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Among The Quantock Hills
by
On our way out to the place where we had left our equipage, we met the owner of the estate, walking with his dogs. He was much less fierce than his placard. It may have been something in Dorothea’s way that mollified him, but at all events he turned and walked with us to show us the way up the “Hareknap”–the war-path of ancient armies–to a famous point of view. There we saw the Quantock Hills, rolling all around us. They were like long smooth steep billows of earth, covered with bracken, and gorse, and heather just coming into bloom. Thick woodlands hung on their sides, but above their purple shoulders the ridges were bare. They looked more than a thousand feet high. Among their cloven combes, deep-thicketed and watered with cool springs, the wild red deer still find a home. And it was here (not in Cardiganshire as the poem puts it) that Wordsworth’s old huntsman, “Simon Lee,” followed the chase of the stag.
It was a three-mile drive from Holford to Nether Stowey. Dorothea remarked that Coleridge and the Wordsworths must have been great walkers if this was their idea of living close together. And so they were, for that bit of road seemed to them only a prelude to a real walk of twenty or thirty miles. The exercise put them in tune for poetry, and their best thoughts came to them when they were afoot.
“The George” at Nether Stowey is a very modest inn, the entrance paved with flag-stones, the only public room a low-ceiled parlour; but its merits are far beyond its pretensions. We lunched there most comfortably on roast duck and green peas, cherry tart and cheese, and then set out to explore the village, which is closely built along the roads whose junction is marked by a little clock-tower. The market-street is paved with cobble-stones, and down one side of it runs a small brook, partly built in and covered over, but making a merry noise all the way. Coleridge speaks of it in his letters as “the dear gutter of Stowey.”
Just outside of the town is the Castle Mound, a steep, grassy hill, to the top of which we climbed. There was the distinct outline of the foundations of the old castle, built in the Norman times; we could trace the moat, and the court, and all the separate rooms; but not a stone of the walls remained–only a ground-plan drawn in the turf of the hill-top. All the pride and power of the Norman barons had passed like the clouds that were sailing over the smooth ridges of the Quantocks.
Coleridge was twenty-four years old when he came to Nether Stowey with his young wife and a boy baby. Troubles had begun to gather around him; he was very poor, tormented with neuralgia, unable to find regular occupation, and estranged by a quarrel from his friend and brother-in-law, Robert Southey. Thomas Poole, a well-to-do tanner at Nether Stowey, a man of good education and noble character, a great lover of poetry and liberty, had befriended Coleridge and won his deep regard and affection. Nothing would do but that Poole should find a cottage near to his own house, where the poet could live in quietude and congenial companionship.
The cottage was found; and, in spite of Poole’s misgivings about its size, and his warnings in regard to the tedium and depression of village life, Coleridge took it and moved in with his little family on the last day of the year 1796–a cold season for a “flitting!” We can imagine the young people coming down the Bridgewater road through the wintry weather with their few household goods in a cart.
The cottage was at the western end of the village; and there it stands yet, a poor, ugly house, close on the street. We went in, and after making clear to the good woman who owned it that we were not looking for lodgings, we saw all that there was to see of the dwelling. There were four rooms, two downstairs and two above. All were bare and disorderly, because, as the woman explained, house-cleaning was in progress. It was needed. She showed us a winding stair, hardly better than a ladder, which led from the lower to the upper rooms. There was no view, no garden. But in Coleridge’s day there was a small plot of ground belonging to the house and running back to the large and pleasant place of his friend Poole. It was upon this little garden that the imagination of the new tenant was fixed, and there he saw, in his dream, the corn and the cabbages and the potatoes growing luxuriantly under his watchful and happy care; enough, he hoped, to feed himself and his family, and to keep a couple of what he called “snouted and grunting cousins” on the surplus. “Literature,” he wrote, “though I shall never abandon it, will always be a secondary object with me. My poetic vanity and my political favour have been exhaled, and I would rather be an expert, self-maintaining gardener than a Milton, if I could not unite them both.” How amusing are men’s dreams–those of humility as well as those of ambition! There is a peculiarly Coleridgean touch in that last hint of uniting Milton and the market-gardener.