“An admirable and most forcible way to drive up water by fire, not by drawing or sucking it upwards, for that must be, as the philosopher calleth it, intra sphæram activitatis, which is at but such a distance. But this way hath no bounder, if the vessels be strong enough; for I have taken a piece of a whole cannon, whereof the end was burst, and filled it three quarters full of water, stopping and screwing up the broken end, as also the touch-hole, and making a constant fire under it, within twenty-four hours it burst, and made a great crack; so that having a way to make my vessels that they are strengthened by the force within them, and the one to fill after the other, I have seen the water run like a constant fountain stream forty feet high; one vessel of water, rarified by fire, drives up forty feet of cold water. And a man that attends the work has but to turn two cocks, that one vessel of water being consumed, another begins to force and refit with cold water, and so successfully, the fire being tended and kept constant, with the self-same person may likewise abundantly perform in the interim between the necessity of turning the said cocks.”
We now renew our onward course, but with many a lingering look at “delightsome Monmouth.”
CHAPTER X.
Troy House—Anecdote—Antique custom—Village Churches of Monmouthshire—White-washing—The bard—Strewing graves with flowers—St. Briavels’ Castle—Llandogo—Change in the character of the river—The Druid of the Wye—Wordsworth’s “Lines composed above Tintern Abbey.”
Just below Monmouth the Wye forms a sharp curve, the apex of which is met by the Monnow and the Trothy, in such a way that these two streams, tending to nearly the same point, but coming from different directions, and the two sides of the Wye curve, make the place resemble the meeting of four roads. We have already seen how interesting the Monnow is; the Trothy, which passes White Castle, and has its source in the mountains near the Great Skyrrid, is hardly less so; the Wye we have followed from the summit of Plinlimmon, through a tract of mingled beauty and grandeur, unrivalled in England; and we are now about to trace its course to the monastic ruins of Tintern, and through the fairy land of Piercefield to its destined bourne, the Severn.
The banks are at first low, and the country laid out in level meadows, framed in at a short distance by swelling hills. Troy House is the first object that arrests our attention in front by its sombre woods. In the reign of James I. it was the property of Sir Charles Somerset, the brother of the gallant defender of Raglan Castle, between whom and Charles I. a conversation relating to Troy House took place, which is thus reported in the “Apothegms.”
“Sir Thomas Somerset, brother to the marquis of Worcester, had a house which was called Troy, five miles from Ragland Castle. This Sir Thomas, being a complete gentleman, delighted much in fine gardens and orchards, where, by the benefit of art, the earth was made so gratefull to him at the same time that the king (Charles the first) happened to be at his brother’s house, that it yielded him wherewithal to send him a present; and such a one as (the times and seasons considered) was able to make the king believe that the sovereign of the planets had now changed the poles, and that Wales (the refuse and outcast of the fair garden of England) had fairer and riper fruit than England’s bowels had on all her beds. This present, given to the marquis, he would not suffer to be presented to the king by any other hand than his own. ‘Here I present you, sir,’ said the marquis, (placing his dishes on the table) ‘with that which came not from Lincoln that was, nor from London that is, nor from York that is to be, but from Troy.’ Whereupon the king smiled, and answered the marquis, ‘Truly, my lord, I have heard that corn grows where Troy town stood, but I never thought there had grown any apricots before.’”
Some articles said to be relics of Henry V. are preserved here: the bed in which he was born, the cradle in which he was rocked, and the armour in which he fought at Agincourt. There is also a carved oak chimney-piece from Raglan Castle.
Soon the hills approach nearer, and, covered with rich foliage, sweep down more suddenly towards the river. On the right bank is Penalt church, standing on a wooded eminence; and behind it, an extensive common distinguished for a superstitious custom, derived, as is supposed, from the days of the druids. When a funeral passed that way, the cortege stopped at an oak tree, and placed the corpse on a stone seat at its foot. The company than sang a psalm, and resumed their procession. It may be remarked that wherever an old oak tree is found in this part of the country, in an insulated or otherwise remarkable situation, there is sure to be connected with it some religious tradition, or some observance whose origin is lost in antiquity. The churches are usually an interesting feature in the landscape, for it would seem as if their founders had sought purposely out for them solitary places, by the banks of rivers or in the midst of groves or fields. In general they are exceedingly simple in appearance, many having the marks of great antiquity, and almost all being whitewashed from top to bottom. An antiquary has ingeniously accounted for this peculiarity, by the custom the Normans had of constructing even large buildings of pebbles and rag-stone, which obliged them to cover the inequalities, outside and inside, by a coat of lime and sand. However this may be, the effect is not unpleasing; more especially when the rural temple, as is frequently the case, is shaped like a barn, and without a belfry. Such churches, more especially in the mountainous districts, still present the rounded arches, and other peculiarities, which denote that their rude walls were raised by our Saxon ancestors, if not by the ancient Britons themselves.
We find the white walls, so common in Wales, alluded to as a poetical circumstance by one of the bards of the fourteenth century, in a piece of considerable beauty; and in the succeeding paragraph there is an allusion to another Welsh custom, of more classical authority, that of strewing the graves of the dead with flowers. The poem is an invocation to summer, to shed its blessings over the country of Gwent. The following is the paragraph referred to, with the second allusion, terminating the ode by an abrupt and pathetic transition.