Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science | Page 6

Barley Wood, where for the space of two hours Coleridge delighted the
five-leaved clover with his brilliant talk, but, unluckily, a titled visitor
coming in, the poor philosopher was left to finish his soliloquy alone.
Southey was born in Bristol, at No. 9 Wine street, now the sign of the
Golden Key. His father, a draper, carried on his business under the sign
of a hare: although all his life a shopkeeper, he had been brought up in
the country, and was passionately fond of country sports. He related of
his first experience of city life in London that, happening to look out at
the shop-door just as a porter was passing with a hare in his hands, it
brought the country so vividly before him that he burst into tears, and
the impression was so lasting that years after, when opening a shop in
Bristol, he took the hare for a sign, having it painted on a pane in the
window on each side of the door and printed on the shop-bills. Of
Robert Southey's recollections of Bristol there is his own very
charming account in the first volume of his Life by his son.
We return to Pope's letter to Mrs. Martha Blount for his description of
Clifton: "Passing still along by the river, you come to a rocky way on
one side, overlooking green hills on the other: on that rocky way rise
several white houses, and over them red rocks; and as you go farther
more rocks above rocks, mixed with green bushes, and of different
colored stone. This, at a mile's end, terminates in the house of the Hot

Well, whereabouts lie several pretty lodging-houses, open to the river
with walks of trees. When you have seen the hills seem to shut upon
you and to stop any farther way, you go into the house, and looking out
at the back door, a vast rock of an hundred feet high, of red, white,
green, blue and yellowish marbles, all blotched and variegated, strikes
you quite in the face; and, turning on the left, there opens the river at a
vast depth below, winding in and out, and accompanied on both sides
with a continued range of rocks up to the clouds, of an hundred colors,
one behind another, and so to the end of the prospect, quite to the sea.
But the sea nor the Severn you do not see: the rocks and river fill the
eye, and terminate the view much like the broken scenes behind one
another in a play-house.
"Upon the top of those high rocks by the Hot Well, which I have
described to you, there runs on one side a large down of fine turf for
about three miles. It looks too frightful to approach the brink and look
down upon the river; but in many parts of this down the valleys
descend gently, and you see all along the windings of the stream and
the opening of the rocks, which turns close in upon you from space to
space for several miles in toward the sea. There is first, near Bristol, a
little village upon this down called Clifton, where are very pretty
lodging-houses, overlooking all the woody hills, and steep cliffs and
very green valleys within half a mile of the Wells, where in the summer
it must be delicious walking and riding, for the plain extends, one way,
many miles: particularly, there is a tower that stands close at the edge
of the highest rock, and sees the stream turn quite round it; and all the
banks, one way, are wooded in a gentle slope for near a mile high, quite
green; the other bank all inaccessible rock, of an hundred colors and
odd shapes, some hundred feet perpendicular."
[Illustration: SUSPENSION BRIDGE AT CLIFTON.]
The reputation of the Hot Well, whose waters Pope was sent to drink,
has utterly collapsed. The Hot Well house was long ago removed to
admit a widening of the river, and the well itself is now inaccessible.
There is no spa, once of great reputation, that has sunk into such
complete oblivion as the Clifton Hot Well: this may be due, in part, to

the exaggerated estimate that was formed of the virtue of the water, and
to the blamable practice which prevailed of sending patients here at
their last gasp as a forlorn hope. Of too many it might be said as in
these lines from the epitaph on his wife by the poet Mason in Bristol
cathedral:
To Bristol's fount I bore with trembling care Her faded form: she
bowed to taste the wave, And died.
The little village of Clifton has now become a handsome suburb, where
reside the wealthy successors of the merchant-venturers of Bristol. It is
continuous with Bristol,