Winterslow: Essays and Characters Written ThereHazlitt, William
General
Winterslow: Essays and Characters Written There
Hazlitt, William
English essays
was a native of Nether Stowey, one of those who were attracted to
Coleridge's discourse as flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time
to the sound of a brass pan. He 'followed in the chase like a dog who
hunts, not like one that made up the cry.' He had on a brown cloth
coat, boots, and corduroy breeches, was low in stature, bow-legged,
had a drag in his walk like a drover, which he assisted by a hazel
switch, and kept on a sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like a
running footman by a state coach, that he might not lose a syllable or
sound that fell from Coleridge's lips. He told me his private
opinion, that Coleridge was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his
lips, much less offered an opinion the whole way: yet of the three,
had I to choose during that journey, I would be John Chester. He
afterwards followed Coleridge into Germany, where the Kantean
philosophers were puzzled how to bring him under any of their
categories. When he sat down at table with his idol, John's felicity
was complete; Sir Walter Scott's, or Mr. Blackwood's, when they sat
down at the same table with the King, was not more so. We passed
Dunster on our right, a small town between the brow of a hill and the
sea. I remember eyeing it wistfully as it lay below us: contrasted
with the woody scene around, it looked as clear, as pure, as
_embrowned_ and ideal as any landscape I have seen since, of Gaspar
Poussin's or Domenichino's. We had a long day's march (our feet kept
time to the echoes of Coleridge's tongue) through Minehead and by the
Blue Anchor, and on to Linton, which we did not reach till near
midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgment. We,
however, knocked the people of the house up at last, and we were
repaid for our apprehensions and fatigue by some excellent rashers of
fried bacon and eggs. The view in coming along had been splendid. We
walked for miles and miles on dark brown heaths overlooking the
Channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into
little sheltered valleys close by the sea-side, with a smuggler's face
scowling by us, and then had to ascend conical hills with a path
winding up through a coppice to a barren top, like a monk's shaven
crown, from one of which I pointed out to Coleridge's notice the bare
masts of a vessel on the very edge of the horizon, and within the
red-orbed disk of the setting sun, like his own spectre-ship in the
_Ancient Mariner_. At Linton the character of the sea-coast becomes
more marked and rugged. There is a place called the _Valley of Rocks_
(I suspect this was only the poetical name for it), bedded among
precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into
which the waves dash, and where the sea-gull for ever wheels its
screaming flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown
transverse, as if an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind
these is a fretwork of perpendicular rocks, something like the
_Giant's Causeway_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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