Sheffield is somewhat proud of Chantrey and Montgomery, and honours Elliott by a statue, which, tall of stature and unfaithful in likeness, sits on a pedestal in front of the post-office. I thought that to ramble out to one of the Corn-Law Rhymer’s haunts would be an agreeable way of spending the afternoon and of viewing the scenery in the neighbourhood of the town. I paced up the long ascent of Broome Hill—a not unpleasing suburb—to the Glossop road, and when the town was fairly left behind, was well repaid by the sight of wooded hills and romantic valleys. Amidst scenery such as that you may wander on to Wentworth, to Wharncliff, the lair of the Dragon of Wantley, to Stanedge and Shirecliff, and all the sites of which Elliott has sung in pictured phrase or words of fire. We look into the valley of the Rivelin, one of the
“Five rivers, like the fingers of a hand,”
that converge upon Sheffield; and were we to explore the tributary brooks, we should discover grinding wheels kept going by the current in romantic nooks and hollows. What a glorious sylvan country this must have been
“——in times of old,
When Locksley o’er the hills of Hallam chas’d
The wide-horn’d stag, or with his bowmen bold
Wag’d war on kinglings.”
Troops of women and girls were busy on the slopes gathering bilberries, others were washing the stains from their hands and faces at a roadside spring, others—who told me they had been out six miles—were returning with full baskets to the town. How they chattered! About an hour’s walking brings you to a descent; on one side the ground falls away precipitously from the road, on the other rises a rocky cliff, and at the foot you come to a bridge bestriding a lively brook that comes out of a wooded glen and runs swiftly down to the Rivelin. This is the “lone streamlet” so much loved by the poet, to which he addresses one of his poems:
“Here, if a bard may christen thee,
I’ll call thee Ribbledin.”
I turned from the road, and explored the little glen to its upper extremity; scrambling now up one bank, now up the other, wading through rank grass and ferns, striding from one big stone to another, as compelled by the frequent windings, rejoiced to find that, except in one particular, it still answered to the poet’s description:
“Wildest and lonest streamlet!
Gray oaks, all lichen’d o’er!
Rush-bristled isles, ye ivied trunks
That marry shore to shore!
And thou, gnarl’d dwarf of centuries,
Whose snak’d roots twist above me!
Oh, for the tongue or pen of Burns,
To tell ye how I love ye!”