From our windows we had a view of the higher part of the town, and generally it looked uninteresting enough; but what is it that light cannot transfigure into beauty? One evening, after a shower, as the sun was setting over the sea behind us, some peculiar arrangement of clouds threw a delicious evening light on the irregular cluster of houses, and merged the ugliness of their forms in an exquisite flood of color—as a stupid person is made glorious by a noble deed. A perfect rainbow arched over the picture. From one end of the Capstone we have an admirable bit for a picture. In the background rises old Helesborough, jutting out far into the sea—rugged and rocky as it fronts the waves, green and accessible landward; in front of this stands Lantern Hill, a picturesque mass of green and gray, surmounted by an old bit of building that looks as if it were the habitation of some mollusk that had secreted its shell from the material of the rock; and quite in the foreground, contrasting finely in color with the rest, are some lower perpendicular rocks of dark-brown tints, patched here and there with vivid green. In hilly districts, where houses and clusters of houses look so tiny against the huge limbs of mother earth, one cannot help thinking of man as a parasitic animal—an epizoan making his abode in the skin of the planetary organism. In a flat country, a house or a town looks imposing; there is nothing to rival it in height, and we may imagine the earth a mere pedestal for us. But when one sees a house stuck on the side of a great hill, and, still more, a number of houses, looking like a few barnacles, clustered on the side of a great rock, we begin to think of the strong family likeness between ourselves and all other building, burrowing, house-appropriating, and shell-secreting animals. The difference between a man with his house and a mollusk with its shell lies in the number of steps or phenomena interposed between the fact of individual existence and the completion of the building. Whatever other advantages we may have over mollusks and insects in our habitations, it is clear that their architecture has the advantage of ours in beauty—at least, considered as the architecture of the species. Look at man in the light of a shell-fish, and it must be admitted that his shell is generally ugly; and it is only after a great many more "steps or phenomena" that he secretes here and there a wonderful shell in the shape of a temple or a palace.
On our first zoophyte hunt it was characteristic of the wide difference there is between having eyes and seeing, that in this region of sea-anemones, where the Mesembryanthemum especially is as plenty as blackberries, we climbed about for two hours without seeing one anemone, and went in again with scarcely anything but a few stones and weeds to put into our jars. On our next hunt, however, after we had been out some time, G. exclaimed, "I see an anemone!" and we were immensely excited by the discovery of this little red Mesembryanthemum, which we afterwards disdained to gather, as much as if it had been a nettle. It was a crescendo of delight when we found a "strawberry," and a fortissimo when I, for the first time, saw the pale, fawn-colored tentacles of an Anthea cereus viciously waving like little serpents in a low-tide pool. But not a polype for a long, long while could even G. detect, after all his reading; so necessary is it for the eye to be educated by objects as well as ideas. Every day I gleaned some little bit of naturalistic experience, either through G.'s calling on me to look through the microscope, or from hunting on the rocks; and this in spite of my preoccupation with my article, which I worked at considerably à contre-cœur, despairing of it ever being worth anything. When at last, by the 17th of June, both my articles were despatched, I felt delightfully at liberty, and determined to pay some attention to seaweeds, which I had never seen in such beauty as at Ilfracombe. For hitherto I had been chiefly on chalky and sandy shores, where there were no rock-pools to show off the lovely colors and forms of the algæ. There are tide-pools to be seen almost at every other step on the shore at Ilfracombe; and I shall never forget their appearance when we first arrived there. The Corallina officinalis was then in its greatest perfection, and with its purple-pink fronds threw into relief the dark olive fronds of the Laminariæ on one side, and the vivid green of the Ulva and Enteromorpha on the other. After we had been there a few weeks the Corallina was faded; and I noticed the Mesagloia vermicularis and the M. virescens, which look very lovely in the water, from the white cilia, which make the most delicate fringe to their yellow-brown, whip-like fronds, and some of the common Polysiphoniæ. These tide-pools made me quite in love with seaweeds, so I took up Landsborough's book and tried to get a little more light on their structure and history.
Our zoological expeditions alternated with delicious inland walks. I think the country looked its best when we arrived. It was just that moment in spring when the leaves are in full leaf, but still keep their delicate varieties of coloring, and that transparency which belongs only to this season. And the furze was in all its golden glory! It was almost like the fading away of the evening red, when the furze blossoms died off from the hills, and the only contrast left was that of the marly soil with the green crops and woods. The primroses were the contemporaries of the furze, and sprinkled the sides of the hills with their pale stars almost as plentifully as daisies or buttercups elsewhere. But the great charm of all Devonshire lanes is the springs that you detect gurgling in shady recesses, covered with liverwort, with here and there waving tufts of fern and other broad-leaved plants that love obscurity and moisture.
We seemed to make less of our evenings at Ilfracombe than we have ever done elsewhere. We used often to be tired with our hunting or walking; and we were reading books which did not make us take them up very eagerly—Gosse's "Rambles on the Devonshire Coast," for example; Trench's "Calderon," and other volumes, taken up in a desultory way. One bit of reading we had there, however, which interested me deeply. It was Masson's "Life of Chatterton," which happily linked itself with the impressions I had received from the sight of the old church at Bristol.
Mr. Tugwell's (the curate) acquaintance was a real acquisition to us, not only because he was a companion and helper in zoological pursuits, but because to know him was to know of another sweet nature in the world. It is always good to know, if only in passing, a charming human being; it refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks. One Sunday evening we walked up to his pretty house to carry back some proofs of his, and he induced us to go in and have coffee with him. He played on his harmonium, and we chatted pleasantly. The last evening of our stay at Ilfracombe he came to see us in Mrs. Webster's drawing-room, and we had music till nearly eleven o'clock—a pleasant recollection!
We only twice took the walk beyond Watermouth towards Berrynarbor. The road lies through what are called the "Meadows," which look like a magnificent park. A stream, fringed with wild-flowers and willows, runs along the valley, two or three yards from the side of the road. This stream is clear as crystal, and about every twenty yards it falls over a little artificial precipice of stones. The long grass was waving in all the glory of June, before the mower has come to make it suffer a "love change" from beauties into sweet odors; and the slopes on each side of us were crowned or clothed with fine trees. The last time we went through these meadows was on our last day at Ilfracombe. Such sunlight and such deep peace on the hills and by the stream! Coming back, we rested on a gate under the trees, and a blind man came up to rest also. He told us, in his slow way, what a fine, "healthy spot" this was—yes, a very healthy spot—a healthy spot. And then we went on our way, and saw his face no more.
I have talked of the Ilfracombe lanes without describing them, for to describe them one ought to know the names of all the lovely wild-flowers that cluster on their banks. Almost every yard of these banks is a "Hunt" picture—a delicious crowding of mosses and delicate trefoil and wild strawberries and ferns great and small. But the crowning beauty of the lanes is the springs that gush out in little recesses by the side of the road—recesses glossy with liverwort and feathery with fern. Sometimes you have the spring when it has grown into a brook, either rushing down a miniature cataract by the lane-side, or flowing gently as a "braided streamlet" across your path. I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to give definiteness to our conception of it. We have then a sign which at once calls up in our minds the distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object from all others.
We ascended the Tors only twice; for a tax of 3d. per head was demanded on this luxury, and we could not afford a sixpenny walk very frequently: yet the view is perhaps the very finest to be had at Ilfracombe. Bay behind bay, fringed with foam, and promontory behind promontory, each with its peculiar shades of purple light—the sweep of the Welsh coast faintly visible in the distance, and the endless expanse of sea, flecked with ships, stretching on our left.
Ilfracombe, Recollections, June, 1856.
One evening we went down to the shore through the "Tunnels" to see the sunset. Standing in the "Ladies' Cove," we had before us the sharp fragments of rock jutting out of the waves and standing black against the orange and crimson sky. How lovely to look into that brilliant distance and see the ship on the horizon seeming to sail away from the cold and dim world behind it right into the golden glory! I have always that sort of feeling when I look at sunset; it always seems to me that there in the West lies a land of light and warmth and love.