Over his grave there is a ponderous, oblong block of slate, a native
mineral of this region, as hard as iron, and which will doubtless last
quite as long as Southey's works retain any vitality in English
literature. It is not a monument fit for a poet. There is nothing airy
or graceful about it,--and, indeed, there cannot he many men so solid and
matter-of-fact as to deserve a tomb like that. Wordsworth's grave is
much better, with only a simple headstone, and the grass growing over his
mortality, which, for a thousand years, at least, it never can over
Southey's. Most of the monuments are of this same black slate, and some
erect headstones are curiously sculptured, and seem to have been recently
erected.
We now returned to the hotel, and took a car for the valley of St. John.
The sky seemed to portend rain in no long time, and Skiddaw had put on
his cap; but the people of the hotel and the driver said that there would
be no rain this afternoon, and their opinion proved correct. After
driving a few miles, we again cane within sight of the Enchanted Castle.
It stands rather more than midway adown the declivity of one of the
ridges that form the valley to the left, as you go southward, and its
site would have been a good one for a fortress, intended to defend the
lower entrance of this mountain defile. At a proper distance, it looks
not unlike the gray dilapidation of a Gothic castle, which has been
crumbling and crumbling away for ages, until Time might be supposed to
have imperceptibly stolen its massive pile from man, and given it back to
Nature; its towers and battlements and arched entrances being so much
defaced and decayed that all the marks of human labor had nearly been
obliterated, and the angles of the hewn stone rounded away, while mosses
and weeds and bushes grow over it as freely as over a natural ledge of
rocks.
Pages:
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259