26 SEPTEMBER 1874, Page 13

CORRESPONDENCE.

A HOLIDAY IN YORKSHIRE.—I.

(TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")

SIR,-I know you are from of old a believer in the value of complete change, and think a foreign holiday a truer holiday than any. I hold, for the most part, the same doctrine, but it may easily be pushed beyond its real significance. Those who go to Switzerland every year have, after all, leas complete change than those who go abroad one year and travel at home another. Those who travel by rail and hired carriage one year would do well to walk or drive themselves about within a narrow range another year. Change in the mode of change is as important a secret of enjoyment as change itself. For my part, I think

of the turn religious thought is taking throughout scientific Europe nothing is more delightful than the complete freedom from thatin Professor Miiller's remarks on the ethnology of belief, nothing embarrassing external conditions which you get on a driving tour, excited such applause as the words of aPersian poet, which hequoted without a coachman or vetturino to impose his will upon you, from Mr. Moncure Conway's " Sacred Anthology " :—" Diversity under the plea of consulting for his homes' interests. Of course, if of worship has divided the human race into seventy-two nations. you are a good French scholar, you might combine this plan with From among all their dogmas I have selected one,—the love of foreign travel, as did the late Mr. C. A. Collins in that amusing God." After this address followed a paper by Dr. Thibaut, and delightful journey which he chronicled for us all in "A Tour who, working at an ancient and most crabbed Sanskrit upon Wheels." But there are not many Englishmen except the very treatise concerning the construction of altars, found in it rich, to whom expense is indifferent, who would feel up to the task of a set of rules which showed that before the time of Pytba- hiring or buying a carriage and horse in France, and undertaking the gores, the Brahmans had been led, by the desire of pleasing management of their own journey under these conditions. In the gods by the neat masonry of their altar-courts, to discover small technical matters like the care of a horse and carriage, a the proposition as to the squares on the sides of a right-angled foreign language and the embarrassing consciousness of being a triangle. They had worked it out empirically, guided by mea- stranger, are real chains, and I fancy the driving-tour would, for suring the triangles whose three sides are whole numbers,—for most Englishmen, be more pleasantly carried out in England. instance, 3, 4, and 5. Their rule for squaring the circle was also Then our own country is the only beautiful land, except France, right to several places of decimals, but they knew it was not where one can at once get into and out of the region one goes to quite right, and described it as savicesha.—" that which departs see, without a tedious railway-journey interposed at the beginning from truth." After this instance of the secular knowledge and end of one's enjoyment,—a journey which almost always takes which has sprung from religious belief, there came an in- four whole days out of a holiday, and takes out a good deal more, structive case of the way in which man follows out in- for those who are not strong, in the way of exhaustion. Besides, dependently, in distant regions, the same trains of thought. it is wonderful how little one knows of one's own country. I am This was Professor Stenzler's paper on the expiatory rites a Yorkshireman, and have spent at least one complete holiday in of the Hindus, whose fasts, fines, penances, and indulgences rim Yorkshire besides the present, since I lived there ; but I certainly parallel with those of medimval Christendom. There is some- know more of the Tyrol, the Canton Vaud, and the Grisons than thing quaint in the notion of a penitent ordered to fast for three I do of Yorkshire. The course of the Aar, the course of the years, and doing it by vicarious arithmetic, hiring four hundred Reuss, the course of the Inn, are far more familiar to me than the people to fast for three days. At the Turanian Section, Mr. course of the Wharfe, or the Aire, or the Swale. Only just now, Isaac Taylor pursued his theory of the Etruscan language being though I have been spending my holiday in the neighbourhood Tatar, but he seems to have enlisted no companions, and to of the Wharfe, I asked myself how the Wharfe gets to the sea, journey alone on the doubtful track he has fallen into. The and could not answer my own question with certainty. I guessed Orientalists, in choosing Mr. Grant Duff to preside over the (rightly) that it must in all probability be through the Ouse and Archaeological Section, gave a graceful recognition to the Indian the Humber, but I doubt whether I should have felt in the same Government, whose enlightened patronage of learning and research conjectural and rather a priori condition of mind as to any stream contrasts with the stinginess of our Home Government. Among of equal size in Switzerland.

the topics of Mr. Grant Duff's solid discourse was the discovery However, one does not take a holiday to inform oneself, and

• Ily General Cunningham of sculptures of the time of Asoka certainly if the Aire, for instance, were everywhere what it is when '(three-quarters of a century after Alexander), representing the it leaves Leeds, I should be far from anxious to follow its foul jatakas or transmigration-births of Buddha. In the legends and inky destinies. But even if you obliterate from Yorkshire whose antiquity is thus vouched for, we find probably the first every region where a single long, smoky chimney can be seen, origin of some of the ./Esopian fables,—the "Fox and the Stork," there are scenes 9f wonderful beauty and great stretches of pro- for instance. Professor Owen, at the Ethnological Section, de- found solitude left. There is no moorland country in England like livered the last of the Presidential addresses. It was felt to be a it. The " cheerful silence of the fells," as Matthew Arnold, speaking, pity that he devoted so much time to discussing Egyptian chro- however, of Cumbrian fells (which are hardly so characteristic as nology, where he was leas at home than some of his auditors ; those of Yorkshire), finely calls it, is something quite distinct from and he jarred upon the tenderest chord of the Egyptologist's heart the overpowering stillness of mountain solitudes. You remember by the way in which, speaking of that ancient authority, Manetho, Miss Bronth's description of the scenes in "Jane Eyre," where St. he would call him Manetho. But within the naturalist's province, John communicates to the heroine his intended departure to in contrasting the features of the indigenous Egyptians with India, and austerely commands her to become his wife? It is those of the invading Shepherd Kings from Syria, and in dwelling evidently a high Yorkshire moorland which she describes, though on the traces of human antiquity before any relics which come she, who had never seen a true mountain country, clothes her within the comparatively modern range of the historian, Pro- impression now and then in language fitter for theAlps :—" Let fessor Owen made by no means the smallest contribution to the us rest here,' said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers of

shall see it again,' he said aloud, in dreams, when I sleep by the Ganges ; and again in a more remote hour, when a deeper sleep overcomes me, on the shore of a darker stream.' Strange words of a strange love !—an austere patriot's passion for his father- land ! "

That strikes me as pitched a note too high. Where heather is spread out, 'savage' scenery is impossible. The wide range of

the fells and the elastic carpet of the heather tinge the sense of solitude with a sense of freedom and of beauty which, even under a gloomy sky, makes the scene comparatively cheerful.

You are never shut in by a power that overawes you. You are solitary without being lonely ; it is not the power of nature, but her liberty, that you feel. Still, Miss Bronte's description expresses very finely the passionate love which this kind of scenery excites in those who are born in it. No land scenery has so many points of resemblance to the sea as moorland

scenery,—miles and miles of wavy ground stretching in just such swells as are given by the motion of the sea, but without the sense of helplessness and danger which the sea impresses on us, and with that cheerfulness due to growth and flower which the sea has not, as well as much of the buoyancy which the sea has. On the sea, and still more in the finest mountain scenery, you are somewhat oppressed by the sense of personal limits. You are made prisoner by your ship in the one case, and by the natural barri- cades of rock and glacier and precipice on the other. In a glen or on a mountain-top you must either go up or go down, if you want to move. But on the moorland your solitude is free. The eye commands such ranges of open moor, that the pressure of social life is more completely and visibly removed to a distance, than on any mountain-top, but you are not nearly so much shut in or fettered as to your course. If at least you can walk through long heather,—no light condition, but one which does not particularly oppress the imagination, and this, after all, is the only point in question, for the liability to fatigue is the real limit on human powers,—you may launch yourself in any direction, over a measureless stretch of glowing and fragrant bloom, towards the deep blue distance, which circles the whole horizon, without the fear of break or bound ;— " And now in front behold outspread Those upper regions we must tread, Mild hollows and clear heathy swells, The cheerful silence of the fells ! Some two hours' march with serious air Through the deep noon-tide heats we fare ;

The red grouse springing at our sound Skims now and then the shining ground; No life save his and oars intrudes Upon these breathless solitudes."

For breadth, freshness, and colour there is no scenery to surpass the Yorkshire moors in August and September.

Nor is this the only great beauty of the wilder parts of York- shire. In contrast with it, is the exquisite verdure of the great grazing country, watered by so many rapid streams, which mostly lies beneath the moorland. The purple heather frames a land- scape of which the interior is generally the richest emerald, divided by a rushing "beck," as the Yorkshiremen call even streams of so much importance to them as the Tees, the Ure, the Swale, the Aire, and the Wharfe ; a "beck" full of rapids and shallows, crossed every mile or so by rustic stepping-stones, which, in a rainy autumn like this, are not often dry, and spanned every two or three miles by old stone bridges, with deep embrasures, solidly built, but yet not solidly enough to resist the fierce onset of the stream when it is flooded by a great winter downfall. To me, from my childhood, these stepping- stones have always had a wonderful fascination, and I confess to the childish disappointment which a rather rainy holiday has caused me in not offering many opportunities of passing and repassing them. Our letters ought always to have come to us by the hand of a girl sent across these stepping- stones from the nearest point of the postman's orbit, but when, as the people here say, "'t beck's oop," they have, of course, failed to come by that not very official channel, and we have have had to send for them by the nearest bridge, or have had them conveyed to us by chance-comers, who, perhaps, have kept them a day or two in their pockets before remembering to deliver them. Such primitive arrangements give in themselves a greater sense of distance from the world than any which Switzer- land can afford, and add not a little, I think, to the zest of a Yorkshire holiday. But beautiful as the streams are, and quaint as are the modes of communication which, in these barely-popu- lated districts, are kept up across them, nothing is so delightful to one about them as their music. I can almost enjoy lying awake at night, that I may listen to the nearest rapid,—a friend asserted that he could distinguish clearly the blend- ing music of two rapids about half a quarter of a mile from each other, — and I find it a pleasure fax greater than that caused by the fierce torrents of Switzerland, which are usually too loud, too like a waterfall in sound, to give the same sense of beauty and peace. The swift but gentle streams of Yorkshire go sliding along with a far richer and more modulated sound, till one can hardly help whispering to oneself Words- worth's fine lines about the Derwent, who, said the poet, blent 64 his murmurs with my nurse's song,"

"And from his alder shades and rocky pools, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams."

No Derwent could have had more beautiful alder-brakes, or rocky pools, or fords or shallows, than our favourite Wharfe, and no voice more beautiful ever flowed along even a poet's dreams, than his.

Such is the kind of scenery in which I am spending my holi- day, and which I will, with your permission, describe a little more in detail in two subsequent letters. We have voyaged through it, my wife and I and a chosen friend or two, in a very comfortable pony-carriage, hired in a Yorkshire water- ing-place, and drawn by an old horse of great sagacity and eminent caution, respecting the original hiring of which there were, on my wife's part at all events, "great searchings of heart."

I wish she had that full confidence in me as a whip which I think my experience and general conservatism deserve. But this is just the sort of confidence which, whether from my shortness of sight or natural incapacity, I cannot breathe into her. However, the confidence which I fail to inspire, I think the horse himself has suc- ceeded in inspiring,—in no small degree however, not by virtue of his natural caution, which is vast, but of a certain muscular defect which, fortunately for me, puts on the outward gait of ostentatious precautions against a slip down-hill. It seems that there is a sort of contraction of the muscle which makes going down hill a special difficulty to horses which are troubled there- with, and one not to be got over without a most exaggerated elevation of the hind-legs, giving the air of theatrical and even burlesque prudence. The Yorkshire hills are steep enough, and just the places to try the nerves of any one who broods morbidly, as my wife, I regret to say, does, over those stories of carriage accidents, of which the papers in the long vacation are full. l3ut any fear of the possibility of accident in going down hill with our present excellent steed is not merely out of the ques- tion, but, as it were, inconceivable. The only fear is that he will never get to the bottom ;—he is quick enough on the level, but in descending he seems to feel morally bound not only to lift up each foot two feet at least from the ground, but at every step to give anyone walking by his aide a distinct view of each shoe and ample opportunities of examining it, to see that no stone is in it, and that every nail is still tight. This morbid peculiarity so closely imitates the bearing of the highest prudential spirit, as to be a perpetual guarantee of safety to my wife, and therefore ease to myself, in the course of the brief but pleasant wanderings which, in my other letters, I will shortly