Part 2

“The smooth Severn stream,”

with its

“Rush-yfringed bank Where grows the willow, and the osier dank,”

is the only river of any size in England, running north and south. It rises in Wales, at the foot of Plinlimnon, and winding through some of the finest plains on the island, waters the town of Shrewsbury, Worcester, Tewksbury, and Gloucester. How familiar are all these names to American ears; how the scroll of history unfolds before the mind’s eye as we read their titles! During the last century the importance of the Severn, in a commercial sense, was very great indeed; the movement on the broad estuary by which it flows into the ocean, being perhaps greater, at that period, than that of any other European river, with the single exception of the Thames. Many have been the naval expeditions of importance which have sailed from the Severn; the Cabots when bound on the daring voyage which first threw the light of civilization upon the coast of North America, embarked from the wharves of Bristol. Perchance the scanty sails, and heavy hull of their craft, as it made its way sea- ward, may have been watched by some wondering peasant, toiling in the same fields to which the Naturalist has introduced us.

The mountains of Wales, filling the back-ground of the picture sketched in the author’s opening pages, are very different from those with which American eyes are familiar. Bare and bleak, they are usually wholly shorn of wood, and far bolder in their craggy outline than our own heights. Snowdon, the most important mountain in Wales, rises to a height of 3700 feet. Standing in a northern county of the Principality it is not, however, to be included in a view from the banks of the southern Severn. But the hills of Glamorgan, and Brecon, especially noticed by Mr. Knapp, are upward of 2000 feet in height, and stamped more or less with the same general character. It often happens indeed, from the boldness of position, and the abruptness of outline, which usually mark the mountains of Europe, that heights of no great elevation produce very striking effects in a view.

The fertile alluvial pastures in the immediate foreground of the picture, are those in which Milton’s rivernymph Sabrina, may be supposed to have strayed:

“Still she retains Her maiden gentleness, and oft at eve Visits the herds along the twilight meadows, Helping all urchin blasts, and ill-luck signs That the shrewd meddling elf delights to make, Which she with precious vial’d liquors heals; For which the shepherds at their festivals Carol her goodness loud in rustic lays, And throw sweet garland wreaths into her stream Of pansies, pinks, and gaudy daffodils.”

The little village, the immediate scene of the Naturalist’s observations, appears to have had an uneventful existence. It lies, we are told, “on a very ancient road,” running between the cities of Gloucester and Bristol; doubtless the tide of war and adventure, must often have swept over the track on many occasions, when the interests of England were battled for in the western counties of the kingdom, but only scanty vestiges of its passage have been found in the little community. A few skeletons, accidentally dug up by the road-side, the bones of horses, the iron head of a single lance, are alone alluded to as memorials of some nameless conflict of the period of Cromwell, and his wars. No stern feudal towers, no ambitious monastic edifices appear to have been raised within the limits of the parish; and, in short, the position of the spot is one associated chiefly with simple rustic labors, and rural quiet, a field especially in harmony with the inquiries and pursuits of the lover of nature.

It is with the vegetation of this unambitious region, and with the living creatures by which it is peopled, that the Naturalist would make us acquainted. He tells us of the trees found in the groves and copses of that open country; of the grasses which grow in the meadows on the banks of the Severn; of the grains and plants cultivated in the hedged fields which line his ancient road. He has a great deal to say about the birds which fly to and fro, with the passing seasons; about the butterflies, and moths which come and go with the summer blossoms, and he is familiar with the lowliest of the creeping things found upon his path. Such simple lore is never without interest to those who delight in the face of the earth, to those who love to honor the Creator in the study of his works. It is pleasant to know familiarly the plants which spring up at our feet; we like to establish a sort of intimacy with the birds which, year after year, come singing about our homes; and, on the other hand, when told of the wonders of a foreign vegetation, differing essentially from our own, when hearing of the habits of strange creatures from other and distant climates, we listen eagerly as to a tale of novelty.

We Americans, indeed, are peculiarly placed in this respect. As a people, we are still, in some sense, half aliens to the country Providence has given us; there is much ignorance among us regarding the creatures which held the land as their own long before our forefathers trod the soil, and many of which are still moving about us, living accessories of our existence, at the present hour. On the other hand, again, English reading has made us very familiar with the names, at least, of those races which people the old world. From the nursery epic, relating the melancholy fate of “Cock Robin,” and the numerous feathered dramatis personæ figuring in its verses; from the tragical histories of “Little Red Riding Hood,” and the “Babes in the Woods;” from the winged and four-footed company of Gay and Lafontaine, from these associates of our childhood to the larks and nightingales of Shakspeare and Milton, we all, as we move from the nursery to the library, gather notions more or less definite. We fancy that we know all these creatures by sight; and yet neither “Cock Robin,” nor his murderer the Sparrow, nor his parson the Rook, is to be found this side the salt sea; the cunning Wolf whose hypocritical personation of the old grandame, so wrung our little hearts once upon a time, is not the wolf which howled only a few years since in the forests our fathers felled; the wily Fox of Lafontaine,

“Certain renard Gascon, D’autres disent Normand,”

is not the fox of Yankeeland—albeit we have our foxes too! Neither the Marten,

“The temple-loving martlet, does approve By his lov’d mansioning that the heavens breath Smells wooingly here. * * * where they Most breed, and haunt, I have observed the air Is delicate;”

nor the nightingale who

“Sings darkling, and in the shadiest covert hid, Tunes her nocturnal notes;”

nor the lark

“The herald of the morn,”

flies within three thousand miles of our own haunts. Thus it is that knowing so little of the creatures in whose midst we live, and mentally familiar by our daily reading with the tribes of another hemisphere, the forms of one continent and the names and characters of another, are strangely blended in most American minds. And in this dream-like phantasmagoria, where fancy and reality are often so widely at variance, in which the objects we see, and those we read of are wholly different, and where bird and beast undergo metamorphoses so strange, most of us are content to pass through life.

But there is a pleasant task awaiting us. We may all, if we choose, open our eyes to the beautiful and wonderful realities of the world we live in. Why should we any longer walk blindfold through the fields? Americans, we repeat, are peculiarly placed in this respect; the nature of both hemispheres lies open before them, that of the old world having all the charm of traditional association to attract their attention, that of their native soil being endued with the still deeper interest of home affections. The very comparison between the two is a subject full of the highest interest, a subject more than sufficing in itself to provide instruction and entertainment for a lifetime. And yet, how many of us are ignorant of the very striking, leading fact that the indigenous races of both hemispheres, whether vegetable or animal, while they are generally more or less nearly related to each other, are rarely indeed identical. The number of individual plants, or birds, or insects, which are precisely similar in both hemispheres, is surprisingly small.

It will probably be unnecessary to observe that the writer of these remarks must be understood as laying no claim to the honorable position of a teacher, on either of the many branches connected with Natural History; a mere learner herself, she can offer the reader no other guidance than that of companionship, in looking after the birds, or plants, or insects, mentioned by Mr. Knapp. It has indeed been a subject of regret with her, that the task of editing the “Journal of a Naturalist” should not have fallen into hands better able to render the author full justice in this respect. But it is the object of the present edition to prepare this English volume for the American public generally, and for that purpose simple explanations were alone necessary. Anxious, at least, to do all in her power, the editor has consulted the best printed authorities within her reach, and she has also availed herself of the valuable and most obliging assistance of Professor S. F. Baird, Major Le Conte, and Mr. M. A. Curtis, while preparing several of the notes, which will be found in the appendix.

S. F. C.

AUGUST, 1852.

JOURNAL OF A NATURALIST.

The village in which I reside is situated upon a very ancient road, connecting the city of Bristol with that of Gloucester, and thus with all the great towns in the North of England. This road runs for the chief part upon a high limestone ridge, from which we obtain a very beautiful and extensive prospect: the broad estuary of the river Severn, the mountains of Glamorgan, Monmouth, and Brecon, with their peaceful vales, and cheerful-looking white cottages, form the distant view: beneath it lies a vast extent of arable and pasture land, gained originally by the power of man from this great river, and preserved now from her incursions by a considerable annual expenditure, testifying his industry and perseverance, and exhibiting his reward. The Aust ferry, supposed to be the “trajectus,” or place where the Romans were accustomed to pass the Severn, is visible, with several stations of that people and the ancient British, being a part of that great chain of forts originally maintained to restrain the plundering inroads of the restless inhabitants of the other bank of the river: Thornbury, with its fine cathedral-like church and castle, the opposite red cliffs of the Severn, and the stream itself, are fine and interesting features.

An encampment of some people, probably Romans, occupies a rather elevated part of the parish, consisting of perhaps three acres of ground, surrounded by a high agger, with no ditch, or a very imperfect one, and probably was never designed for protracted resistance: it appears to form one of the above-mentioned series of forts erected by Ostorius, commencing at Weston, in Somersetshire, and terminating at Bredon in the county of Worcester—ours was probably a specula, or watchhill, of the larger kind. We can yet trace, though at places but obscurely, the roads that connected this encampment with other posts in adjoining villages. A few years sweep away commonly all traces of roads of later periods, and the testimony of some old man is often required to substantiate that one had ever been in existence within the memory of a life; yet these uniting roads, which, as works, must have been originally insignificant, little more than by-ways, after disuse for above fourteen hundred years, and encountering all the erasements of time, inclosures, and the plow, are yet manifest, and an evidence of that wonderful people, thieves and ruffians though they were, who constructed them. There is probably no region on the face of the globe ever colonized, or long possessed, by this nation, which does not yet afford some testimony of their having had a footing on it; this people, who, so long before their power existed, it was predicted, should be of “a fierce countenance, dreadful, terrible, strong exceedingly, with great iron teeth that devoured and broke in pieces,”

——where’er thy legions camp’d, Stern sons of conquest, still is known, By many a grassy mound, by many a sculptured stone.

Almost every Roman road that I have observed appears to have been considerably elevated above the surrounding soil, and hence more likely to remain apparent for a length of time than any of those of modern construction, which are flat, or with a slight central convexity; the turf, that in time by disuse would be formed over them, would in one case present a grassy ridge, in the other be confounded with the adjoining land.

Coins of an ancient date, I think, have not been found here; nor do we possess any remains of warlike edifices, or religious endowments. Our laborers have at various times dug up by the road-sides several skeletons of human beings, and of horses; they were in general but slightly covered with earth; and though the bones were much decayed, yet the teeth were sound, and appeared most commonly to have belonged to young persons, and probably had been deposited in their present situations at no very distant period of time. With the bones of a horse so found there remained the iron head of a lance, about a foot long, corroded, but not greatly decayed. Unable better to account for these skeletons, we suppose that they constituted, when alive, part of the forces of General Fairfax, and that they fell in some partial encounters with the peasantry when defending their property about to be plundered by the foragers of his army in 1645, at the time he was besieging the castle of Bristol. The siege lasted sixteen or seventeen days; many parties during that time must have been sent out by him to plunder us cavaliers, and contention would take place.