Other fossil remains found in the Oolite demand our notice before we leave this period of the earth’s history, or this portion of the earth’s crust. In the autumn of last year we were en route to Cornwall, but turned aside to visit, among other matters, the Oolite in the neighbourhood of Bath, Chippenham, Bradford, and Trowbridge. Leaving the trunk line of the Great Western, we transferred ourselves at Chippenham to the branch that would take us to Trowbridge, that little Halifax or Preston of the West of England. Many a long day had passed since we made our first acquaintance with the poet Crabbe, and, though fossil hunting, we felt we must pay a pilgrimage to his honoured shrine. We looked at the old church in which for eighteen years he was the representative and expounder of a large and human creed first uttered by the Great Teacher from Galilee; and standing by Chantrey’s monument of Crabbe, we thought how dear to God the man must be, who by dint of purpose, purity, and hope, had risen from an unknown boy to command the ear of the public in a time of poetic dearth, and who, amidst a very chequered life, had realized the fine idea of Goldsmith:
“As some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form,
Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm,
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”
We have heard it objected to Crabbe’s poetry that it wants fire, that it has no romance, that it moves among the homely scenes of rustic life, and seldom soars above parochial records and village history. But Crabbe’s life was a singularly unromantic one; everything with him had been real, hard, up-hill work, in which he had broken down had he not believed in work rather than in genius. At Bungay School he was flogged unmercifully, according to the wise methods of teaching the classics then in vogue, but now happily exploding, except in our antediluvian public schools; at Bury St. Edmunds he was apprenticed to a surgeon, who quickly turned him into an errand boy and servant of all work; at twenty years of age, conscious of innate power, and aspiring to literary honour, he found himself in London in two equal conditions of misery, without a friend and without a pound; and then, in this very condition of impecuniosity, the tender place of his heart was touched by an unpropertied girl, Sarah Elwy, and he, the friendless young man, loves her with a pure, deep, passionate, and unchanging love. For eight long years of struggle, her image gave buoyancy to his spirit, and oneness to his purpose, amidst the ups and downs of no common hardships,—now turned from the rich man’s door by lacqueys in silver lace, and then politely bowed out by those who might have been his patrons in an hour of need, until, fortune favouring the bold, he became not only the recognised poet of the poor, but better still, the husband of a woman of surpassing worth.
Never aspiring to be a great poet, but only a true and real man, he lived, and laboured, and published much. As a parish clergyman, his memory at Trowbridge is a familiar household word, and having honourably served his generation according to the will of God, he placidly and Christianly fell asleep. As we stood by Chantey’s monumental record of this good man, we felt that it did us good to look on such a memorial of a working man; a working man, in the truest sense of the word, for we must take some care, or else this good name will become an empty conventional sham. We must not confine the term to any one class, whether to men who work with sweat of brow, or to other men who work as hard, and harder too, with sweat of brain; we give the name of working men to all who toil with head or hand, and all such may be bettered by the contemplation of a character like Crabbe’s.
But we return; our digression makes geology lag behind. We were fortunate in procuring several fine specimens of the Crinoidean[[95]] or Stone-lily family, about which the reader will pardon a few details. At the stations of the Great Northern Railway, the marble mantelpieces and uprights are all made of the Derbyshire encrinital marble, and the mind is filled with singular surprise in the contemplation of these interesting relics of past creations. How multitudinous must have been this one form of life in those ancient days, and how quietly these encrinites, when their brief term of life was over, must have sunk down into the soft calcareous and argillaceous beds lying at the bottom of the old ocean waiting to receive them, only that, mummy like, it might embalm them safely, until in process of time, by upheaval, evaporation, and sun-hardening, their delicate forms should be brought out to our daylight in all the symmetry and beauty of their pre-Adamite life! But the family of Crinoideans or Stone-lilies, called the “Pear encrinite,” or “apiocrinites rotundus,” differs very remarkably from the “Lily encrinite,” or “encrinites molliformis;” and the following descriptions grouped from Lyell and Buckland, aided by the accompanying figures, will introduce these singular animals to our readers. “The Crinoideans or Stone-lilies are almost all confined to the limestone, but an exception occurs at Bath, where they are enveloped in clay. In this case, however, it appears that the solid upper surface of the ‘Great Oolite’ had supported for a time a thick submarine forest of these beautiful zoophytes, (plant-animals,) until the clear and still water was invaded by a current charged with mud,” (see diagram below, a,) “which threw down the stone-lilies, and broke most of their stems off near the point of attachment. The stumps still remain” (b) “in their original position, but the numerous articulations once composing the stem, arms, and body of the zoophyte, were scattered at random through the argillaceous deposit in which some now lie prostrate. Vast strata of entrochal[[96]] marble, extending over large tracts of country in Northern Europe and North America, are made up of the petrified bones of encrinites, just as a cornrick is composed of straws. Man applies it to construct his palace or to adorn his sepulchre, but there are few who know, and fewer still who duly appreciate the surprising fact, that much of this marble is composed of the skeletons of millions of organized beings, once endowed with life, and susceptible of enjoyment, which after performing the part that was for a while assigned to them in living nature, have contributed their remains towards the composition of the mountain masses of the earth.”
In situ. Restored.
PEAR ENCRINITES, OR APIOCRINITES ROTUNDUS. BRADFORD, WILTS.