By transposition name the Ford of Arle;
And out of which along a chalky marl
That river trills, whose waters wash the fort
In which brave Arthur kept his royal court.”
—Which, being interpreted, means Camelot, or Winchester.
Yet Wither is one of the poets whom we can connect with a district of England and often cannot sunder from it without harm. Many other poets are known to have resided for a long or a short time in certain places; but of these a great many did not obviously owe much to their surroundings, and some of those that did, like Wordsworth, possessed a creative power which made it unnecessary that the reader should see the places, whatever the railway companies may say. Wordsworth at his best is rarely a local poet, and his earth is an “insubstantial fairy place.” But if you know the pond at Alresford before this poem, you add a secondary but very real charm to Wither; while, if you read the poem first, you are charmed, if at all, partly because you see that the pond exists, and you taste something of the human experience and affection which must precede the mention. To have met the poet’s name here would have been to furbish the charm a little.
The name of Norgett on a stone called up Oldhurst into my mind, a thatched house built of flints in the middle of oak woods not far off—ancient woods where the leaves of many Autumns whirled and rustled even in June. It was three miles from the hard road, and it used to seem that I had travelled three centuries when at last I emerged from the oaks and came in sight of that little humped gray house and within sound of the pines that shadowed it. It had a face like an owl; it was looking at me. Norgett must have heard me coming from somewhere among the trees, for, as I stepped into the clearing at one side, he was at the other. I thought of Herne the Hunter on catching sight of him. He was a long, lean, gray man with a beard like dead gorse, buried gray eyes, and a step that listened. He hardly talked at all, and only after questions that he could answer quite simply. Speech was an interruption of his thoughts, and never sprang from them; as soon as he ceased talking they were resumed with much low murmuring and whistling—like that of the pine trees—to himself, which seemed the sound of their probings in the vast of himself and Nature. His was a positive, an active silence. It did me good to be with him, especially after I had learned to share it with him, instead of trying to get him to join in gossip. I say I shared it, but what I did and enjoyed was, apparently, to sleep as we walked. It was unpleasant to wake up, to go away from that cold, calm presence. Then, perhaps, I sneaked back for a talk with Mrs. Norgett, who was a little, busy woman with black needle eyes and a needle voice like a wren’s, as thin and lively as a cricket; she knew everything that happened, and much that did not. But with him she also was silent.
These two had two daughters—and, in fact, I got to know them by staying with a friend three miles away, where one of the girls was a servant: she said that there were always woodcocks round Oldhurst, and her father would introduce me. It was several years since I had seen Norgett and Oldhurst, but a letter concerning these daughters brought them again before me,—
“Martha Norgett is dead. I suppose you remember her just as a stout, nervous girl, with uncomfortable manners, tow hair, face always as red as if she had been making toast, gray eyes rather scared but alarmingly frank, always rushing about the house noisily and apologetically at the same time; willing to do anything at any time for almost anybody, but especially for you, perhaps, when you stayed with us in Summer holidays. I am sure you could not tell me offhand how old she was. I can hear you saying, ‘Well, the country girls always look much older than you said they were. I suppose it is the responsibility, and they belong to an older, more primitive type. So I always have an instinct to treat them deferentially.... She might be twenty-three or -four—say, eighteen. But then she was just the same fifteen years ago.... Thirty—thirty-five. That is absurd. I give it up.’...