A Shepherds Life | Page 7

seen it many times, far and near, from all points of
view, and am never in or near the place but I go to some spot where I
look at and enjoy the sight; but I will speak here of the two best points
of view.
The nearest, which is the artist's favourite point, is from the meadows;
there, from the waterside, you have the cathedral not too far away nor
too near for a picture, whether on canvas or in the mind, standing
amidst its great old trees, with nothing but the moist green meadows
and the river between. One evening, during the late summer of this
wettest season, when the rain was beginning to cease, I went out this
way for my stroll, the pleasantest if not the only "walk" there is in
Salisbury. It is true, there are two others: one to Wilton by its long,
shady avenue; the other to Old Sarum; but these are now motor-roads,
and until the loathed hooting and dusting engines are thrust away into
roads of their own there is little pleasure in them for the man on foot.
The rain ceased, but the sky was still stormy, with a great blackness
beyond the cathedral and still other black clouds coming up from the
west behind me. Then the sun, near its setting, broke out, sending a
flame of orange colour through the dark masses around it, and at the
same time flinging a magnificent rainbow on that black cloud against
which the immense spire stood wet with rain and flushed with light, so
that it looked like a spire built of a stone impregnated with silver.
Never had Nature so glorified man's work! It was indeed a marvellous
thing to see, an effect so rare that in all the years I had known Salisbury,
and the many times I had taken that stroll in all weathers, it was my
first experience of such a thing. How lucky, then, was Constable to
have seen it, when he set himself to paint his famous picture! And how
brave he was and even wise to have attempted such a subject, one
which, I am informed by artists with the brush, only a madman would
undertake, however great a genius he might be. It was impossible, we
know, even to a Constable, but we admire his failure nevertheless, even
as we admire Turner's many failures; but when we go back to Nature
we are only too glad to forget all about the picture.
The view from the meadows will not, in the future, I fear, seem so
interesting to me; I shall miss the rainbow, and shall never see again

except in that treasured image the great spire as Constable saw and
tried to paint it. In like manner, though for a different reason, my future
visits to Old Sarum will no longer give me the same pleasure
experienced on former occasions.
Old Sarum stands over the Avon, a mile and a half from Salisbury; a
round chalk hill about 300 feet high, in its round shape and isolation
resembling a stupendous tumulus in which the giants of antiquity were
buried, its steeply sloping, green sides ringed about with vast,
concentric earth-works and ditches, the work of the "old people," as
they say on the Plain, when referring to the ancient Britons, but how
ancient, whether invading Celts or Aborigines--the true Britons, who
possessed the land from neolithic times--even the anthropologists, the
wise men of to-day, are unable to tell us. Later, it was a Roman station,
one of the most important, and in after ages a great Norman castle and
cathedral city, until early in the thirteenth century, when the old church
was pulled down and a new and better one to last for ever was built in
the green plain by many running waters. Church and people gone, the
castle fell into ruin, though some believe it existed down to the
fifteenth century; but from that time onwards the site has been a place
of historical memories and a wilderness. Nature had made it a sweet
and beautiful spot; the earth over the old buried ruins was covered with
an elastic turf, jewelled with the bright little flowers of the chalk, the
ramparts and ditches being all overgrown with a dense thicket of thorn,
holly, elder, bramble, and ash, tangled up with ivy, briony, and
traveller's-joy. Once only during the last five or six centuries some
slight excavations were made when, in 1834, as the result of an
excessively dry summer, the lines of the cathedral foundations were
discernible on the surface. But it will no longer be the place it was, the
Society of Antiquaries having received permission from the Dean and
Chapter of
Salisbury to work their sweet will on the