Three miles out of Bridgwater my road had dropped to the level, and proceeded over it to Cannington, but instead of sticking to it I turned at a smithy on my left into a by-road, which wound between low hedges of thorn and maple mounted either on ivied walls or on banks covered with celandines. It passed Bradley Green’s few cottages, the “Malt Shovel” inn, an oak copse with a chiff-chaff in it, and here a robin on a wall, and there a linnet on a thorn tip, in a slightly up and down country of grass, ploughland, and orchard. In a mile the road twisted at right angles to cross the Cannington brook and rejoin the main road; and at this angle, by a green bowered lane, was a stone house and chapel in one. This was Blackmoor Manor Farm, a group that no longer has anything stately or sacred save what it owes to its antiquity and continuous human occupation.
The main road, when I rejoined it, was rising once more between banks of gorse. So bright was the blossom of the gorse that its branches were shadowy and nearly invisible in the brightness. For the sun was now as warm as ever it need be for a man who can move himself from place to place. On both hands the undulating land was warm and misty, but particularly on the right. There, as I approached Swang Farm, at the third milestone from Nether Stowey, a hill, almost as graceful as Ball Hill near Stawell, rose parallel to the road, its long-curving ridge about a third of a mile away. Its smooth flank was apportioned by hedgerows and a few elms among bare ploughland and young corn above, and drabby grass with sheep on it below. Near by, on the other side, was another such hill, a nameless one above Halsey Cross Farm, which I first took notice of when it was cut in two perpendicularly by the signpost pointing to Spaxton. It was but a blunt, conical hillside of green corn, rosy ploughland, sheep-fed pasture, and a few elms in the partitions; and behind it the dim Quantocks. Between these two hills, at a spot where the road twists again at right angles, a brick summer-house perched on the walled roadside bank, at the very corner. Here, as I heard, a few generations ago, ladies from the house near by used to sit to watch for the coaches. I was now two hundred feet up in the foothills of the Quantocks. Three or four miles in front bulked the moorlands of the main ridge.
Nether Stowey begins with a church and a farm and farmyard in a group. Then follows a street of cottages without front gardens, dominated by a smooth green “castle” rampart a third of a mile away. The street ends in a “First and Last Inn” on one side, and a cottage on the other, announced as formerly Coleridge’s by an inscription and a stone wreath of dull reddish brown. Altogether Nether Stowey offered no temptations to be compared with those of the road leading out of it. Immediately outside the village it was walled by deep banks, and on these grew arum, celandine, and nettle, with bushes of new-leaved blackthorn and spindle. Here I saw the first starry, white stitchworts or milkmaids. And henceforward I was always walking steeply up or steeply down one of the medley of lesser hills. Below on the right was chiefly red ploughland; above on the left wilder and wilder heights of sheep-fed moorland. The road was visible ahead, looping half way up the slopes.
Honeysuckle ramped on the banks of the deep-worn road in such profusion as I had never before seen. The sky had clouded softly, and the sun-warmed misty woods of the coombs, the noise of slender waters threading them, the exuberant young herbage, the pure flowers such as stitchwort and the pink and “silver white” cuckoo flowers, but above all the abounding honeysuckle, produced an effect of wildness and richness, purity and softness, so vivid that the association of Nether Stowey was hardly needed to summon up Coleridge. The mere imagination of what these banks would be like when the honeysuckle was in flower was enough to suggest the poet. I became fantastic, and said to myself that the honeysuckle was worthy to provide the honeydew for nourishing his genius; even that its magic might have touched that genius to life—which is absurd. And yet magic alone could have led Coleridge safely through the style of his age, the style of the author of Jolliffe’s epitaph at Kilmersdon, the style of Stephen Duck and his benefactors, the style of his own boyish effusions, where he personified Misfortune, Love, Wisdom, Virtue, Fortune, and Content with the aid of capitals. He fell again when weary into lines like,—
“Thro’ vales irriguous, and thro’ green retreats;”
he rose and fell once more, until finally the conventions had either slipped away or been adopted or subdued. Perhaps it was not in vain, or so fatuous as it seems to us, that he personified, like any lady or gentleman of the day,—
“The hideous offspring of Disease,
Swoln Dropsy ignorant of Rest,
And Fever garb’d in scarlet vest;
Consumption driving the quick hearse,