John Cowper Powys

From Autobiography

John Cowper Powys

1934

Gloucester too was a city I got especially familiar with, and to this day I think of it as fulfilling some deep craving in my nature, a craving that I would be hard put to it to define. Something about those particular ancient streets, those ancient bridges, those ancient cloisters, those old inn-yards, those romantic up-raised stone footpaths under Gothic masonry, used to give me again and again as I returned from my afternoon walks a certain vague obscure delicious feeling, quite impossible to put into words, but of extraordinary value in my secret life. How can I so much as approach a definition of it? It was clearly not concerned with any aesthetic loveliness; for when I call up now, after all these years, what pleased me most in those walks it is not of the precincts of the cathedral that I think. I think of a somewhat dilapidated entrance to this old city, a lingering twilight-darkened highway, leading up from certain vague, misty wide-stretching water-meadows. This highway, I remember, as it approached the region where in old days the city walls must have been, crossed an ancient stone bridge. Beyond this bridge, in that obscure evening light in which I always see it, the road trailed upward, itself lingering, so I almost feel now, as if it were loth to leave the river-mists and to face the traffic, till it led me into the heart of the town. And there was an intermediate region, between the bridge and the town, where this entrance into Gloucester seemed really, in some obscure way, enchanted. Between straw-smelling stables the road went, where, amid darkened shapes of great wagons, lanterns seemed to be moving of their own volition. Under rain-washed sign-boards and weather-stained roof eaves it led me on; and it seemed to be always passing cavernous warehouses and mediaeval-looking shops in the dark interiors of which there seemed to be flickering candles.

Was it that the thrills of mysterious delight that always ran quivering through me as I came up at nightfall from those chilly water-meadows were the resuscitation of far-away pre-natal memories, or even, further-drawn still, memories that descended to me from my ancestors? If this latter were the explanation it was natural enough that this most purely Celtic of all our English cities, this place of enchantments, co-aeval with Caerleon and Camelot, should have stirred up these sensations in me! But in my secret heart I think my emotions went yet further back and wider afield. What I think did actually arise in me at such times, and arises still when those visions recur, was a re-birth of the more vague, the more intangible, the less ponderable feelings of the human race itself; not merely of certain Welsh ancestors, not merely of my ancestors, but of all our ancestors; roused up in me just at this moment by some predetermined reciprocity between my personal nerves and this coming up into the warm Gloucester streets from the chilly river-mists!