The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament

—‘Now, if Time knows That Her, whose radiant brows Weave them a garland of my vows;

Her that dares be What these lines wish to see: I seek no further, it is She.’ —R. CRASHAW.

A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steep road which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the Street of Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singular peninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is connected with the mainland by a long thin neck of pebbles ‘cast up by rages of the se,’ and unparalleled in its kind in Europe.

The pedestrian was what he looked like—a young man from London and the cities of the Continent. Nobody could see at present that his urbanism sat upon him only as a garment. He was just recollecting with something of self-reproach that a whole three years and eight months had flown since he paid his last visit to his father at this lonely rock of his birthplace, the intervening time having been spent amid many contrasting societies, peoples, manners, and scenes.