Go to Cromer

by Anonymous

The question of a local habitation having been settled, let him stroll down the zig-zag path—a humble reminder of wanderings in remoter regions, and the wondrous railway-route up the pass of St. Gotthard—to the jetty, or the sands to the right or left, and take his bearings.

Or let him then, or the next morning, for the sake of a more extensive view, or to look up any impedimenta left in charge of the railway officials, walk leisurely to the station. This is but a short distance above the town on a plateau, girt about with a golden girdle of the very bonniest broom when seen early in June, commanding, moreover, a ravishing prospect.

The refreshment-room of a conservatory type will tempt one to linger over the lemonade, certain to be demanded by the thirsting soul as a due reward at the finish of the climb, and which the pleasant toil renders unusually nectareous, the relish being chiefly due, without doubt, to the slight sudorific exertion, the most stimulative and wholesome condiment for food, and, as experience satisfactorily proves, for drinks too. Horace, “always up to date,” advises well “pulmentaria quære sudando.”

Here, or at the lighthouse, or indeed anywhere on the cliffs, an early bird may count on the enjoyment of a most delectable matutine worm, in a sight of the sun rising from the ocean-bed above the blue ring of the eastern verge, and flinging a bountiful largess of sapphires and diamonds on the sea before him.

But the many, it is to be feared, “would rather gang supperless to their beds than rise in the morning early,”—at any rate early enough to behold “the hues of primrose and gold, and daffodil and rose, that diffuse themselves and blend and kindle and glow in the dawn of an opening heaven.”

All, however, will have frequent opportunities of feasting on the scarcely less glorious spectacle of the sun plunging out of sight in the molten golden depths of the same sea, at its western confines. Standing out as Cromer does clear towards the north, there is nothing to interrupt the view of both the eastern and western horizons; so that the phenomenon may any day be witnessed, of the rising and setting of the day-ruling luminary in the same waters, from the same point of observation.

Then again, what better place can be found if a holiday be needful to rest the over-taxed brain? Here one can work the lazier lobe thereof, and let the other, exhausted by the production of successive and heavy crops of thoughts and speeches and plans, lie completely fallow. But “want of occupation is not rest; a mind quite vacant is a mind distrest.” What an important factor in the recruitment of health, and the retoning of the nervous system, is some light occupation for mind and fingers during the sundry hours of forced confinement, for various causes, pro tem., to one’s lodgings! What a recuperative agent, too, is some interesting quest that prevents the wandering about in the invigorating air from being listless and wearisome, because aimless, as it too often is! Let the visitor be induced to engage in the daily and engrossing search for the best stock, not for the farm, nor the investment of capital, but for an aquarium, and the true balance of the brain will begin to be adjusted instanter. Hours may be healthfully spent in the preliminary work of collecting such things as a shell or so, with bits of green and purple laver attached, and embossed with a few acorn-shells, and the rough tube that a serpula has scrawled over its surface,—a multum in parvo indeed is such a find,—a stone or two on which the crimson pholamium has got a foot-hold, a couple of the common red anemones and a periwinkle, whose keen-edged scythe never needs setting or whetting, and which will be in constant requisition in a few days after the aquarium has been set up, and a green growth developed on its sides by the ministry of light.

If you are not afraid to risk some unpopularity in your newly-acquired domain by a certain number of evictions, without the aid of the battering ram, from the shell-cabins on your estate, a star-fish of moderate dimensions, and a peripatetic prying hermit-crab, will be interesting objects; and, of course, a vivacious shrimp will give grace to the grottoed scene: perhaps, to your temporary alarm and subsequent interest, shedding its skeleton in the glass shade or confectioner’s bottle, or the borrowed hand-basin, as the case may be, which holds your captures, and which eye will not tire of watching, nor hand of aerating and replenishing, when once it is established as a going concern.

But I do not offer an aquarium as a “Hobson’s choice.” To say nothing about rides and drives and fishing, and moth or butterfly-hunting, a botanist may seek and find in the season the wild tulip, the lily of the valley, the sea buck-thorn, the sea blite, and other varieties, besides the commoner and more beautiful flowers that flourish and abound in the byways and backwoods in the rear of the town.

There I roamed and rested alternately through the blissful hours of a perfect summer-day (alas! how few such were vouchsafed to us last year, fewer, a scientific and observing octogenarian tells me, than in any year since 1816)—there, I will hope, many a reader will roam and rest during many such days, either of this or subsequent and more highly-favoured seasons, when they shall have no cause to wish the project had been successful for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, and bottling them, to have a supply at hand to let out and warm the ungenial air. There I rested in sublime enjoyment, but let it be distinctly understood, not sub tegmine fagi: the fagus may be very well in a country where the chief object of daily life is to endure life by evading the pursuit, and dodging, as if one were a hunted brigand, the fierce light of a raging sun behind the trunks, or hiding with breathless haste in the stifling umbrage of such trees as may be within reach of the ever weary legs of a languid southerner. But here in merrie England, give one the tegmen pini, such as I enjoyed at Cromer, when lying on the soft bosom of one of the graceful heights so attractive to the sojourner who would restfully view the panorama beneath him—(better, a thousand times than “Niagara in London,”)—of ocean and homebound ships, going and coming in an almost uninterrupted stream of succession on the deep blue plane of the far horizon, and the fishing boats making for land over the pasture-like green of the nearer depths, with the prized freights which need scarcely be named to any who have visited this sweet spot, or even heard of Cromer.