A country always impressive by the severe
beauty of its outlines; sometimes speaking to the heart in radiant
stillness, its moments of repose mirthful sometimes, inspiring
joyous life, with the gleams of its vast sky, the sweet, keen breath
of its heaths and pastures; but for the most part shadowed,
melancholy, an austere nurse of the striving spirit of man, with
menace in its mountain-rack, in the rushing voice of its winds and
torrents.
Here, in a small, plain cottage, stone-walled, stone-roofed, looking
over the wide and deep hollow of a stream--a beck in the local
language--which at this point makes a sounding cataract on its
course from the great moor above, lived Jerome Otway. It had been
his home for some ten years. He lived as a man of small but
sufficient means, amid very plain household furniture, and with no
sort of social pretence. With him dwelt his wife, and one
maidservant.
On an evening of midsummer, still and sunny, the old man sat among
his books; open before him the great poem of Dante. His much-lined
face, austere in habitual expression, yet with infinite
possibilities of radiance in the dark eyes, of tenderness on the
mobile lips, was crowned with hair which had turned iron-grey but
remained wonderfully thick and strong; the moustache and beard, only
a slight growth, were perfectly white. He had once been of more than
average stature; now his bent shoulders and meagre limbs gave him an
appearance of shortness, whilst he suffered on the score of dignity
by an excessive disregard of his clothing.
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