A BIT OF COUNTRY BETWEEN PLYMOUTH AND EXETER
as I can of such characteristic features of the landscape as the gray stone cottages with thatched roofs, and the gray stone villages with tiled roofs clustering about the knees of a venerable mother-church and then thinning off into the scattered cottages again.
As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours, where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you pass through carefully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation, but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a vision of things endeared by association from the earliest moment of your intellectual nonage. The primroses, if they are primroses and not cowslips, are a pale-yellow wash in the grass; the ivy is creeping over the banks and walls, and climbing the trees, and clothing their wintry nakedness; the hedge-rows, lifted on turf-covered foundations of stone, change the pattern of the web they weave over the prospect as your train passes; the rooks are drifting high or drifting low; the little streams loiter brimful through the meadows steeped in perpetual rains; and all these material facts have a witchery from poetry and romance to transmute you to a common substance of tradition. The quick transition from the present to the past, from the industrial to the feudal, and back again as your train flies through the smoke of busy towns, and then suddenly skirts some nobleman’s park where the herds of fallow deer lie motionless on the borders of the lawn sloping up to the stately mansion, is an effect of the magic that could nowhere else bring the tenth and twentieth centuries so bewilderingly together. At times, in the open, I seemed to be traversing certain pastoral regions of southern Ohio; at other times, when the woods grew close to the railroad track, I was following the borders of Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts shore, in either case recklessly irresponsible for the illusion, which if I had been in one place or the other I could have easily reversed, and so been back in England.
The run from Plymouth to Exeter is only an hour and a half, but in that short space we stopped four or five minutes at towns where I should have been glad to have stopped as many days if I had known what I lost by hurrying on. I do not know it yet, but I know that one loses so greatly in every sort of high interest at all the towns one does not stop at in England that one departs at last a ruined, a beggared man. As it was we could only avert our faces from the pane as we drew out of each tempting station, and sigh for the certainty of Exeter’s claims upon us. There our first cathedral was waiting us, and there we knew, from the words which no guide-book fails to repeat, that we should find “a typical English city ... alike of Briton, Roman, and Englishman, the one great prize of the Christian Saxon, the city where Jupiter gave way to Christ, but where Christ never gave way to Wodin.... None other can trace up a life so unbroken to so remote a past.” Whether, when we found it, we found it equal to the unique grandeur imputed to it, I prefer to escape saying by saying that the cathedral at Exeter is more than equal to any expectation you can form of it, even if it is not your first cathedral. A city of scarcely forty thousand inhabitants may well be forgiven if it cannot look an unbroken life from so remote a past as Exeter’s.
