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‘And now, since your heart is softened towards these wild, stag- hunting, trout fishing, jovial west-countrymen, consider whether it should not be softened likewise toward those old outlaw ballads which I have never yet been able to make you admire. They express feelings not yet extinct in the minds of a large portion of the lower orders, as you would know had you lived, like me, all your life in poaching counties, and on the edges of one forest after another,–feelings which must be satisfied, even in the highest development of the civilization of the future, for they are innate in every thoughtful and energetic race,–feelings which, though they have often led to crime, have far oftener delivered from swinish sensuality; the feelings which drove into the merry greenwood “Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John;” “Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William of Cloudislee;” the feelings which prompted one half of his inspiration to the nameless immortal who wrote the “Nutbrown Maid;”–feelings which could not then, and cannot now, be satisfied by the drudgery of a barbaric agriculture, which, without science, economy, or enterprise, offers no food for the highest instincts of the human mind, its yearnings after Nature, after freedom, and the noble excitement of self-dependent energy.’

Our talk ended: but the rain did not: and we were at last fain to leave our shelter, and let ourselves be blown by the gale (the difficulty being not to progress forward, but to keep our feet) back to the shed where our ponies were tied, and to canter home to Lynmouth, with the rain cutting our faces like showers of pebbles, and our little mountain ponies staggering against the wind, and more than once, if Londoners will believe me, blown sheer up against the bank by some mad gust, which rushed perpendicularly, not down, but up, the chasms of the glens below.

II.–THE COAST LINE.

It is four o’clock on a May morning, and Claude and I are just embarking on board a Clovelly trawling skiff, which, having disposed of her fish at various ports along the Channel, is about to run leisurely homewards with an ebb tide, and a soft north-easterly breeze.

So farewell, fair Lynmouth; and ye storm-spirits, send us a propitious day; and dismiss those fantastic clouds which are coquetting with your thrones, crawling down one hill-side, and whirling and leaping up another, in wreaths of snow, and dun, and amber, pierced every minute by some long glittering upward arrow from the rising sun, which gilds grey crags and downs a thousand feet above, while underneath the gorges still sleep black and cold in shade.

There, they have heard us! The cap rises off the ‘Summer-house hill,’ that eight hundred feet of upright wall, which seems ready to topple down into the nest of be-myrtled cottages at its foot; and as we sweep out into the deeper water the last mist-flake streams up from the Foreland, and vanishes in white threads into the stainless blue.

‘Look at the colours of that Foreland!’ cried Claude. ‘The simple monotone of pearly green, broken only at intervals by blood-red stains, where the turf has slipped and left the fresh rock bare, and all glimmering softly through a delicate blue haze, like the bloom on a half-ripened plum!’

‘And look, too, how the grey pebble beach is already dancing and quivering in the mirage which steams up, like the hot breath of a limekiln, from the drying stones. Talk of “glazings and scumblings,” ye artists! and bungle at them as you will, what are they to Nature’s own glazings, deepening every instant there behind us?’

‘Mock me not. I have walked up and down here with a humbled and broken spirit, and had nearly forsworn the audacity of painting anything beyond a beech stem, or a frond of fern.’

‘The little infinite in them would have baffled you as much as the only somewhat bigger infinite of just the hills on which they grow.’