the Island, who planted the trees around it.

Perhaps Mr. Hardy’s most inalienable possession is not the town but the wild, the “obscure, obsolete, superseded country,” a “tract in pain,” which, with one form but many names, stretches from Poole in the east to almost within sight of Dorchester on the west, from near Bere Regis in the north to Winfrith in the south, where it joins the heathland of the Isle of Purbeck. Though “Egdon” Heath is broken up into many tracts, into Morden and Bere, and Wool and Duddle and other heaths, it has an essential unity, and the attempts at cultivation have met with desperate and, as it were, voluntary resistance, so that the breaks into green strips of cornfield slip the memory on a back-look at that lonely land. It is a place inviolate and “unaltered as the stars,” a sweep of moorland, a tract of land covered with heather and bracken and furze, practically unbroken, where, “with the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow, themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance, even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pick-axe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.” In appearance its colours are by distance blended into the purple brown called, in The Return of the Native, “swart”—its “antique brown dress.” The swart, abrupt slopes appear to be “now rising into natural hillocks masquerading solemnly as sepulchral tumuli, now dipping into hollows, where the rain-water collects in marshy pools and keeps green the croziers and fully-opened fronds of the bracken much longer than the parched growths at the crests of these rises, and again spreading out into little scrubby plains.”[81]

Its quality is “prodigious, and so as to frighten one to be in it all alone at night,” as Pepys said of another solitary place—the great earthwork of Old Sarum. In Mr. Hardy’s words, “the face of the heath by its mere complexion adds half an hour to evening: it can, in like manner, retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.” It is an agent among agents, and what Wordsworth finds that nature becomes seen by man’s intellect, “an ebbing and a flowing mind.” Its lonely face, and the face of all solitary heath-lands, are interpreted for ever in The Return of the Native.

Sidney Heath 1901

Came Rectory.
The home of William Barnes.