Now I Was Free Once More, A Wanderer With No Ties, No
Business To Transact In Any Town, No Worries To Make Me
Miserable Like Others, Nothing To Gain And Nothing To Lose.
Pausing on the summit to consider which way I should go,
inland, towards Axminister, or along the coast by
Beer, Seton,
Axmouth, and so on to Lyme Regis, I turned to have a last look
and say a last good-bye to Branscombe and could hardly help
waving my hand to it.
Why, I asked myself, am I not a poet, or verse-maker, so as to
say my farewell in numbers? My answer was, Because I am too
much occupied in seeing. There is no room and time for
'tranquillity,' since I want to go on to see something else.
As Blake has it: "Natural objects always did and do, weaken,
deaden and obliterate imagination in me."
We know however that they didn't quite quench it in him.
Chapter Nneteen: Abbotsbury
Abbotsbury is an old unspoilt village, not on but near the
sea, divided from it by half a mile of meadowland where all
sorts of meadow and water plants flourish, and where there are
extensive reed and osier beds, the roosting-place in autumn
and winter of innumerable starlings. I am always delighted to
come on one of these places where starlings congregate, to
watch them coming in at day's decline and listen to their
marvellous hubbub, and finally to see their aerial evolutions
when they rise and break up in great bodies and play at clouds
in the sky.
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