"The mystic glory swims away;
From off my bed the moonlight dies;
And closing eaves of wearied eyes
I sleep till dusk is dipt in grey:
"And then I know the mist is drawn
A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn."
From Clevedon, from Bath, from Cheddar, from Wells, the roads lead to Bristol, which must not, if only for the sake of poor Chatterton, be ignored. This worn, dignified old city has had something of a vagrant career. Before the Norman Conquest, and for long after, Bristol stood north of the Avon and was a Gloucestershire town. In course of time it stretched across the river and lay partly in Somerset. And in the fourteenth century, when for wealth and consequence it ranked second only to London, Edward III created it a county by itself. From the dawn of its history it was a trading-mart. Nothing came amiss to it, even kidnapping, so that among its gains it gained the title "Stepmother of all England." The merchants and the mariners of Bristol stood in the front of English enterprise. Even in the time of Stephen it was deemed wellnigh the richest city of the kingdom. When a foreign war was in hand, Bristol could be counted on for a large contingent of ships and men. Its merchants lived in towered mansions, with capacious cellars for the storage of their goods, warehouses and shops on the street floor, the family parlours and bedrooms above, and attics for the prentices in the sharp-pitched gables. The banquet-halls, at the rear of these spacious dwellings, were splendid with carven roofs, rich tapestries, and plate that would have graced a royal board. Even the critical Pepys, who visited Bristol after its Spanish and West Indian trades were well established, found its quay "a most large and noble place."
Bristol sailors bear no small part in the tales of English sea-daring and records of discovery. As early as 1480, Bristol merchants were sending out tall ships to search west of Ireland for "the Island of Brazil and the Seven Cities." Sixteen years later the Venetian mariner, John Cabot, probably accompanied by his son Sebastian—"shadow-seekers," the old Bristol tars would call them—had touched the coast of North America. On his return the "Great Admiral" clad himself in silk and was a notable figure in the Bristol streets. Phantasmal though it all seems in a retrospect of centuries, many are the men who have drawn the gaze in these ever-moving thoroughfares,—William Canynges, "Merchant Royal," whose trade with the north of Europe probably exceeded that of any other merchant in England; Thomas Norton, fifteenth-century alchemist and dreamer, who believed that he had discovered both the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life; Captain Thomas James, for whom James's Bay is named, he whose search for the Northwest Passage is one of the heroic chapters in the annals of the sea; the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, always deep in talk with some grizzled seaman; Captain Martin Pring, proud of the load of sassafras he had brought back from Cape Cod; Colston the philanthropist, the local saint. Mere literary folk would have been embarrassed by little enough attention as they went their quiet ways. What was Chatterton to the trading, shipbuilding, ship-lading town but a bright-eyed Blue-Coat boy? And how those hard-headed merchants would have chuckled over the eager scheme of three penniless young poets, Coleridge, Southey, and Lovell, for founding a community on the Susquehanna—a river of melodious name and delightfully far away—where no one should labour more than two hours out of the twenty-four!
I have been in Bristol several times, but I remember the workaday old city as I saw it first. It was September weather, and College Green was strewn with sallow leaves that flitted and whispered continually like memories of the past. A few fat sheep were in possession, together with a statue of Queen Victoria and a Gothic cross. On the south of the Green, once the burial-ground of the abbey, stands the cathedral, the older portion, in contrast with the new, looking black and rough and massy. The jewel of this building—which was one of the few abbey churches to profit by the Dissolution, in that Henry VIII was graciously pleased, establishing the bishopric of Bristol, to raise it to cathedral rank—is its Norman chapter-house, a rectangular chamber wonderfully enriched with stone carvings and diaper work and interlaced arcades. Among the bishops on whom the silvery lights from the Jesse window, the great east window of the choir, have fallen, are Fletcher, father of the dramatist, and Trelawney of Cornish fame. With a lingering look at the Norman archway known as College gate, whose elaborate mouldings are worn on the sea-wind side, but still distinct on the other, I crossed the Green to the Mayor's Chapel, a little Gothic church of peculiar beauty, with windows that are harmonies in glass, and with monuments, among which the burgess element is marked, so old and strange, yet so naïve and natural, that the valour, love, and grief of a far past seem but held in slumber there. If the marble figures rise and talk together on All Saints' Eve, it is a quaint but seemly assemblage.
Bristol, even in the palmy days of her rum-trade and her slave-trade, was always singularly given to religion, and her churches are numerous,—St. Peter's, her mother-church, with an Early Norman tower, guarding the ashes of her hapless poet, Richard Savage, who died, a debtor, in Newgate prison hard by and was buried at his jailer's costs; St. Stephen's, whose turreted Perpendicular tower is one of the sights of the city; and many another; but supreme among them all,
"The pride of Bristowe and the Western londe,"
is St. Mary Radcliffe. This superb structure, ever since the day when Queen Bess called it "the fairest, the goodliest, and most famous parish-church in England," has gone on adding praise to praise. It is of ancient foundation, still observing, at Whitsuntide, the ceremony of rush-bearing, but it was rebuilt, in course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by Mayor Canynges the grandfather and Mayor Canynges the grandson. It is a pity that their alabaster heads should be all scratched over with initials. It was in this church that Chatterton pretended to discover the manuscript poems of his invented monk Rowley; it was here that Coleridge and Southey wedded the ladies of their Pantisocratical choice; and every good American is expected to thrill at the sight of the armour, hanging from one of the piers, of the gallant admiral, Sir William Penn, a native of Bristol and the father of our Quaker.
On my first visit, I righteously went on bustop out to Clifton, the breathing-place of Bristol, viewed the great grassy upland, with the Avon flowing muddily through a deep gorge, paced the boasted Suspension Bridge that spans the gorge, and finally, by way of tribute to "Evelina" and "Humphrey Clinker," followed "the zigzag" down to the Hotwells, whose glory as a spa is now departed. But of all that one may see in or about Bristol, nothing so impresses the mind as the big, plain, serious old town itself. It has been out-distanced in commerce and in manufacture by those giant upstarts, Liverpool and Manchester, yet it is still patiently pushing on in its accustomed track. So absorbed in business routine does it seem that one almost forgets that it has ever had other than practical interests,—that the "Lyrical Ballads" found their publisher here,—but gives one's self over to the latent romance of commerce and of trade. One wanders through Corn Street and Wine Street and Christmas Street, by Bakers' Hall and Spicers' Hall and Merchant Venturers' Hall, and—for the tidal Avon is navigable even for vessels of large tonnage—is ever freshly astonished, as Pope was astonished, to behold "in the middle of the street, as far as you can see, hundreds of ships, their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable."
The last great city in our summer path was Exeter, whose greatness is of the past. Exeter is, like Bristol, a county of itself, and yet stands, in a true sense, as the capital of Devonshire. It is, moreover, the heart of the whole West Country. "In Exeter," says Mr. Norway, a Cornishman, "all the history of the West is bound up—its love of liberty, its independence, its passionate resistance to foreign conquerors, its devotion to lost causes, its loyalty to the throne, its pride, its trade, its maritime adventure,—all these many strands are twined together in that bond which links West Countrymen to Exeter. There is no incident in their past history which does not touch her. Like them she was unstained by heathendom, and kept her faith when the dwellers in less happy cities further north were pricked to the worship of Thor and Odin at the point of Saxon spears. Like them she fought valiantly against the Norman Conqueror, and when she fell their cause fell with her. And since those days what a host of great and stirring incidents have happened here, from Perkin Warbeck beating on the gates with his rabble of brave Cornishmen, to William of Orange going in high state to the cathedral, welcomed already as a deliverer to that throne which it lay almost with Exeter to give or to withhold."