when the peculiar character and
charm of a place steals over and takes possession of me I begin to fear
it, knowing from long experience that it will be a painful wrench to get
away and that get away sooner or later I must. Now I was free once more,
a wanderer with no ties, no business to transact in any town, no worries
to make me miserable like others, nothing to gain and nothing to lose.

Pausing on the summit to consider which way I should go, inland, towards
Axminister, or along the coast by Beer, Seton, Axmouth, and so on to
Lyme Regis, I turned to have a last look and say a last good-bye to
Branscombe and could hardly help waving my hand to it.

Why, I asked myself, am I not a poet, or verse-maker, so as to say my
farewell in numbers? My answer was, Because I am too much occupied in
seeing. There is no room and time for 'tranquillity,' since I want to go
on to see something else. As Blake has it: "Natural objects always did
and do, weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination in me."

We know however that they didn't quite quench it in him.

Chapter Nineteen: Abbotsbury

Abbotsbury is an old unspoilt village, not on but near the sea, divided
from it by half a mile of meadowland where all sorts of meadow and water
plants flourish, and where there are extensive reed and osier beds,
the roosting-place in autumn and winter of innumerable starlings. I
am always delighted to come on one of these places where starlings
congregate, to watch them coming in at day's decline and listen to their
marvellous hubbub, and finally to see their aerial evolutions when they
rise and break up in great bodies and play at clouds in the sky. When
the people of the place, the squire and keepers and others who have an
interest in the reeds and osiers, fall to abusing them on account of the
damage they do, I put my fingers in my ears. But at Abbotsbury I did not
do so, but listened with keen pleasure to the curses they vented and the
story they told. This was that when the owner of Abbotsbury came down
for the October shooting and found the starlings more numerous than
ever, he put himself into a fine passion and reproached his keepers and
other servants for not having got rid of the birds as he had desired
them to do. Some of them ventured to say that it was easier said than
done, whereupon the great man swore that he would do it himself without
assistance from any one, and getting out a big duck-gun he proceeded
to load it with