Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

A silence fell on the group, and looks were exchanged between the women. I drove away hastily, feeling as one does who has unawares stepped irreverently on a grave. Many grief-stricken queens have trod the Scottish shores; the centuries still keep their memory green, and their names haunt one's thoughts in every spot they knew. But more vivid to my memory than all these returns and returns the thought of the obscure fisherwoman whose hair, from a grief of which the world never heard, "a' 't once wentit white."

CHESTER STREETS.

If it be true, as some poets think, that every spot on earth is full of poetry, then it is certainly also true that each place has its own distinctive measure; an indigenous metre, so to speak, in which, and in which only, its poetry will be truly set or sung.

The more one reflects on this, in connection with the spots and places he has known best in the world, the truer it seems. Memories and impressions group themselves in subtle co-ordinations to prove it. There are surely woods which are like stately sonnets, and others of which the truth would best be told in tender lyrics; brooks which are jocund songs, and mountains which are Odes to Immortality. Of cities and towns it is perhaps even truer than of woods and mountains; certainly, no less true. For instance, it would be a bold poet who should attempt to set pictures of Rome in any strain less solemn than the epic; and is it too strong a thing to say that only a foolish one would think of framing a Venice glimpse or memory in anything save dreamy songs, with dreamiest refrains? Endless vistas of reverie open to the imagination once entered on the road of this sort of fancy,—reveries which play strange pranks with both time and place, endow the dreamer with a sort of post facto second sight, and leave him, when suddenly roused, as lost as if he had been asleep for a century. For sensations of this kind Chester is a "hede and chefe cyte." Simply to walk its streets is to step to time and tune of ballads; the very air about one's ears goes lilting with them; the walls ring; the gates echo; choruses rollic round corners,—ballads, always ballads, or, if not a ballad, a play, none the less lively,—a play with pageants and delightful racket.

Such are the measure and metre to-day of "The Cyte of Legyons, that is Chestre in the marches of Englonde, towards Wales, betwegne two armes of the see, that bee named Dee and Mersee. Thys cyte in tyme of Britons was hede and chefe cyte of Venedocia, that is North Wales. Thys cyte in Brytyshe speech bete Carthleon, Chestre in Englyshe, and Cyte of Legyons also. For there laye a wynter, the legyons that Julius Cæsar sent to wyne Irlonde. And after, Claudius Cæsar sent legyons out of the cyte for to wynn the Islands that bee called Orcades. Thys cyte hath plenty of cyne land, of corn, of flesh, and specyally of samon. Thys cyte receyveth grate marchandyse and sendeth out also. Northumbres destroyed this cyte but Elfleda Lady of Mercia bylded it again and made it mouch more."

This is what was written of Chester, more than six hundred years ago, by one Ranulph Higden, a Chester Abbey monk,—him who wrote those old miracle plays, except for which we very like had never had such a thing as a play at all, and William Shakspeare had turned out no better than many another Stratford man.

All good Americans who reach England go to Chester. They go to see the cathedral, and to buy old Queen Anne furniture. The cathedral is very good in its way, the way of all cathedrals, and the old Queen Anne furniture is now quite well made; but it is a marvel that either cathedral or shop can long hold a person away from Chester streets. One cannot go amiss in them; at each step he is, as it were, button-holed by a gable, an arch, a pavement, a door-sill, a sign, or a gate with a story to tell. A story, indeed? A hundred, or more; and if anybody doubts them, or has by reason of old age, or over-occupation with other matters, got them confused in his mind, all he has to do is to step into a public library, which is kept in a very private way, in a by-street, by two aged Cestrian citizens and a parish boy. Here, if he can convince these venerable Cestrians of his respectability, he may go a-junketing by himself in that delicious feast of an old book, the "Vale-Royale" of England, published in London in 1656, and written, I believe, a half-century or so earlier.

Never was any bit of country more praised than this beautiful Chester County, "pleasant and abounding in plenteousness of all things needful and necessary for man's use, insomuch that it merited and had the name of the Vale-Royale of England."

The old writer continues:—

"The ayr is very wholesome, insomuch that the people of the Country are seldome infected with Diseases or Sicknesses; neither do they use the help of the Physicians nothing so much as in other countries. For when any of them are sick they make him a Posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not amend him, then God be merciful to him!"