‘Seeing is believing, Claude: through laughter, and failures, and the stupidity of half-barbarous clods, she persevered in her silk-growing, and succeeded; and I should like to put her book into the hands of every squire in Devon, Cornwall, and the South of Ireland.’
‘Or require them to pass an examination in it, as one more among the many books which I intend, in my ideal kingdom, all landlords to read and digest, before they are allowed to take possession of their estates. In the meantime, what is that noble conical hill, which has increased my wonder at the infinite variety of beauty which The Spirit can produce by combinations so simple as a few grey stones and a sheet of turf?’
‘The Hangman.’
‘An ominous name. What is its history?’
‘Some sheep-stealer, they say, clambering over a wall with his booty slung round his neck, was literally hung by the poor brute’s struggles, and found days after on the mountain-side, a blackened corpse on one side of the wall, with the sheep on the other, and the ravens—You may fill up the picture for yourself.’
But, see, as we round the Hangman, what a change of scene—the square-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under dark slate-beds, fantastically bent and broken by primeval earthquakes. Wooded combes, and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and slope towards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked harbours. There shines among the woods the Castle of Watermouth, on its lovely little salt-water loch, the safest harbour on the coast; and there is Combe-Martin, mile-long man-stye, which seven centuries of fruitless silver-mining, and of the right (now deservedly lost) of ‘sending a talker to the national palaver,’ have neither cleansed nor civilized. Turn, turn thy head away, dear Claude, lest even at this distance some foul odour taint the summer airs, and complete the misfortune already presaged by that pale, sad face, sickening in the burning calm! For this great sun-roasted fire-brick of the Exmoor range is fairly burning up the breeze, and we have nothing but the tide to drift us slowly down to Ilfracombe.
Now we open Rillage, and now Hillsborough, two of the most picturesque of headlands; see how their round foreheads of glistening grey shale sink down into two dark, jagged moles, running far out to seaward, and tapering off, each into a long black horizontal line, vanishing at last beneath its lace-fringe of restless hissing foam. How grand the contrast of the lightness of those sea-lines, with the solid mass which rests upon them! Look, too, at the glaring lights and Tartarean shadows of those chasms and caves, which the tide never leaves, or the foot of man explores; and listen how, at every rush of the long ground-swell, mysterious mutterings, solemn sighs, sudden thunders, as of a pent-up earthquake, boom out of them across the glassy swell. Look at those blasts of delicate vapour that shoot up from hidden rifts, and hang a moment, and vanish; and those green columns of wave which rush mast-high up the perpendicular walls, and then fall back and outward in a waterfall of foam, lacing the black rocks with a thousand snowy streams. There they fall, and leap, and fall again. And so they did yesterday, and the day before; and so they did centuries ago, when the Danes swept past them, battleworn, and sad of heart for the loss of the magic raven flag, from the fight at Appledore, to sit down and starve on ‘the island of Bradanrelice, which men call Flat Holms.’ Ay, and even so they leapt and fell, before a sail gleamed on the Severn sea, when the shark and the ichthyosaur paddled beneath the shade of tropic forests—now scanty turf and golden gorse. And so they will leap and fall on, on, through the centuries and the ages. O dim abyss of Time, into which we peer shuddering, what will be the end of thee, and of this ceaseless coil and moan of waters? It is true, that when thou shalt be no more, then, too, ‘there shall be no more sea;’ and this ocean bed, this great grave of fertility, into which all earth’s wasted riches stream, day and night, from hill and town, shall rise and become fruitful soil, corn-field and meadow-land; and earth shall teem as thick with living men as bean-fields with the summer bees? What a consummation! At least there is One greater than sea, or time: and the Judge of all the earth will do right.
But there is Ilfracombe, with its rock-walled harbour, its little wood of masts within, its white terraces, rambling up the hills, and its capstone sea-walk, the finest ‘marine parade,’ as Cockneydom terms it, in all England, except that splendid Hoe at Plymouth, ‘Lam Goemagot,’ Gog-magog’s leap, as the old Britains called it, over which Corineus threw that mighty giant. And there is the little isolated rock-chapel, where seven hundred years ago, our west-country forefathers used to go to pray St. Nicholas for deliverance from shipwreck,—a method lovingly regretted by some, as a ‘pious idea of the Ages of faith.’ We, however, shall prefer the method of lighthouses and the worthy Trinity Board, as actually more godly and ‘faithful,’ as well as more useful; and, probably, so do the sailors themselves.
But Claude is by this time nearly sick of the roasting calm, and the rolling ground-swell, and the smell of fish, and is somewhat sleepy also, between early rising and incoherent sermons; wherefore, if he takes good advice, he will stay and recruit himself at Ilfracombe, before he proceeds further with his self-elected cicerone on the grand tour of North Devon. Believe me, Claude, you will not stir from the place for a month at least. For be sure, if you are sea-sick, or heart-sick, or pocket-sick either, there is no pleasanter or cheaper place of cure (to indulge in a puff of a species now well nigh obsolete, the puff honest and true) than this same Ilfracombe, with its quiet nature and its quiet luxury, its rock fairyland and its sea-walks, its downs and combes, its kind people, and, if possible, its still kinder climate, which combines the soft warmth of South Devon with the bracing freshness of the Welsh mountains; where winter has slipped out of the list of the seasons, and mother Earth makes up for her summer’s luxury by fasting, ‘not in sackcloth and ashes, but in new silk and old sack;’ and instead of standing three months chin-deep in ice, and christening great snowballs her ‘friends and family,’ as St. Francis of Assisi did of old, knows no severer asceticism than tepid shower-baths, and a parasol of soft grey mist.