Stray leaves from a physician's portfolio / by James Crichton-Browne.

  • James Crichton-Browne
Date:
[1927]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Stray leaves from a physician's portfolio / by James Crichton-Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    45/372 page 29
    Clough once told me that on one occasion on which the poet was visiting him in North Wales he took him for a walk and conducted him to a grassy slope terminating in a wall which formed the parapet of a huge cliff, with a sheer descent of two or three hundred feet. The wall, a rough stone one, looked simply the boundary of a field, and no one approaching it on the landward side could have any conception of what lay beyond it. The poet being brought up to the wall looked over it, and on doing so had suddenly disclosed to him the declivity, the wrinkled ocean beneath, and the circling flakes of white sea birds between, and with a very startling effect. He fell back on the grass, pale and shivering, and exclaimed : “ Oh, my God ! what a fearful sight! ” and then turned and said to his friend: “ My life seems shrivelled up before me. For Heaven’s sake give me some brandy! ” But there was no brandy to be had, for the nearest house was four miles off: so nothing could be done for him in his distress but to sprinkle his face with water. He lay on the grass for half an hour ghastly and sick like a man at the point of death, and it was then only with the utmost difficulty that he was helped to a farm where stimulants were procured for him. Never afterwards would he permit any conversa¬ tion about that vision of the sea; he shuddered when any reference was made to it. The late Sir Charles Dilke wrote to me: “ When over-fatigued, as by hard examination work, I felt unwillingness to pass in front of the looking-glass late at night from a fear—nothing definite—of what might
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3