Now we are leaving them
far below us; the blue hazy sea is showing far above the serrated
ridge of the Tors, and their huge bank of sunny green: and before us
is a desolate table-land of rushy pastures and mouldering banks,
festooned with the delicate network of the little ivy-leaved
campanula, loveliest of British wild-flowers, fit with its hair-like
stems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the temples of Titania.
Alas! we have passed out of the world into limbum patrum, and the
region of ineffectuality and incompleteness. The only cultivators
here, and through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, are the
rook and mole: and yet the land is rich enough--the fat deep
crumbling of the shale and ironstone returning year by year into the
mud, from whence it hardened ages since. There are scores of farms
of far worse land in mid-England, under 'a four-course shift,'
yielding their load of wheat an acre. When will that land do as
much? When will the spirit of Smith of Deanston and Grey of Dilston
descend on North Devon? When will some true captain of industry, and
Theseus of the nineteenth century, like the late Mr.
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