So when Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth came to Lynton, and found it beautiful, and nearly decided to live there and be the poets of Devon instead of the poets of the Lake District, it was because they found in it that quality of beauty which they needed; and when, a little later, Lynton was "discovered" by one or more people of wealth--notably by Mr. Coutts, the banker, who built houses there and hotels, and began to noise its beauty up and down the London world--it was just the outermost ripple of the vast disturbance of the French Revolution which touched the little spot, part of the free new eager spirit which sent men questing for a loveliness they could neither make nor control, and of which they must be humble and passive spectators, and part also of vast causes and changes, which drove Englishmen to seek their holidays within their own shores.
Before closing this second chapter on Lynton, I cannot forbear to speak yet further of the beautiful scenery in which it lies. There is Summerhouse Hill, or Lyn Cleave, as it is more charmingly and appropriately called, the great rocky height, a thousand feet above Lynmouth, which looks down on the two villages and which divides the valleys of the East and West Lyn. Lying on the short dry springy turf, in the mellow sunlight of late afternoon, you can look along the velvety wooded valley of the East Lyn, where the stream is hidden by the tufted banks of the trees, and by shifting ever so slightly on your elbows as you lie at ease you can look into the bare brown rocky valley of the West Lyn, and see the gleam of the river foaming over its rocks a thousand feet below. All round is the cawing of rooks, as they sail majestically back to their nests, grave and cheerful with their abundance of food and their security of tenure. England belongs to the rooks, says a friend of mine. We English may live here, we may build houses and farms, we may plough and sow and reap, we may make revolutions or wars, sending our armies marching through the countryside in creeping dusty columns, but we are only illusions on the page of history, shadows flitting across the face of the land; the rooks are perpetual, ineradicable, and possessive. They feed behind our plough; they flock in our green trees; they build in our valleys and in the shelter of our houses; summer and winter they are seen flying under our English skies; they mate and nest and bicker round our cathedrals and our cottages; they are noisy and turbulent and unrestrained before us, as if we were no more than the hedges we plant and prune; they are irrepressible as street-arabs, and arrogant as monarchs. If all human life were by some unimagined catastrophe swept from the length and breadth of England, the cawing of the rooks would sound as certainly, and they would fly forth to their morning meal and back across the evening sky to their tall green elm-trees as if they had never sailed over the heads of men who looked up and saw in them the symbol of peace, security, and comfort, which they loved to call England.