Is it because the wild-wood passion of Pan still lingers in our hearts,
because still in our minds the voice of Syrinx floats in melancholy
music, the music of regret and longing, that for most of us there is
so potent a spell in running waters? We associate them with loneliness
and beauty. Beauty and solitude ... these are still the shepherd-kings
of the imagination, to compel our wandering memories, our thoughts,
our dreams. There is a story of one snatched from the closing hand
of death, who, when asked if he had been oppressed by dark confusion
and terror, answered that he had known no terror and no confusion but
only an all-embracing and intensifying silence, till at the last, deep
within it as in a profound chasm, he had caught the low, continuous
sound of running waters. That I can well believe. At the extremes of
life thought naturally returns to the things that first communicated
to the shaken mind of childhood the sense of mystery, the summons and
the elation of that which reveals in beauty and utters the vibration
of wonder. The first coming of snow, the noise of wind in trees, the
gathering murmur of the tide heard in the night’s darkness and silence,
music or songs borne across water, the first falling meteors with
their terrifying suggestion that all these familiar stellar fires may
likewise at any time be blown abroad by some obscure and awful wind,
the furtive whisperings and inexplicable confused speech of running
waters, of such are these primitive and unforgettable experiences.
The burn, the brook, the rivulet, what memories of them are possessed
by those whose childhood has not been wholly spent in towns, or at
those thronged seaside resorts where the bounteous green life of Nature
is even more absent than in many cities, at least in those which have
their wooded parks, in which there may be flowing or still waters,
where the cushat may be heard among the cedars or beeches, and where,
above the tall elms, the noisy coming and going of rooks seems to the
exile the very voice of the country-side. The linn of brown foaming
water, the amber surge of the hill-stream, the stealthy if swift rush
of the brown flood beloved of the salmon, or the curve and sweep of
the grass-green river flowing between meadows and under alders and past
rocky fastnesses and linking green valleys as a winding snake barred
with emerald, what memories these suggest to every lad or lass, to
every man or woman who has ever thrown a cast or trailed a line, or,
for that matter, who has lain on their leaning banks, book in hand, or
lost in dreams, or wandered the dewy ways at dusk. Does not the very
mention of torrent and cataract and waterfall evoke happy memories? One
can hear the tumultuous surge between heather-held banks, and see the
rock-rooted bracken shake with the ceaseless spray: can see the wild
leap and foaming collapse, so habitual, so orderly in disorder, that
the ring-ousel flies heedlessly from her fragile eggs which a handful
of this whirling water would crush and sweep away: can recall, as in
dreams the mind rebuilds the phantoms of natural imagery, the long,
white, wavering smoke down the sheer slope of some mountain-bastion,
or the filmy yet motionless veils of delicate gauze hung high on the
breasts of silent and remote hills.
What differences there are in these running waters. We hear much of
‘blue’ rivers, of the silver flood of azure, and so forth. But few
rivers or brooks or burns are blue. Their azure colour is a mirage
wrought by distance and the angle of vision, affected by the play of
wind, by the quality of light, by the blueness of the sky. Every German
poet has sung of the blue Danube, the blue Rhine. These rivers have
no quality of blueness, save by reflection from above, at a distance,
and at a certain angle of vision. Waters flowing from the Lake of
Geneva and from the Lake of Lucerne are blue even on grey days and if
looked at on the shadow-side of a bridge. We have many grey-blue and
blue-white and azure-shadowed running waters, but we have more that
are grass-green and far more that are dappled hazel and nut-brown and
golden-brown and amber-shot black-brown. It is not easy to say which
of these running waters one loves best: nor need one, nor should one
try. It would be like thinking of a garden-close filled with wallflower
and mignonette, carnations and sweet-peas, dark violets and yellow
pansies and blue love-in-a-mist, white tulips and lilies-of-the-valley
and white roses, damask rose and the flusht morning-glory and the
pink moss-rose and brier and eglantine, and saying which is best of
these, which loveliest, which the most dear to the mind as well as to
the eyes. But, still, we have doubtless each some happy choice, some
hidden predilection. That will depend on memories and associations. I
read somewhere recently that a certain traveller could not anywhere
find, could nowhere recall, any stream or river for him so poetical,
so lovely in quiet beauty as the Yorkshire Ouse. My knowledge of that
river is restricted to a brief intimacy at and near York, and my
recollection of it is of a broad turbid stream between muddy banks. But
that does not interfere with the giving full credit to that traveller’s
loyal affection. He would remember the Ouse among the sands of Egypt
or by the yellow flow of the Hooghly or perhaps by the surge of some
great river as the Mississippi, and it would flow through his mind in
a serene pastoral beauty, bluer than any river that ever flowed in our
grey North, and in a changeless light of May or June, with calling
cuckoo and thridding swallow unmindful of seasons that come and go,
and with green flag and tufted reed and trailing willow-branch as
unfading as the memories to which they are for evermore wed. It would
not be the Ouse that you or I look at from the muddy banks on a dull
November day, or catch a glimpse of as the North Express whirls by.
It would be the Ouse of boyhood and youth and the heart filled with
a sweet trouble, perplext by a strange ache. It would be the Ouse at
its loveliest, on a rare day, in an hour of the hours, flowing in
midsummer-air fragrant with meadow-hay and wild-roses. It would be an
Ouse more beautiful still: it would be subtly present in ‘the quiet
waters’ of the Psalmist, wherever the painter limned that delicate
unrest, wherever the poet sang of the Stream’s Secret. It would be, for
him, the archetype of the flowing stream: _the_ river.
And so, each will have his preference, if it be only one of temperament
rather than of sentiment. The deep, broad, swirling river has its
incalculable fascination. Its mysterious volume, so great a flood from
perhaps so insignificant a source, from mayhap some shallow pool among
stagnant marsh-lands with nothing of stir or motion but the hovering
dragon-fly, the wheeling and wailing lapwing, and the slow, voiceless
passage of wayfaring cloud: its devious way, like an interminable
procession or the continuous winding column of an army seen from a
great height: its arrivals and departures at quiet towns and noisy and
defiling cities: its destiny, its ultimate blending with the devouring
tide and the overrunning wave ... all this has become the commonplace
of the poet and the romancist. Thames filled with every craft possible
to be seen betwixt the Nore and Oxford; the Forth, winding in still
loops under the walls of Stirling and grey Cambuskenneth; the Clyde,
running past the hills of Dumbarton and Argyll, already salt with the
sea-flood pouring in by the ocean-gates of Arran and Ailsa; the deep
flood of Tay or Shannon; these, and others, will always have a host to
praise and magnify. But many of us will dream rather of chalk-streams
in Devon, of the rippling amber-yellow flood of Derwent in the Peakland
valleys, of Tweed and Teviot, of slow streams among woods and bright
rivers going like cold flame through wide straths and lowlands: of
small narrow waters whose very names are wedded to beauty and to
‘old, unhappy, far-off things,’ Otterbourne, the Water of Urr, the
Water of Quair, Allan Water. Above all will some of us think of those
peat-stained bracken-dyed burns, that leap and dance and sing down the
steep ways of rock and heather in the Scotland of our love.
For my own part I find myself in so great agreement with a friend, who
expresses better than I can do the love and haunting spell of the brown
hill-water (which is neither a river nor exactly a stream nor yet a
rivulet, but with something of each and more of what in the lowlands
is a brook and in the highlands a burn, yet than the one is swifter
and than the other is less debonair and impetuous) that I have been
constrained to ask leave to let it appear here as a natural close of
running waters at the end of this brief paper on a theme in whose very
title lie old music and dream and subtly incalculable spell.
“THE HILL-WATER
“There is a little brook,
I love it well:
It hath so sweet a sound
That even in dreams my ears could tell
Its music anywhere.
Often I wander there,
And leave my book
Unread upon the ground,
Eager to quell
In the hush’d air
That dwells above its flowing forehead fair
All that about my heart hath wound
A trouble of care:
Or, it may be, idly to spell
Its runic music rare,
And with its singing soul to share
Its ancient lore profound:
For sweet it is to be the echoing shell
That lists and inly keeps that murmurous miracle.
“About it all day long
In this June-tide
There is a myriad song.
From every side
There comes a breath, a hum, a voice:
The hill-wind fans it with a pleasant noise
As of sweet rustling things
That move on unseen wings,
And from the pinewood near
A floating whisper oftentimes I hear,
As when, o’er pastoral meadows wide,
Stealeth the drowsy music of a weir.
The green reeds bend above it;
The soft green grasses stoop and trail therein;
The minnows dart and spin;
The purple-gleaming swallows love it:
And, hush, its innermost depths within,
The vague prophetic murmur of the linn!
“But not in summertide alone
I love to look
Upon this rippling water in my glen:
Most sweet, most dear my brook,
And most my own,
When the grey mists shroud every ben,
And in its quiet place
The stream doth bare her face
And lets me pore deep down into her eyes,
Her eyes of shadowy grey
Wherein from day to day
My soul is spellbound with a new surmise,
Or doth some subtler meaning trace
Reflected from unseen invisible skies.
“Dear mountain-solitary, dear lonely brook,
Of hillside rains and dews the fragrant daughter,
Sweet, sweet thy music when I bend above thee,
When in thy fugitive face I look:
Yet not the less I love thee,
When, far away, and absent from thee long,
I yearn, my dark hill-water,
I yearn, I strain to hear thy song,
Brown, wandering water,
Dear, murmuring water!”