CHAPTER II.

DESCRIPTIVE LETTERS.

LETTER I.

Mr. Gray to Mr. Nicholls.--Description of Southampton, and of a sea view of the rising sun.

Dear sir,

November 19, 1764.

I received your letter at Southampton.-My health is much improved by the sea: not that I drank `it, or bathed in it, as common people do; no! I only walked by it, and looked upon it. The climate is remarkably mild at Southampton, even in October and November. No snow has been seen to lie there for these thirty years past. The myrtles grow in the ground against the houses; and Guernsey lilies bloom in every window. The town, clean and well-built, surrounded by old stone walls with their towers and gateways, stands at the point of a peninsula; and opens full south to an arm of the sea, which, having formed two beautiful bays on each hand, stretches away in direct view, till it joins the British Channel: it is skirted on either side with gently-rising grounds, clothed with thick wood; and directly cross its mouth, rise the high lands of the Isle of Wight at distance, but distinctly seen. In the bosom of the woods, concealed from profane eyes, lie hid the ruins of Nettely abbey. There may be richer and greater houses of religion, but the abbot is content with his situation. See, at the top of that hanging meadow, under the shade of those old trees that bend into a half circle about it, he is walking slowly, and bidding his beads for the souls of his benefactors,

interred in the venerable pile that lies beneath him. Beyond it, the meadow still descending, nods a thicket of oaks that mask the building, and exclude a view too garish and luxuriant; only on either hand they leave an opening to the blue, glittering sea.

From Southampton, I went to Salisbury, Wilton, and Stonehenge: but of these things I say no more; they will be published at the University press.

I must not close my letter without giving you one principal event of my history; which is, that, in the course of my late tour, I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the sea-coast time enough to be at the Sun's levee. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open gradually to the right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky wreathes; and the tide, as it flowed gently in upon the sands, first whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue; and, all at once, a little line of insufferable brightness, that, before I can write these few words, was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one, too glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd this makes no figure on paper; yet I shall remember it as long as the sun endures, or at least as long as I endure. I wonder whether any body ever saw it before! I hardly believe it. I am, &c.

Thomas Gray.

LETTER II.

Description

Miss Seward to Miss Emma

of Eyam, in Derbyshire.

Lichfield, Feb. 13, 1765.

I wish in vain for a Claudian and Salvatorial

pencil to delineate the promised landscape of my native

rocks and hills in Derbyshire. Take it, however, in the best tints of your friend's recollection.

Eyam, though but a village, is near a mile in length, and considerably populous. It sweeps, in a waving line, among the mountains, upon a kind of natural terrace, perhaps a quarter of a mile in breadth. From the stupendous Middleton or Eyam dale, (for the two places contend which of their names it shall bear,) in the road between Buxton and Chatsworth, we ascend to Eyam up a steep and narrow lane, about three hundred yards, and enter near the middle of the village. On the right hand, to its eastern termination, the mountain, in whose bosom it stands, is crossed by another, and still higher mountain.

The top of this eastern elevation, so majestic and picturesque amidst all its barren brownness, presents us, on ascending it, with the eagle's view of several lovely val leys, separated from each other by a number of smaller hills, winding down to the right, along the range of those vales; and, at about four miles' distance, the eye perceives the palace of Chatsworth, rising, in golden beauty, from beneath its dark and pendant woods, which are flanked by a ridge of gray, stony, and bleak mountains. The epithet golden applied to Chatsworth, is, as to appearance, literally just, since the yellowish colour of the beautiful stone of which it is built, and the gilt window. frames, make the edifice, even at that distance, when the sun shines upon it, seem as if it were built of pale gold.

The south side of my native mansion, the parsonage, (which stands by the church, in nearly the centre of the village,) looks upon a mountainous knoll, whose surface is always green; the sheep which feed upon it, have made it glossy and smooth as a bowling-turf. From childhood I have delighted to observe, amidst the gradual clearing of a foggy day, the mists which had enveloped

the head of this round and less mountain, rolling away by degrees, and its bright, green summit peeping through them, and imbibing the soft gilding of the sun-beams. Its height, above the village, is moderate. It is called the Cliff; and its top affords a level and lawny walk, of about a hundred and fifty yards' extent, before it descends. The summit overlooks that stupendous Middleton, or, more properly, Eyam dale, so well known to those who make excursions from Buxton. This dale is narrow; and the vast and steril rocks rise, on each side, to a sublime height. No beauty of wood or field softens the barren grandeur of the scene. It is here that the sterner graces have built their aeries; here that the seasons suffer no visible alteration, except when the craggy steeps are covered with snow, and shoot forth millions of pensile and horrent icicles. The towers and turrets of these lofty rocks are, however, continually growing less and less distinct, picturesque, and noble. They are broken and ravaged from time to time, for the purposes of building, and of making and mending roads; and by the perpetual consumption of the ever-burning lime-kilns.

The middle part of our long-extended village, stands on the brink of a dell, which has different and softer features. It is deep, abrupt, and rocky; still narrower than the savagedale; but grassy and sylvan, the haunt of the ver nal linnet, and of the autumnal red-breast. The descent from the village, though extremely steep, is a smooth, green turf, interspersed with the straggling nut-tree, the alder, and the mountain ash. The bottom is scarcely five yards wide, so immediately rise the perpendicular rocks on the opposite side, curtained with wild shrubs, only that a few bare parts appear, in fantastic points, and perforated arches, through which, by glimpses, we catch the horizon. In wet weather, a small rill passes

along the bottom of this dell; but, in summer, its channel is generally dry, and its pebbles are left to bleach in the sun. Pines wave over the tops of these opposite rocks; and cliffs and fields descend from them gradually, to the farther and right hand termination of the village, which is considerably higher than its centre.

This grassy dingle curves round to the left, till it meets the sterner and frowning dale, which seems to say to its verdure and its umbrage; "Here shall your wanton growth be arrested, dried up, and withered."

The village of Eyam was one of the last places, (if not the very last place,) in England, visited by the plague in 1666; the year after that, in which, in the city of London, Death, on his pale horse, trampled on three thousand victims, in one ghastly night. Mr. Mompesson was then rector of Eyam, and in the vigour of his youth. He had married a beautiful young lady, by whom he had a boy and a girl, of three and four years old. The plague was brought to Eyam, in patterns of cloth sent from London to a tailer in that village. It raged with great violence, and swept away four fifths of the inhabitants.

On the commencement of the contagion, Mrs. Mompesson threw herself, with her babes, at the feet of her husband, to supplicate his flight from that devoted place; but not even the tears and entreaties of a beloved wife could induce him to desert his flock, in these hours of danger and dismay. Equally fruitless were his persuasions that she would retire with her infants. The result of this pathetic contest was a resolve to remove their chil dren, and abide together the fury of the pestilence.

Mr. Mompesson, constantly visiting the sick, and praying by them,

"" Drew, like Marseilles' good bishop, purer breath,

When nature sicken'd, and each gale was death."