d 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 Lynton 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'. A
thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was
running out bareheaded to enjoy the commotion of the elements in the
'Valley of Rocks', but as if in spite, the clouds only muttered a few
angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops. Coleridge told me
that he and Wordsworth were to have made this place the scene of a
prose-tale, which was to have been in the manner of, but far superior
to, the _Death of Abel_, but they had relinquished the design. In the
morning of the second day, we breakfasted luxuriously in an
old-fashioned parlour on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very
sight of the bee-hives from which it had been taken, and a garden full
of thyme and wild flowers that had produced it. On this occasion
Coleridge spoke of Virgil's _Georgics_, but not well. I do not think
he had much feeling for the classical or elegant. It was in this room
that we found a little worn-out copy of the _Seasons_, lying in a
window-seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, '_That_ is true fame!' He
said Thomson was a great poet, rather than a good one; his style was
as meretricious as his thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as
the best modern poet. He said the _Lyri