United States or Kyrgyzstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The home of the principal actors, as there depicted, is a compound of Glenthorne I have mentioned its situation already, on the seaward borders of Exmoor and of Denbury. Several of the characters are clergymen with whom I was once familiar. Mixed with these elements are certain scenes of fashionable life.
Denbury Manor at the end of the eighteenth century was converted and enlarged into a dower-house for my mother's grandmother, but was occupied when first I knew it by my great-aunt, her daughter, an old Miss Margaret Froude. To judge from a portrait done of her in her youth by Downman, she must have been then a very engaging ingénue; but when I remember her she looked a hundred and fifty.
In its general aspect it resembles my own early home, Denbury, but in some ways it is quite peculiar. In front of it is an Italian garden, below which are breaking waves, and behind it precipitous woods rise like a wall to an altitude of more than twelve hundred feet.
These four houses Denbury Manor, Dartington Parsonage, Dartington Hall, and Cockington Court all lying within a circle of some twelve miles in diameter, represent, together with their adjuncts, the material aspects of the life with which I was first familiar. Let me give a brief sketch of each, taking Denbury first.
Even at Denbury, in my most conservative days, I had so far escaped from the atmosphere of Pope's Pastorals that I had described a beautiful valley in which I would often sequester myself as a place Where no man's voice, or any voice makes stir, Save sometimes through the leafy loneliness The long loose laugh of the wild woodpecker.
When my father and his family migrated from the banks of the Exe to Denbury these literary projects found fresh means of expanding themselves. Opposite the front door of the Manor House was a large and antique annexe, once occupied by a bailiff who managed the home farm.
Here she would receive such visitors as happened to be staying in the house, and subsequently reverential villagers, who appealed to her for aid or sympathy. Dartington Parsonage was in one sense more modern than Denbury, having been for the most part constructed by the Archdeacon himself.
Yet another house it has been mentioned already as associated with my childhood also is Denbury Manor, with its stucco chimneys and pinnacles, its distance from Dartington being something like eight miles.
One of its frontages forms the side of a forecourt flanked by grandiose outbuildings estate offices, stables, and a great frescoed ballroom. Elsewhere round the house was a very untidy flower garden, which half the old women of the little town spent, so it seemed to me, most of their days in weeding herein reviving my recollections of Dartington Hall and Denbury.
He was subsequently given for life the use of another house, Denbury Manor, of which I shall speak presently, which I myself much preferred, and with which my own early recollections are much more closely associated. My mother was a daughter of the Ven.
Word Of The Day