The Country To Which I Refer Was A Level And Tree-Less Plateau,
Over Which The Winds Cut Like A Whip.
For miles and miles it was
the same.
A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I
resided; but the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as
far up as ever I had the heart to follow it. There were roads,
certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there
was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your
whole walk exposed to you from the beginning: there was nothing
left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside,
save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here and
there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only
accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-
posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind. To
one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by
the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it
still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the
side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, 'taken
back to Nature' by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the
land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain
tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a
lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this
was of another description - this was the nakedness of the North;
the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and
cold.
It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had
passed into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each
other when they met with 'Breezy, breezy,' instead of the customary
'Fine day' of farther south. These continual winds were not like
the harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure against
your face as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over
your head, or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the
country after a shower. They were of the bitter, hard, persistent
sort, that interferes with sight and respiration, and makes the
eyes sore. Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper
time and place. It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses
of shadow. And what a power they have over the colour of the
world! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and
make them shudder and whiten like a single willow! There is
nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods,
with all its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some
painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of
their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a
gale. There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a
country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save the
passive shadows of clouds or those of rigid houses and walls. But
the wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere
could you taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a
place of opportune shelter. The reader knows what I mean; he must
remember how, when he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a
hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the
crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with warmth,
and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that
the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away
hills all marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful
passage of the 'Prelude,' has used this as a figure for the feeling
struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of
the great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other
way with as good effect:-
'Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook,
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!'
I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must
have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of
escape. He had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a
great cathedral somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral,
the great unfinished marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in
dark stairways, he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform
high above the town. At that elevation it was quite still and
warm; the gale was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had
forgotten it in the quiet interior of the church and during his
long ascent; and so you may judge of his surprise when, resting his
arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into the Place far
below him, he saw the good people holding on their hats and leaning
hard against the wind as they walked. There is something, to my
fancy, quite perfect in this little experience of my fellow-
traveller's. The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when
we find ourselves alone on a church-top, with the blue sky and a
few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and
foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of the city
streets; but how much more must they not have seemed so to him as
he stood, not only above other men's business, but above other
men's climate, in a golden zone like Apollo's!
This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I
write. The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in
memory all the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 68 of 70
Words from 68364 to 69365
of 70588
