Ch. 2: Salisbury As I See It - Page 2

loathed hooting and dusting engines are thrust away into roads of their
own there is little pleasure in them for the man on foot. The rain
ceased, but the sky was still stormy, with a great blackness beyond the
cathedral and still other black clouds coming up from the west behind
me. Then the sun, near its setting, broke out, sending a flame of orange
colour through the dark masses around it, and at the same time flinging
a magnificent rainbow on that black cloud against which the immense
spire stood wet with rain and flushed with light, so that it looked like
a spire built of a stone impregnated with silver. Never had Nature so
glorified man's work! It was indeed a marvellous thing to see, an effect
so rare that in all the years I had known Salisbury, and the many times
I had taken that stroll in all weathers, it was my first experience of
such a thing. How lucky, then, was Constable to have seen it, when he
set himself to paint his famous picture! And how brave he was and even
wise to have attempted such a subject, one which, I am informed by
artists with the brush, only a madman would undertake, however great a
genius he might be. It was impossible, we know, even to a Constable, but
we admire his failure nevertheless, even as we admire Turner's many
failures; but when we go back to Nature we are only too glad to forget
all about the picture.

The view from the meadows will not, in the future, I fear, seem so
interesting to me; I shall miss the rainbow, and shall never see again
except in that treasured image the great spire as Constable saw and
tried to paint it. In like manner, though for a different reason, my
future visits to Old Sarum will no longer give me the same pleasure
experienced on former occasions.

Old Sarum stands over the Avon, a mile and a half from Salisbury; a
round chalk hill about 300 feet high, in its round shape and isolation
resembling a stupendous tumulus in which the giants of antiquity were
buried, its steeply sloping, green sides ringed about with vast,
concentric earth-works and ditches, the work of the "old people," as
they say on the Plain, when referring to the ancient Britons, but how
ancient, whether invading Celts or Aborigines--the true Britons, who
possessed the land from neolithic times--even the anthropologists, the
wise men of to-day, are unable to tell us. Later, it was a Roman
station, one of the most important, and in after ages a great Norman
castle and cathedral city, until early in the thirteenth century, when
the old church was pulled down and a new and better one to last for ever
was built in the green plain by many running waters. Church and people
gone, the castle fell into ruin, though some believe it existed down to
the fifteenth