On the 26th of June we said good-bye to Ilfracombe. The sight of the cockle-women at Swansea, where we had to wait, would make a fine subject for a painter. One of them was the grandest woman I ever saw—six feet high, carrying herself like a Greek warrior, and treading the earth with unconscious majesty. Her face was weather-beaten and wizened, but her eyes were bright and piercing, and the lines of her face, with its high cheek-bones, strong and characteristic. The guard at the railway station told us that one of the porters had been insolent the other day to a cockle-woman, and that she immediately pitched him off the platform into the road below!
Letter to the Brays, 6th June, 1856.
When we arrived here I had not even read a great book on which I had engaged to write a long article by the beginning of this month; so that between work and zoology and bodily ailments my time has been full to overflowing. We are enchanted with Ilfracombe. I really think it is the loveliest sea-place I ever saw, from the combination of fine rocky coast with exquisite inland scenery. But it would not do for any one who can't climb rocks and mount perpetual hills; for the peculiarity of this country is, that it is all hill and no valley. You have no sooner got to the foot of one hill than you begin to mount another. You would laugh to see our room decked with yellow pie-dishes, a foot-pan, glass jars and phials, all full of zoophytes, or mollusks, or anellides—and, still more, to see the eager interest with which we rush to our "preserves" in the morning to see if there has been any mortality among them in the night. We have made the acquaintance of a charming little zoological curate here, who is a delightful companion on expeditions, and is most good-natured in lending and giving apparatus and "critturs" of all sorts. Mr. Pigott[51] is coming here with his yacht at the end of June, and we hope then to go to Clovelly—Kingsley's Clovelly—and perhaps other places on the coast that we can't reach on foot. After this we mean to migrate to Tenby, for the sake of making acquaintance with its mollusks and medusæ.
Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 8th June, 1856.
I received your kind letter only yesterday, but I write a few words in answer at once, lest, as it so often happens, delay should beget delay.
It is never too late to write generous words, and although circumstances are not likely to allow of our acquiring a more intimate knowledge of each other from personal intercourse, it will always be a pleasant thought to me that you have remembered me kindly, and interpreted me nobly. You are one of the minority who know how to "use their imagination in the service of charity."
I have suffered so much from misunderstanding created by letters, even to old friends, that I never write on private personal matters, unless it be a rigorous duty or necessity to do so. Some little phrase or allusion is misinterpreted, and on this false basis a great fabric of misconception is reared, which even explanatory conversations will not remove. Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly on under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th June, 1856.
Yes, indeed, I do remember old Tenby days, and had set my heart on being in the very same house again; but, alas! it had just been let. It is immensely smartened up, like the place generally, since those old times, and is proportionately less desirable for quiet people who have no flounces and do not subscribe to new churches. Tenby looks insignificant in picturesqueness after Ilfracombe; but the two objects that drew us hither, zoology and health, will flourish none the worse for the absence of tall precipices and many-tinted rocks. The air is delicious—soft, but not sultry—and the sands and bathing such as are to be found nowhere else. St. Catherine's Rock, with its caverns, is our paradise. We go there with baskets, hammers and chisels, and jars and phials, and come home laden with spoils. Altogether, we are contented to have been driven away from Ilfracombe by the cold wind, since a new place is new experience, and Mr. Lewes has never been here before. To me there is the additional pleasure—half melancholy—of recalling all the old impressions and comparing them with the new. I understand your wish to have as much of Rosehill as possible this year, and I am so glad that you will associate a visit from Herbert Spencer with this last summer. I suppose he is with you now. If so, give him my very evil regards, and tell him that because he has not written to us we will diligently not tell him a great many things he would have liked to know. We have a project of going into St. Catherine's caverns with lanterns, some night when the tide is low, about eleven, for the sake of seeing the zoophytes preparing for their midnight revels. The Actiniæ, like other belles, put on their best faces on such occasions. Two things we have lost by leaving Ilfracombe for which we have no compensation—the little zoological curate, Mr. Tugwell, who is really one of the best specimens of the clergyman species I have seen; and the pleasure of having Miss Barbara Smith there for a week, sketching the rocks, and putting our love of them into the tangible form of a picture. We are looking out now for Mr. Pigott in his yacht; and his amiable face will make an agreeable variety on the sands. I thought "Walden"[52] (you mean "Life in the Woods," don't you?) a charming book, from its freshness and sincerity as well as for its bits of description. It is pleasant to think that Harriet Martineau can make so much of her last days. Her energy and her habit of useful work are admirable.
During the stay at Ilfracombe and Tenby not much literary work was done, except the articles on Young and on Riehl's book. There was a notice of Masson's Essays and the Belles-lettres section for the July number of the Westminster, and a review for the Leader. There is mention, too, of the reading of Beaumarchais' "Memoirs," Milne Edwards's "Zoology," Harvey's sea-side book, and "Coriolanus," and then comes this significant sentence in her Journal: