CHAPTER VI.

Stourbridge. Effect of Plutonic Convulsion on the surrounding Scenery. -Hagley; Description in the "Seasons.". Geology the true Anatomy of Landscape. - Geologic Sketch of Hagley. - The Road to the Races. -The old Stone-cutter. - Thomson's Hollow. His visits to Hagley. - Shenstone's Urn. — Peculiarities of Taste founded often on a Substratum of Personal Character. Illustration. · Rousseau. Pope's Haunt. - Lyttelton's high Admiration of the Genius of Pope. - Description. Singularly extensive and beautiful Landscape; drawn by Thomson. Reflection. — Amazing Multiplicity of the Prospect illustrative of a Peculiarity in the Descriptions of the "Seasons."- Addison's Canon on Landscape; corroborated by Shenstone.

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I LEFT Dudley by the morning coach for Stourbridge, and arrived, all unwittingly, during the bustle of its season of periodic license, the yearly races. Stourbridge is merely a smaller Wolverhampton,- built on the same lower deposit of the New Red Sandstone, of the same sort of red brick, and roofed and floored with the same sort of red tiles. The surrounding country is, however, more pleasingly varied by hill and valley. Plutonic convulsion from beneath has given to the flat incoherent formation a diversity of surface not its own; and we see it tempested into waves, over the unseen trappean masses, like ocean over the back of some huge sea-monster. In passing on to the south and west, one finds bolder and still bolder inequalities of surface; the hills rise higher, and are more richly wooded, until at length, little more than three miles from Stourbridge, in a locality where the disturbing rock has broken through, and forms a chain of picturesque trap eminences, there may be seen some of at once the finest and

most celebrated scenery in England. Certainly for no scenery either at home or abroad, has the Muse done more. Who, acquainted with the poetry of the last century, has not heard of Hagley, the "British Tempe," so pleasingly sung by Thomson in his "Seasons," and so intimately associated, in the verse of Pope, Shenstone, and Hammond, with the Lord Lyttelton of English literature? It was to walk over Hagley that I had now turned aside half-a-day's journey out of my purposed route. Rather more from accident than choice, there were no poets with whom I had formed so early an acquaintance as with the English poets who flourished in the times of Queen Anne and the first two Georges. I had come to be scarce less familiar with Hagley and the Leasowes, in consequence, than Reuben Butler, when engaged in mismanaging his grandmother's farm, with the agriculture of the "Georgics;" and here was my first opportunity, after the years of half a lifetime had come and gone, of comparing the realities as they now exist, with the early conceptions I had formed of them. My ideas of Hagley had been derived chiefly from Thomson, with whose descriptions, though now considerably less before the reading public than they have been, most of my readers must be in some degree acquainted.

"The love of Nature works,

And warms the bosom; till at last, sublimed

To rapture and enthusiastic heat,

We feel the present Deity, and taste

The joy of God to see a happy world!
These are the sacred feelings of thy heart,

O Lyttelton, the friend! Thy passions thus

And meditations vary, as at large,

Courting the Muse, through Hagley Park thou strayest,

The British Tempe! There along the dale,

With woods o'erhung, and shagged with mossy rocks,

Where on each hand the gushing waters play,

And down the rough cascade white dashing fall,
Or gleam in lengthened vista through the trees,
You silent steal, or sit beneath the shade

Of solemn oaks that tuft the swelling mounts,
Thrown graceful round by Nature's careless hand,
And pensive listen to the various voice

Of rural peace,

the herds, the flocks, the birds,

The hollow whispering breeze, the plaint of rills,
That, purling down amid the twisted roots

Which creep around, their dewy murmurs shake

On the soothed ear."

In all the various descriptions of Hagley and the Leasowes which I have yet seen, however elaborate and well-written, I have found such a want of leading outlines, that I could never form a distinct conception of either place as a whole. The writer - whether a Thomson or a Dodsley — introduced me to shaded walks and open lawns, swelling eminences and sequestered hollows, wooded recesses with their monumental urns, and green hill-tops with their crowning obelisks; but, though the details were picturesquely given, I have always missed distinct lines of circumvallation to separate and characterize from the surrounding country the definite locality in which they were included. A minute anatomical acquaintance with the bones and muscles is deemed essential to the painter who grapples with the difficulties of the human figure. Perhaps, when the geological vocabulary shall have become better incorporated than at present with the language of our common literature, a similar acquaintance with the stony science will be found scarce less necessary to the writer who describes natural scenery. Geology forms the true anatomy-the genuine osteology of landscape; and a correct representation of the geological skeleton of a locality will be yet regarded, I doubt not, as the true mode of imparting adequate ideas of its characteristic outlines. The osteology of Hagley, if I may sɔ speak,

is easily definable. On the southern shore of the Dudley coalbasin, and about two miles from its edge, there rises in the New Red Sandstone a range of trap hills about seven miles in length, known as the Clent Hills, which vary in height from six to eight hundred feet over the level of the sea. They lie parallel, in their general direction, to the Silurian range, already described as rising, like a chain of islands, amid the coal; but, though parallel, they are, like the sides of the parallel ruler of the geometrician when fully stretched, not opposite; the southernmost hill of the Silurian range lying scarce so far to the south as the northernmost hill of the trap range. The New Red Sandstone, out of which the latter arises, forms a rich, slightly undulating country, reticulated by many a green lane and luxuriant hedge-row; the hills themselves are deeply scoped by hollow dells, furrowed by shaggy ravines, and roughened by confluent eminences; and on the southwestern slopes of one of the finest and most variegated of the range, half on the comparatively level red sandstone, half on the steep-sided billowy trap, lie the grounds of Hagley. Let the Edinburgh reader imagine such a trap hill as that which rises on the north-east between Arthur's Seat and the sea, tripled or quadrupled in its extent of base, hollowed by dells and ravines of considerable depth, covered by a soil capable of sustaining the noblest trees, mottled over with votive urns, temples, and obelisks, and traversed by many a winding walk, skilfully designed to lay open every beauty of the place, and he will have no very inadequate idea of the British Tempe sung by Thomson. We find its loveliness compounded of two simple geologic elements, that abrupt and variegated picturesqueness for which the trap rocks are so famous, and which may be seen so strikingly illustrated in the neighborhood of Edinburgh; and that soft-lined and level beauty, an exquisite component

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SO

in landscape when it does not stand too much alone, characteristic, in many localities, of the Lower New Red Sandstone formation.

I was fortunate in a clear, pleasant day, in which a dappled sky over head threw an agreeable mottling of light and shadow on the green earth below. The road to Hagley was also that to the races, and so there were many passengers. There were carts and wagons rumbling forward, crowded with eager ruddy faces of the round Saxon type; and gigs and carriages in which the faces seemed somewhat less eager, and were certainly less ruddy and round. There were numerous parties, too, hurrying afoot mechanics from the nearer towns, with pale unsunned complexions, that reminded one of the colorless vegetation which springs up in vaults and cellars; stout, jovial ploughmen, redolent, in look and form, of the open sky and the fresh air; bevies of young girls in gypsy bonnets, full of an exuberant merriment, that flowed out in laughter as they went; and bands of brown Irish reapers, thrown out of their calculations by the backward harvest, with their idle hooks slung on their shoulders, and fluttering in rags in a country in which one saw no rags but their own. And then there came, in long procession, the boys of a free-school, headed by their masters; and then the girls of another free-school, with their mistresses by their side; but the boys and girls were bound, I was told, not for the races, but for a pleasant recess among the Clent Hills, famous for its great abundance of nuts and blackberries, in which they were permitted to spend once a-year, during the season of general license, a compensatory holiday. To the right of the road, for mile beyond mile, field succeeds field, each sheltered by its own rows of trees, stuck into broad wasteful hedges, and which, as they seem crowded together in the distance, gave to the remote landscape the character of a forest.