_ There is a glen above West Dart whence a lesser stream after brief journeying comes down to join the river. By many reaches, broken with little falls, the waters descend upon the glen from the Moor; but barriers of granite first confront them, and before the lands break up and hollow, a mass of boulders, piled in splendid disorder and crowned with willow and rowan, crosses the pathway of the torrent. Therefore the little river divides and leaps and tumbles foaming over the mossy granite, or creeps beneath the boulders by invisible ways. Into fingers and tresses the running waters dislimn, and then, that great obstacle passed, their hundred rillets run together again and go on their way with music. By a descent that becomes swiftly steeper, the burn falls upon fresh rocks, is led into fresh channels and broken to the right and left where mossy islets stand knee-deep in fern and bilberry. Here spring up the beginnings of the wood, for the glen is full of trees. Beech and alder, with scrub of dwarf willow at their feet, cluster on the islets and climb the deepening valley westward; but in the glen stand aged trees, and on the crest of the slope haggard spruce firs still fight for life and mark, in their twisted and decaying timbers and perishing boughs, the torment of the unsleeping wind. Great is the contrast between these stricken ruins with death in their high tops, and the sylva beneath sheltered by the granite hill. There beech and pine are prosperous and sleek compared with the unhappy, time-foundered wights above them; but if the spruces perish, they rule. The lesser things are at their feet and the sublimity of their struggle--their mournful but magnificent protest against destiny--makes one ignore the sequestered woodland, where there is neither battle nor victory, but comfortable, ignoble shelter and repose. The river kisses the feet of these happy nonentities; they make many a stately arch and pillar along the water; in spring the pigeon and the storm-thrush nest among their branches; and they gleam with newly-opened foliage and shower their silky shards upon the earth; in autumn they fling a harvest of sweet beech mast around their feet. The seed germinates and thousands of cotyledon leaves appear like fairy umbrellas, from the waste of the dead leaves. The larger number of these seedlings perish, but some survive to take their places in fulness of time.
By falls and rapids, by flashing stickles and reaches of stillness, the little river sinks to the heart of the glen; but first there is a water-meadow under the hills where an old clapper-bridge flings its rough span from side to side. This is of ancient date and has been more than once restored against the ravages of flood since pack-horses tramped that way in Tudor times. Here the streamlet rests awhile before plunging down the steeps beyond and entering the true glen--a place of shelving banks and many trees.
In summer the dingle is a golden-green vision of tender light that filters through the beeches. Here and there a sungleam, escaping the net of the leaf, wins down to fall on mossy boulder and bole, or plunge its shaft of brightness into a dark pool. Then the amber beam quivers through the crystal to paint each pebble at the bottom and reveal the dim, swift shades of the trout, that dart through it from darkness back to darkness again. In autumn the freshets come and the winds awaken until a storm of foliage hurtles through the glen, now pattering with shrill whispers from above and taking the water gently; now whirling in mad myriads, swirling and eddying, driven hither and thither by storm until they bank upon some hillock, find harbour among holes and the elbows of great roots, or plunge down into the turmoil of the stream. The ways of the falling leaf are manifold, and as the rock delays the river, so the trees, with trunk and bough, arrest the flying foliage, bar its hurrying volume and deflect its tide. In winter the glen is good, for then a man may escape the north wind here and, finding some snug holt among the river rocks, mark the beauty about him while snow begins to touch the tree-tops and the boughs are sighing. Then can be contrasted the purple masses of sodden leaves with the splendour of the mosses among which they lie; for now the minor vegetation gleams at this, its hour of prime. It sheets every bank in a silver-green fabric fretted with liquid jewels or ice diamonds; it builds plump knobs and cushions on the granite, and some of the mosses, now in fruit, brush their lustrous green with a wash of orange or crimson, where tiny filaments rise densely to bear the seed. Here, also, dwelling among them, flourishes that treasure of such secret nooks by stream-side, the filmy fern, with transparent green vesture pressed to the moisture-laden rocks.
Man's handiwork is also manifested here; not only in the felled trees and the clapper-bridge, but uniquely and delightfully; for where the river quickens over a granite apron and hastens in a torrent of foam away, the rocks have tongues and speak. He who planted this grove and added beauty to a spot already beautiful, was followed by his son, who caused to be carved inscriptions on the boulders. You may trace them through the moss, or lichen, where the records, grown dim after nearly a hundred years, still stand. It was a minister of the Church who amused himself after this fashion; but in no religious spirit did he compose; and the scattered poetry has a pleasant, pagan ring about it proper to this haunt of Pan.
Upon one great rock in the open, with its grey face to the south-west and its feet deeply bedded in grass and sand, you shall with care decipher these words:--
Sweet Poesy! fair Fancy's child!
Thy smiles imparadise the wild.
Beside the boulder a willow stands, its finials budding with silver; upon the north-western face of the stone is another inscription whose legend startles a wayfarer on beholding the bulk of the huge mass. "This stone was removed by a flood 17--."
On the islets and by the pathway below, sharp eyes may discover other inscribed stones, and upon one island, which the bygone poet called "The Isle of Mona," there still exist inscriptions in "Bardic characters." These he derived from the
Celtic Researches of Davies. Furnished with the English letters corresponding to these symbols, one may, if sufficiently curious, translate each distich as one finds it. Elsewhere, beside the glen path, a sharp-eyed, little lover of Nature, tore the coat of moss from another phrase that beat us both as we hunted through the early dusk:--
Ye Naiads! venera
This was the complete passage, and we puzzled not a little to solve its meaning. On dipping into the past, however, I discovered that the inscription was intended to have read as follows:--
Ye Naiads! venerate the swain
Who joined the Dryads to your train.
The rhyme was designed to honour the poet's father, who set the forest here; but accident must have stayed the stone-cutter's hand and left the distich incomplete.
And now a sudden flash of red aloft above the tree-tops told that the sun was setting. Night thickened quickly, though the lamp of a great red snow-cloud still hung above the glen long after I had left it. Beneath, the mass of the beech wood took on wonderful colour and the streamlet, emerging into meadows, flashed back the last glow of the sky. _