’Your history whither are you spinning?
Can you do nothing but describe?
A house there is, and that’s enough!’
Gray.
How we did enjoy our journey, when the wrench from
our old home was once made. We did not even
leave Clarence behind, for Mr. Castleford had given
him a holiday, so that he might not appear to be
kept at a distance, as if under a cloud, and might
help me through our travels.
My mother and I occupied the inside of the carriage,
with Emily between us at the outset; but when we
were off the London stones she was often allowed
to make a third on the dickey with Clarence and Martyn,
whose ecstatic heels could be endured for the sake
of the free air and the view. Of course we
posted, and where there were severe hills we indulged
in four horses. The varieties of the jackets
of our post-boys, blue or yellow, as supposed to indicate
the politics of their inns, were interesting to us,
as everything was interesting then. Otherwise
their equipment was exactly alike— neat
drab corduroy breeches and top-boots, and hats usually
white, and they were all boys, though the red faces
and grizzled hair of some looked as if they had faced
the weather for at least fifty years.
It was a beautiful August, and the harvest fields
were a sight perfectly new, filling us with rapture
unspeakable. At every hill which offered an
excuse, our outsiders were on their feet, thrusting
in their heads and hands to us within with exclamations
of delight, and all sorts of discoveries—really
new to us three younger ones. Ears of corn,
bearded barley, graceful oats, poppies, corn-flowers,
were all delicious novelties to Emily and me, though
Griff and my father laughed at our ecstasies, and
my mother occasionally objected to the wonderful
accumulation of curiosities thrust into her lap or
the door pockets, and tried to persuade Martyn that
rooks’ wings, dead hedgehogs, sticks and stones
of various merits, might be found at Earlscombe,
until Clarence, by the judicious purchase of a basket
at Salisbury, contrived to satisfy all parties and
safely dispose of the treasures. The objects
that stand out in my memory on that journey were
Salisbury Spire, and a long hill where the hedgebank
was one mass of the exquisite rose-bay willow herb—a
perfect revelation to our city-bred eyes; but indeed,
the whole route was like one panorama to us of L’Allegro
and other descriptions on which we had fed.
For in those days we were much more devoted to poetry
than is the present generation, which has a good
deal of false shame on that head.
Even dining and sleeping at an inn formed a pleasing
novelty, though we did not exactly sympathise with
Martyn when he dashed in at breakfast exulting in
having witnessed the killing of a pig. As my
father observed, it was too like realising Peter’s
forebodings of our return to savage life.
