or, as in “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner,” both written in the Quantocks, raised again and again to a peculiar harmony from the innermost parts of our poetry’s holy of holies.
Except for Coleridge, I had the road to myself between Nether Stowey and Holford. Sheep were feeding on some of the slopes, and in one coomb woodmen were trimming cordwood among prostrate regiments of oak trees; but these eaters of grass, or of bread and cheese and bacon, were ghosts by comparison with the man who wrote “The Ancient Mariner;” the very hills, their chasms and processions of beeches, were made unforgettable by his May opium dream of—
“That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.”
Then the sea. At a mile past Holford the road bent sharp to the left and west, to get between the sea and the Quantocks. A sign-board pointed to the right to Stringston’s red-roofed white church. On the left two converging hillsides framed a wedge of sea, divided into parallel bands of gray and blue. It came as if it were a reward, an achievement, the unsuspected aim of my meanderings. A long drift of smoke lay over it from the seaward edge of the hills. The bottom of the wedge held the village of Kilve, and, a little apart, the cube of Kilve Court. As if to a goal I raced downhill to Kilve and its brook.
I had lunch at the “Hood Arms,” and made up my mind to stay there for that night. Two o’clock had not long passed when I left the inn and the main road and went north to Kilve Church and the sea. The by-road accompanied the brook, and skirted its apple orchards and tall poplars wagging myriads of wine-red catkins. Having passed a mill, a farm, and a cottage or two, the road took me to the church and its big, short-boughed yew tree, and became a farm track only. The small towered church is a poor place, clean and newly repointed outside, the arches filled in which had apparently communicated with a side chapel, and all its possible crosses lacking. Inside it has a cheap rickety gallery at the tower end, and was being stripped of its plaster to show the wood carving at the cornice. Tablets hang on the wall in memory of people named Cunditt and Sweeting, and of Norah Muriel Sweet-Escott, aged twenty, who died in South Africa of yellow fever. As I was leaving the church, entered the Other Man. Laughing nervously at the encounter, he explained that he had come to Kilve to see if it really had a weather-cock. He reminded me of Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers,” where the poet pesters his son of five to give his reason for preferring Liswyn to Kilve, until, a broad, gilded vane catching his eye, the child gives the inspired answer,—
“At Kilve there is no weather-cock;