174 MY DEVON YEAR 



To shapes of beauty and of grandeur thus ; 



And Fancy, all-creative, musters up 



Apt semblances. Upon the very edge 



Of yonder cliff seem, frowning o'er the vale, 



Time-hallowed battlements with rugged chasms 



Fearfully yawning ; and upon the brow 



Of yonder dreary hill are towers sublime, 



Rifted as by the lightning stroke, or struck 



By war's resistless bolts. The mouldering arch 



The long withdrawing aisle, the shatter'd shrine 



The altar grey with age, the sainted niche, 



The choir, breeze-swept, where once the solemn hymn 



Upswelled, the tottering column pile on pile 



Fantastic, the imagination shapes 



Amid these wrecks enormous." 



A noble peace reigns here, and though the skirts of 

 the central fastness are fretted with flocks, herds, and 

 the habitations of men, yet if one passes onward to 

 the inner heart behind these purple hills, he shall 

 enter a loneliness and feel a silence profound in their 

 intensity. About Fur Tor, upon the grey head of 

 High Willhayes, or in the desolation of such regions 

 as Cranmere Pool, the mother of Devon rivers, 

 no beast is visible ; a bird is rare ; the husky stridu- 

 lation of grasshoppers or the impressions of a fox's 

 pads upon the mire are sole indications of animate 

 life. There, at such an hour as this of summer noon, 

 no sight or sound that speaks of man shall appear; 

 and an abstraction, as of equatorial deserts, broods 

 upon the granite, the heath, the quaking bog. Only 

 the wind drones in the crisp heath-bells ; only the 

 solemn cloud-shadows pass, like forms of amorphous 



