SUMMER IN DEVONSHIRE.
It is sad to be obliged to speak hardly of departed friends. As we pass by their graves the tender hare-bells and sweet-scented clover tell of nothing but what is beautiful and of good report. We cannot then quarrel with buried foibles, and “sit tibi terra levis” is our only thought. Thus I would rather not mention the true character of last summer in Devon, and the watery weeks of the present one, so far as it has yet advanced. Their souls have passed into the daisies of Time’s grave, and I would fain only recal them as glad summer hours of sunshine and bee-murmurings, and pleasant lime-tree fragrance, and airy whisperings of the mountain firs. They brought their blessing with them, and it would ill-become me to resuscitate them in their storms and mists and thunderous rage. But truth compels me to admit this much of them, at least, they were not what they generally are.
As I am speaking of Devon summers, I will adopt the manner of the natives—ungrateful though it be—and write down the summer of this year and of 1860, as an old crone in that county lately spoke to me of her dead husband:
“Poor dear mon, I be real sorry for un; but he were a bad old man, dree and fifty years he ill-used me, but I quite forgive un; oh! he were a bad old man!”
Let us therefore contemplate summer in Devon as it generally is, avoiding invidious particularity, and remembering its delights in past years in those
Summer days, when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
Sweet childAs twenty days are now.
Given the county, let me try to deck it with some of the usual accompaniments of its delightful August. Of course there is pleny of sunshine, where else are you to look for it if not in Devon? Sometimes stealing gently over the land from the distant peaks of Dartmoor, and streaming over meadow, lawn and moor, with its gentle influences, it lulls all nature into serenity, only broken by the hum of insects, which seems reflected in the seas round the coast, as the gentle ripple just stirs their blue expanse. Sometimes, again, like a tropical day, it blazes over heath and hamlet, a brilliant, steady flood of light, without a flicker and without a breath, as if the sun could not lose a look of the land it loves so well. Often, again (and this is to my mind its most pleasant phase), the sunshine skims down the dark-green Tors, dances over the Combes beneath, now runs over a waving field of corn, now gilds the distant farmstead, and ere it has well passed, another flood of light is upon you and gone in its turn, gently toying with the wind as it fleets on, and keeping pace with its lightest breath. This is the weather in which Devon looks its best. This is spring, almost visibly flushing into summer. The constant alternation of light and shade brings out the varied tints of the foliage and the splendour of the wild flowers to perfection, while the sun is not too hot to rob you of their enjoyment.
Summer brings its showers as well as April, and if I dislike, as much as you do, the unvarying rains of last year, I gladly welcome many a stray shower. We cannot put up with perpetual ill-temper even in the greatest beauty, but willingly abide her chance caprices of smile and frown. And if you insist on a southern serenity, always brooding over Devon, the deep azure would rob my favourite county of half its charms. It is impossible to obtain its cloud-scenery unless you welcome these passing showers. But from this cause its beauty is heightened; after every rainy hour “blue isles of heaven smile between,” and grey and white “angels from the sea” (as Ruskin calls them) float over the hills to catch the golden tints of day as it dies in the crimson west. Not only is the splendour of the sunsets heightened by these occasional showers, but their frequent recurrence tends greatly to give summer in Devonshire that vigorous life and motion which continuous sunshine can never grant to other lands.
Let us borrow the wild bird’s wings, and take a passing glance at Devon, from end to end, as it now is.
Starting, as I have seen the cuckoo after its long voyage, between the greensand of Sidmouth and the bold chalk cliffs of Beer Head, the deep purple blossoms of the rare “Lithospermum purpureo-cæruleum” tell the botanist at once that he is drawing near the riches of the west. We may take the “Corrigiola littoralis,” which does not, however, occur further east than Slapton Sands, near the Start, as the next step towards the continental Flora of Cornwall. But, away over lanes dappled underneath with feathery lady-ferns, and smothered overhead by honeysuckles and white-clustered traveller’s joy (Clematis vitalba),—over many a strip stolen from the breezy moorland where rows of pink-flowered potatoes flourish, as yet happily untouched by disease,—over many a red and yellow mosaic of scarlet lychnis and golden-rod crowding round those green furze bushes which bend under the strangling grasp of parasitic dodder,—dashing down the verdant hills which enclose the Otter—past the gardens of Bicton and the elms of Sowton, and the giant boughs of Heavitree, where tradition tells of many a fettered criminal swinging in the breeze, we will rest by the mossy towers of Exeter Cathedral.
Perchance the good folks here are busily flocking to a flower-show or an archery-meeting, or those gay streamers tell of an election, and Exeter has always been a loyal city, answering to her motto of “Semper Fidelis.” Ere now its Bishop has been torn to pieces by a London mob because he loved his king too well, and one of its parish-priests been hanged, in full canonicals from his own church-tower, because he struggled for the old religion. The patriotism which, in old times, led the Devon gentry to draw their swords for King Charles, still leads its trusty Conservatives to fight, tooth and nail, for Church and State. But we will not lose our summer holiday amid political turmoil:
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes,
Flumina amem sylvasque inglorius.
