Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 7

there was no timber, and but little irregularity
of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the
beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to
see by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking
homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker;[12]
and you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward by the
gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen
sea-wind. To one who has learned to know their song in warm pleasant
places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make
it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the side
of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to
Nature" by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had

the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of
the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed
only in the blue transparent air; but this was of another description--this
was the nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was
naked, and was ashamed and cold.[13]
It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed
into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when
they met with "Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" of
farther south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze,
that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and
serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you the
smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were of the
bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and respiration,
and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have their own
merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them brandish great
masses of shadow. And what a power they have over the colour of the
world! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and make
them shudder and whiten like a single willow! There is nothing more
vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods, with all its sights
and noises; and the effect gets between some painters and their sober
eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture is calm, the foliage
is coloured like foliage in a gale.[14] There was nothing, however, of
this sort to be noticed in a country where there were no trees and hardly
any shadows, save the passive shadows and clouds or those of rigid
houses and walls. But the wind was nevertheless an occasion of
pleasure; for nowhere could you taste more fully the pleasure of a
sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter. The reader knows what I
mean; he must remember how, when he has sat himself down behind a
dyke on a hill-side, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through
the crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with warmth,
and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that the
country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the faraway hills all
marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage[15]
of the "Prelude," has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us by
the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the great
thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way with as
good effect:

"Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length, Escaped as from an
enemy we turn, Abruptly into some sequestered nook, Still as a
shelter'd place when winds blow loud!"
I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must
have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He
had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great cathedral
somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the great
unfinished marvel by the Rhine;[16] and after a long while in dark
stairways, he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform high above
the town. At that elevation it was quite still and warm; the gale was
only in the lower strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet
interior of the church and during his long ascent; and so you may judge
of his surprise when, resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and
looking over into the Place far below him, he saw the good people
holding on their hats and leaning hard against the wind as they walked.
There is something, to my fancy, quite perfect in this little experience
of my fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem always very trivial