The situation of Matlock itself surpassed every idea I had formed of it. On the right were some elegant houses for the bathing company, and lesser cottages suspended like birds’ nests in a high rock; to the left, deep in the bottom, there was a fine bold river, which was almost hid from the eye by a majestic arch formed by high trees, which hung over it. A prodigious stone wall extended itself above a mile along its border, and all along there is a singularly romantic and beautiful secret walk, sheltered and adorned by many beautiful shrubs.
The steep rock was covered at the top with green bushes, and now and then a sheep, or a cow, separated from the grazing flock, came to the edge of the precipice, and peeped over it.
I have got, in Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which I am reading thoroughly through, just to the part where he describes Paradise, when I arrived here and the following passage, which I read at the brink of the river, had a most striking and pleasing effect on me. The landscape here described was as exactly similar to that I saw before me, as if the poet had taken it from hence
“—delicious Paradise,
Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green,
As with a rural mound, the champion head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access denied.”—Book IV. v. 132.
From Matlock Baths you go over Matlock Bridge, to the little town of Matlock itself, which, in reality, scarcely deserves the name of a village, as it consists of but a few and miserable houses. There is here, on account of the baths, a number of horses and carriages, and a great thoroughfare. From hence I came through some villages to a small town of the name of Bakewell. The whole country in this part is hilly and romantic. Often my way led me, by small passes, over astonishing eminences, where, in the deep below me, I saw a few huts or cottages lying. The fencing of the fields with grey stone gave the whole a wild and not very promising appearance. The hills were in general not wooded, but naked and barren; and you saw the flocks at a distance grazing on their summit.
As I was coming through one of the villages, I heard a great farmer’s boy eagerly ask another if he did not think I was a Frenchman. It seemed as if he had been waiting some time to see the wonder; for, he spoke as though his wish was now accomplished.
When I was past Bakewell, a place far inferior to Derby, I came by the side of a broad river, to a small eminence, where a fine cultivated field lay before me. This field, all at once, made an indescribable and very pleasing impression on me, which at first, I could not account for; till I recollected having seen, in my childhood, near the village where I was educated, a situation strikingly similar to that now before me here in England.
This field, as if it had been in Germany, was not enclosed with hedges, but every spot in it was uninterruptedly diversified with all kinds of crops and growths of different green and yellowish colours, which gave the whole a most pleasing effect; but besides this large field, the general view of the country, and a thousand other little circumstances which I cannot now particularly enumerate, served to bring back to my recollection the years of my youth.
Here I rested myself a while, and when I was going on again I thought of the place of my residence, on all my acquaintances, and not a little on you, my dearest friend, and imagined what you would think and say, if you were to see your friend thus wandering here all alone, totally unknown, and in a foreign land. And at that moment I first seriously felt the idea of distance, and the thought that I was now in England, so very far from all I loved, or who loved me, produced in me such sensations as I have not often felt.
It was perhaps the same with you, my dearest friend, when on our journey to Hamburg we drove from Perlsbeg, to your birthplace, the village of Boberow; where, among the farmers, you again found your own playmates, one of whom was now become the bailiff of the place. On your asking them whether they knew you, one and all of them answered so heartily, “O, yes, yes—why, your are Master Frederic.” The pedantic school-master, you will remember, was not so frank. He expressed himself in the stiff town phrase of, “He had not the honour of knowing you, as during your residence in that village, when a child, he had not been in loco.”