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_. A
thunderstorm 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 _Lyrical Ballads_ were an experiment
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