The rain was falling heavily when we came to Dunster on the following day and the abbey church was gloomy indeed. And what can be gloomier than an old church on a gray day, when the rain pours from the low-hung clouds and sweeps in fitful gusts against the mossy gravestones and crumbling, ivy-clad walls? A scene that renders one solemn and thoughtful on almost any occasion becomes positively depressing under such conditions. And though we recall Dunster Church with associations not unpleasing in perspective, the surroundings were not altogether pleasing at the time. We found the caretaker, a bent old woman, in the church, but she informed us that there were really two churches and that she had jurisdiction over only one of them. However, she conducted us about the dimly lighted building, gloomy indeed from the lowering skies without, and our recollection of her story of the quarrel that resulted in the partition of the church has faded quite away. But we do remember the rood screen which has fourteen separate openings, no two wrought in the same pattern and altogether as marvelous a piece of black-oak carving as we saw in England.
Aside from the abbey church, there are other things of interest in Dunster, especially the market cross and the castle. The latter overlooks the town from a neighboring hill and is one of the lordliest fortresses in the West Country. The town lies in one of the loveliest vales in Somersetshire and is famed for its beautiful surroundings. This section of Somerset and Devon is rich in literary associations; at Nether Stowey we pass the square, uncomfortable-looking house, close to the roadside, where Coleridge lived for three years, beginning in 1797. Indeed, it was in the autumn of that year that he made the excursion with Wordsworth and Dorothy, during which the plan of the “Ancient Mariner” was conceived. A few months before, while in a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Lynton, he had the dream which he started to record in “Kubla Khan.” This poem he had composed in his dream, but while writing it down on awakening, a “person from Porlock” interrupted, and when the poet essayed to write, not only the words but the images of the vision had faded away, and the fragment of “Kubla Khan” remains like a shattered gem. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came a little later to Alfoxden House, standing in a pleasant park in the parish of Halford, and here the literary association between Coleridge and Wordsworth became intimate and the little volume of “Lyrical Ballads” was published jointly by them in 1798. Southey, while storm-stayed by “an unwelcome summer rain” at the Ship Inn in Porlock, wrote a sonnet in praise of the hills and glens. Hazlitt and Charles Lamb at times joined their friends here for pedestrian excursions among the hills. Nor can we forget Blackmore, whose “Lorna Doone” turned the eyes of the English-speaking world toward the Exmoor wastes. Shelley’s escapade at Barnstaple we have already mentioned and the cottage he occupied at Lynton still stands. No doubt much of the weird beauty that pervades his work entered his soul amidst the glorious surroundings—the sea, the hills and the vales—of the West Country.
EVENING ON THE CORNISH COAST.
From Original Painting by A. J. Warne-Browne.
A pause at Cleeve Abbey near at hand gave us perhaps a better idea of the life of monastic days than any other we visited—and we saw all the greater abbeys of Britain. In the majority of cases the abbey proper had been destroyed, but the church escaped, often through purchase by the citizens. At Cleeve the reverse has happened; the church has totally disappeared, but the abbey buildings are nearly intact. As a well-informed writer puts it:
“The whole life of the society can be lived over again with but little demands on the imagination. We can see the dormitories in which they slept, the refectory where they fed, the abbot’s particular parlour and the room for accounts, the kitchen, and even the archway through which their bodies went out to the grave. The church suffered from despoilers more than any other part of the abbey, and great is the loss to architecture. Otherwise we get a community of the Middle Ages preserved in all its essential surroundings, the refectory being in particular a grand fifteenth-century hall.” The ceiling of this great apartment is of the hammer-beam pattern, the beams richly carved, and, springing from oaken corbels, figures of angels with expanded wings.
It brings one near indeed to the spirit of monastic days—this gray old ruin, through which sweep the wind and rain and where under foot the grass grows lush and green as it grows only in England—the spirit which the Latin legend over the gatehouse so vividly expresses, quaintly rendered thus: