It is a beautiful anthem-like fragment, “like the sound of a great ‘Amen,’” and brings thoughts of cathedral choirs and deep-toned organs. Havergal, of course, as a writer of devotional music, had a mind by long use attuned to finding such a motive; but I am not sure that another composer, with a bent towards secular music of a sprightly, light-opera kind, might not, lying wakeful here, find a suggestion for his own art in these untutored sharps and trebles.
The Lyn in its final series of falls in the semi-private grounds of Glen Lyn, at the rear of the Lyndale Hotel, sounds a deeper note, and comes splashing down with a roar by fern-clad rocky walls and between a scatter of great boulders. A rustic bridge looks down upon the foaming water, flecked with sunlight coming in patches of gold through the overarching foliage.
No description of Lynmouth that has ever been penned gives even a remote idea of what the place is really like. I care nothing for Southey and his comparison with Cintra and Arrabida, for I have not been to those places, and don’t want to go: resembling, I suspect, in that disability, and in the disinclination to remedy it, most other visitors, to whom that parallel has no meaning. Lynmouth is really comparable with no other place. It is essentially individual and like nothing but itself; or, at any rate, like nothing else in nature. What it does really resemble is some romantic theatrical set scene, preferably in comic opera: the extraordinary picturesqueness of it seeming too impossible to be a part of real life. There is the quaint tower at the end of the tiny stone jetty, there are the bold, scrub-covered hills, with rocks jutting out from them, as they rarely do except in the imagination of a scene-painter, and here are the grouped little houses and cottages, mostly with the roses, the jessamine, and the clematis that are indispensable to rural cottages—on the stage. Even the very fishermen seem unreal. I don’t believe—or at least find some difficulty in believing—that they, really and truly, are fishermen, and almost imagine they must be paid to lounge out from the wings on to the stage—I mean the sea-front—in order to give an air of verisimilitude. They ask you, occasionally, it is true, if you want a boat, but with the air of playing a part that does not particularly interest them, and every moment you expect them to break into song, after the manner of the chorus in comic-opera, expressive of the delights of a life on the ocean wave, and the joys of sea-fishing.
Or, to adopt the conventions of melodrama, as formerly practised at the Adelphi, and still at Drury Lane; here you expect almost to see the villain smoking his inevitable villainous cigarette (an infallible stage symbol of viciousness), and, possibly in evening dress, that ultimate stage symbol of depravity, shooting his cuffs by the bridge that spans the Lyn; and on summer evenings the lighted hotels down in the huddled little street look for all the world like stage-hotels—abodes of splendour and gilded vice, whence presently there should issue some splendid creature of infamy, to plot with another villain, already waiting in his trysting-place, the destruction of hero and heroine. But, lest I be misunderstood, I hasten to add that all these expectations are vain things, and that villains really require a much faster place than Lynmouth.
I have spoken already about the “fishermen” of Lynmouth, but, truth to tell, that is but a conventional term, for sea-fishing here is not the industry it is on most coasts, and the jerseyed persons who loll about the harbour are more used to taking out and landing steamboat excursionists, or accompanying amateur fishermen with lines on pleasant days, than to enduring the rigours the trawler knows. Rock Whiting, Bass, and Grey Mullet give the chief sport in the sea, and in the Lyn are salmon, salmon-peel, and trout, as you may readily believe by examining the trophies of sport with rod and line treasured by Mr. Cecil Bevan, of the Lyn Valley Hotel.
LYNDALE BRIDGE.
There was formerly, indeed, a herring fishery at Lynmouth. Westcote speaks of it as existing in the time of Queen Elizabeth. “God,” says he, “hath plentifully stored with herrings, the king of fishes, which shunning their ancient places of repair in Ireland, come hither abundantly in shoals, offering themselves, as I may say, to the fishers’ nets, who soon resorted hither with divers merchants, and so for five or six years continued, to the great benefit and good of the country, until the parson vexed the poor fishermen for extraordinary unusual tithes, and then, as the inhabitants report, the fish suddenly clean left the coast.” They were not friends of the Establishment. But after a while some returned, and from 1787 to 1797 there was such an extraordinary abundance that the greater part of the catch could not be disposed of, and vast quantities were put upon the land for manure. Then they totally deserted the channel for a number of years; a fact at that time regarded by many as a Divine judgment for thus wasting the food sent. On Christmas Day 1811 a remarkable shoal appeared and choked the harbour, and in 1823 another shoal paid a visit; but since then, the herrings have given Lynmouth a wide berth.
