Edward Sterling never shone in farming;indeed I believe he never took heartily to it,or tried it except in fits.His Bute farm was,at best,a kind of apology for some far different ideal of a country establishment which could not be realized;practically a temporary landing-place from which he could make sallies and excursions in search of some more generous field of enterprise.Stormy brief efforts at energetic husbandry,at agricultural improvement and rapid field-labor,alternated with sudden flights to Dublin,to London,whithersoever any flush of bright outlook which he could denominate practical,or any gleam of hope which his impatient ennui could represent as such,allured him.This latter was often enough the case.In wet hay-times and harvest-times,the dripping outdoor world,and lounging indoor one,in the absence of the master,offered far from a satisfactory appearance!Here was,in fact,a man much imprisoned;haunted,I doubt not,by demons enough;though ever brisk and brave withal,--iracund,but cheerfully vigorous,opulent in wise or unwise hope.A fiery energetic soul consciously and unconsciously storming for deliverance into better arenas;and this in a restless,rapid,impetuous,rather than in a strong,silent and deliberate way.
In rainy Bute and the dilapidated Kaimes Castle,it was evident,there lay no Goshen for such a man.The lease,originally but for some three years and a half,drawing now to a close,he resolved to quit Bute;had heard,I know not where,of an eligible cottage without farm attached,in the pleasant little village of Llanblethian close by Cowbridge in Glamorganshire;of this he took a lease,and thither with his family he moved in search of new fortunes.Glamorganshire was at least a better climate than Bute;no groups of idle or of busy reapers could here stand waiting on the guidance of a master,for there was no farm here;--and among its other and probably its chief though secret advantages,Llanblethian was much more convenient both for Dublin and London than Kaimes Castle had been.
The removal thither took place in the autumn of 1809.Chief part of the journey (perhaps from Greenock to Swansea or Bristol)was by sea:
John,just turned of three years,could in after-times remember nothing of this voyage;Anthony,some eighteen months older,has still a vivid recollection of the gray splashing tumult,and dim sorrow,uncertainty,regret and distress he underwent:to him a "dissolving-view"which not only left its effect on the _plate_(as all views and dissolving-views doubtless do on that kind of "plate"),but remained consciously present there.John,in the close of his twenty-first year,professes not to remember anything whatever of Bute;his whole existence,in that earliest scene of it,had faded away from him:Bute also,with its shaggy mountains,moaning woods,and summer and winter seas,had been wholly a dissolving-view for him,and had left no conscious impression,but only,like this voyage,an effect.
Llanblethian hangs pleasantly,with its white cottages,and orchard and other trees,on the western slope of a green hill looking far and wide over green meadows and little or bigger hills,in the pleasant plain of Glamorgan;a short mile to the south of Cowbridge,to which smart little town it is properly a kind of suburb.Plain of Glamorgan,some ten miles wide and thirty or forty long,which they call the Vale of Glamorgan;--though properly it is not quite a Vale,there being only one range of mountains to it,if even one:certainly the central Mountains of Wales do gradually rise,in a miscellaneous manner,on the north side of it;but on the south are no mountains,not even land,only the Bristol Channel,and far off,the Hills of Devonshire,for boundary,--the "English Hills,"as the natives call them,visible from every eminence in those parts.On such wide terms is it called Vale of Glamorgan.But called by whatever name,it is a most pleasant fruitful region:kind to the native,interesting to the visitor.A waving grassy region;cut with innumerable ragged lanes;dotted with sleepy unswept human hamlets,old ruinous castles with their ivy and their daws,gray sleepy churches with their ditto ditto:
for ivy everywhere abounds;and generally a rank fragrant vegetation clothes all things;hanging,in rude many-colored festoons and fringed odoriferous tapestries,on your right and on your left,in every lane.
A country kinder to the sluggard husbandman than any I have ever seen.
For it lies all on limestone,needs no draining;the soil,everywhere of handsome depth and finest quality,will grow good crops for you with the most imperfect tilling.At a safe distance of a day's riding lie the tartarean copper-forges of Swansea,the tartarean iron-forges of Merthyr;their sooty battle far away,and not,at such safe distance,a defilement to the face of the earth and sky,but rather an encouragement to the earth at least;encouraging the husbandman to plough better,if he only would.