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II. CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. {29}
Fishing is generally associated in men's minds with wild mountain
scenery; if not with the alps and cataracts of Norway, still with the
moors and lochs of Scotland, or at least with the rocky rivers, the
wooded crags, the crumbling abbeys of Yorkshire, Derbyshire,
Hereford, or the Lowlands. And it cannot be denied that much of the
charm which angling exercises over cultivated minds, is due to the
beauty and novelty of the landscapes which surround him; to the sense
of freedom, the exhilarating upland air. Who would prefer the
certainty of taking trout out of some sluggish preserve, to the
chance of a brace out of Edno or Llyn Dulyn? The pleasure lies not
in the prize itself, but in the pains which it has cost; in the
upward climbs through the dark plantations, beside the rock-walled
stream; the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay flower-bed of
blue and purple butter-wort; the steady breathless climb up the
crags, which looked but one mile from you when you started, so clear
against the sky stood out every knoll and slab; the first stars of
the white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropt, as if a fairy had
pricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon some green cushion of
wet moss, in a dripping crack of the cliff; the first grey tufts of
the Alpine club-moss, the first shrub of crowberry, or sea-green
rose-root, with its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the
two-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning of the Alpine world; the
scramble over the arid waves of the porphyry sea aloft, as you beat
round and round like a weary pointer dog in search of the hidden
lake; the last despairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramid
on Moel Meirch; the hasty gaze around, far away into the green vale
of Ffestiniog, and over wooded flats, and long silver river-reaches,
and yellow sands, and blue sea flecked with flying clouds, and isles
and capes, and wildernesses of mountain peaks, east, west, south, and
north; one glance at the purple gulf out of which Snowdon rises,
thence only seen in full majesty from base to peak: and then the
joyful run, springing over bank and boulder, to the sad tarn beneath
your feet: the loosening of the limbs, as you toss yourself, bathed
in perspiration, on the turf; the almost awed pause as you recollect
that you are alone on the mountain-tops, by the side of the desolate
pool, out of all hope of speech or help of man; and, if you break
your leg among those rocks, may lie there till the ravens pick your
bones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish are
moving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what
they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and
yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster
from Amboyna or Brazil--may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious
of trout to cease for once their life-long business of picking
leeches from among those Syenite cubes which will twist your ankles
and break your shins for the next three hours.
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