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Escape, and Other Essays By: Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925) |
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AND OTHER ESSAYS By ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON I love people that leave some traces of their journey behind them,
and I have strength enough to advise you to do so while you can.
Thomas Gray. NEW YORK 1915
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction
1. Escape
2. Literature and Life
3. The New Poets
4. Walt Whitman
5. Charm
6. Sunset
7. The House of Pengersick
8. Villages
9. Dreams
10. The Visitant
11. That Other One
12. Schooldays
13. Authorship
14. Herb Moly and Heartsease
15. Behold, This Dreamer Cometh
NOTE I desire to recourd my obligations to the Editor of the Century
Magazine, and to the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine, for their
permission to include in this volume certain essays which appeared
first in their pages. A. C. B.
INTRODUCTION 1 I walked to day down by the river side. The Cam is a stream much
slighted by the lover of wild and romantic scenery; and its chief
merit, in the eyes of our boys, is that it approaches more nearly
to a canal in its straightness and the deliberation of its slow
lapse than many more famous floods and is therefore more adapted
for the maneuvres of eight oared boats! But it is a beautiful
place, I am sure; and my ghost will certainly walk there, "if our
loves remain," as Browning says, both for the sake of old memories
and for the love of its own sweet peaceableness. I passed out of
the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing
chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once
the scene opens, wide pasture lands on either side, and rows of old
willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There
on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen
Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and
vicarage and irregular street, and the little red gabled Hall
looking over its barns and stacks. More and more willows, and then,
lying back, an old grange, called Poplar Hall, among high standing
trees; and then a little weir, where the falling water makes a
pleasant sound, and a black timbered lock, with another old house
near by, a secluded retreat for the bishops of Ely in medieval
times. The bishop came thither by boat, no doubt, and abode there
for a few quiet weeks, when the sun lay hot over the plain; and a
little farther down is a tiny village called Horningsea, with a
battlemented church among orchards and thatched houses, with its
own disused wharf a place which gives me the sense of a bygone age
as much as any hamlet I know. Then presently the interminable fen
stretches for miles and miles in every direction; you can see, from
the high green flood banks of the river, the endless lines of
watercourses and far off clumps of trees leagues away, and perhaps
the great tower of Ely, blue on the horizon, with the vast spacious
sky over arching all. If that is not a beautiful place in its
width, its greenness, its unbroken silence, I do not know what
beauty is! Nothing that historians call an event has ever happened
there. It is a place that has just drifted out of the old lagoon
life of the past, the life of reed beds and low lying islands, of
marsh fowl and fishes, into a hardly less peaceful life of
cornfield and pasture. No one goes there except on country
business, no armies ever marshalled or fought there. The sun goes
down in flame on the far horizon; the wild duck fly over and settle
in the pools, the flowers rise to life year by year on the edges of
slow watercourses; the calm mystery of it can be seen and
remembered; but it can hardly be told in words.
2
Now side by side with that I will set another picture of a
different kind. A week or two ago I was travelling up North. The stations we passed
through were many of them full of troops, the trains were crammed
with soldiers, and very healthy and happy they looked. I was struck
by their friendliness and kindness; they were civil and modest;
they did not behave as if they were in possession of the line, as
actually I suppose they were, but as if they were ordinary
travellers, and anxious not to incommode other people... Continue reading book >>
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