Came close up to the garden wall,
As if it longed, but thought it sin,
To look into the charms within.
Behind majestic mountains frowned
And dark, rich groves were all around.”
The “dark, rich groves,” were no mere poetic imagery. They were largely ilex, or “evergreen oak,” for which streets of the flimsiest houses in close-packed ranks are the sorriest exchange.
Keats, of course, no self-respecting Devonian would mention. He came, himself consumptive, to Teignmouth in 1818, to cheer the last hours of his brother Tom, dying of that disease. Here, lodging at No. 35, Strand, he completed Endymion and wrote Isabella; but it was winter and spring at the time of his sojourn, and although spring and winter in South Devon are preferable to those seasons elsewhere, he found the moist humours of the rainy West anything but pleasant:
KINGSTEIGNTON.
“You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of ’em; the primroses are out, but you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them. … The flowers here wait as naturally for the rain twice a day as mussels do for the tide. This Devonshire is like Lydia Languish, very entertaining when it smiles, but cursedly subject to sympathetic moisture.”