The smoke goes dancing from the cottage trees;
And, when you listen, you may hear the coil
Of bubbling springs about the grassy soil.’
It may be that the inception of these felicitously-descriptive lines was due to local influence, for, though written of Italy, they are as true a transcript of many an early summer’s morn at Hampstead (where Crabb Robinson tells us the pleasure of waking and looking out of window from his friend Hammond’s house[191] was worth walking from London overnight to enjoy) as of a waking village landscape in the neighbourhood of Ravenna.
It is otherwise in winter, with snow on the ground, and a fierce wind blowing, for the wind, Leigh Hunt tells us, ‘loses nothing of its fierceness on Hampstead Heath.’ It was on such a bitter winter night that Shelley, in either going to or leaving the little cot in the Vale of Health, found a woman lying insensible on the snow on the top of the hill, and, knocking at the first door he came to, asked to have her taken in and cared for—or, at least, that she might be placed in an outhouse out of the inclement night. Being refused, he made an application at the second house, with the same result. Indignant at this seeming want of charity and the uselessness of his intercession, he took her up, and carried her down the frozen path to his friend’s cottage, the expansiveness of which he well knew when an act of compassion was in question. Nor was it ill bestowed. The woman, who was on her way to Hendon, ‘had been all day attending a criminal court, at which a charge had been made against her son, and, though he had been acquitted, the suspense and agitation, added to fatigue, had affected her so seriously as to produce fits; from which the doctor who was called in asserted she could not have recovered but for the timely care and shelter bestowed upon her.’
Cowden Clarke gives us a glimpse of Shelley on the Heath under other conditions—‘scampering and bounding over the gorse bushes late at night, now close upon us, and now shouting from the height like a wild schoolboy.’ It was on his return to town, after one of his overnight visits to the ‘Hampstead bard,’ that Shelley, accompanied by the latter, astonished the only other inside passenger of the Hampstead coach—a stiffly-silent old gentlewoman, who, in spite of various attempts to draw her into conversation, determinedly maintained a severe reticence—by suddenly exclaiming:
‘For God’s sake, Hunt,
‘Let’s talk of graves, and worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and, with rainy eyes,
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth;