Let the Londoner
have his six weeks every year among crag and heather, and return with
lungs expanded and muscles braced to his nine months' prison. The
countryman, who needs no such change of air and scene, will prefer
more homelike, though more homely, pleasures. Dearer than wild
cataracts or Alpine glens are the still hidden streams which Bewick
has immortalized in his vignettes, and Creswick in his pictures; the
long glassy shallow, paved with yellow gravel, where he wades up
between low walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut, and oak, and
alder, to the low bar over which the stream comes swirling and
dimpling, as the water-ouzel flits piping before him, and the murmur
of the ringdove comes soft and sleepy through the wood. There, as he
wades, he sees a hundred sights and hears a hundred tones, which are
hidden from the traveller on the dusty highway above. The traveller
fancies that he has seen the country. So he has; the outside of it,
at least: but the angler only sees the inside. The angler only is
brought close face to face with the flower, and bird, and insect life
of the rich river banks, the only part of the landscape where the
hand of man has never interfered, and the only part in general which
never feels the drought of summer, 'the trees planted by the
waterside whose leaf shall not wither.
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