THE BROOK
The brook rises in a clear, grey, trembling basin at the foot of
a chalk hill, among flowers of lotus and thyme and eyebright and
rest-harrow. Here the stone curlew drinks, and above is the gently
rounded encampment, ancient, and yet still young compared with the
dusky spring which has something gnomish and earthy about it, though it
takes the sun. It drops in thin, bright links over the chalk, and then
for a time loses its way in playing with cresses and marsh marigolds,
spreading out so finely that hardly will the ladybird drown that falls
therein--falling at length in a cascade from one dead leaf to another
down a hedge bank. Below, it nourishes the first forget-me-nots, by a
gateway where it slips across the lane, and is dew-fed by the vetches
and clovers that swaddle the posts of the gate. Now it is unheard and
unseen in the darkness underneath dog’s mercury leaves until it has
gained its first treble voice as, pausing by an interrupting branch,
it fills a hollow and pours over in icy fingers to the ditch beneath.
Here it has cuckoo flowers and creeping jenny and butterbur to feed;
thrushes drink of it; beetles dart across it like scullers that dream
now and then upon their sculls. It learns now to sway the cress, to
bow the brooklime, to brighten the sides of the minnows; the fledgling
of the robin that falls into it dies. It floats the catkin down, and
out of it rises the azure dragon fly. Sometimes it muffles its going
in moss, but in a little while it gushes through drains and falls and
falls with a now unceasing noise in a land where all the hollows are
full of apple trees, rough grey with dewy clover, and through all
the hollows winds the brook, dappled by blossom, leaned over by the
bee-cradling, sleepy, meadow cranesbill flower; in its green bed the
watervoles wear their submerged pathways. Now men have laid a slab of
elm or of rude stone across it, and from those they lean to drink at
haymaking or harvest; the children float on it pinnaces of bent reed,
or set it to turn waterwheels of ash bark, or dip their cans in it for
curving minnow or twisting tadpole or the little black circlers that
meet and divide and pursue for a few April days. Already it has ranged
along its margin rough, leaning willows garlanded by purple ivy; and
their leaves that dip to the surface it will never allow to rest. The
briers still overleap it in their long dreaming curves. The kingfisher
sits over it and the small trout nestle in its bed. It enters many an
ash copse and fills it with willow herb and meadowsweet and all juicy
plants, figwort and iris and orchis and hyacinth and reed, with osiers
and their mists of crimson and gold. Nymph-like the brook brightens and
curves its crystal flesh and waves its emerald hair under the bridges
at field corners, where the brambles dip their blossoms, and the
nightingale sings and the sedgewarbler has its nest. For it the lonely
willows in the flat fields shed their yellow leaves most pensively,
like maidens casting their bridal garlands off. Three flowering
apple trees in one islanded angle on a lawn of perfect grass, a most
dream-worthy place, fit for the footprints of the beautiful,
“White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,”
seem all its own; for there it first makes a deep sound in falling
over a ledge among its own curded, quivering and moonlit yellow foam.
Thereafter it opens wide between broad low banks from which the cattle
can step and stand among the reeds under serene tall ashes, and the
lily petals float upon it that catch against the branches and against
the hearts of men in distant towns. There, too, among the lilies the
brook first takes the stars into its heart, but gaily with all its
flowers and thick herbage and its rippling fall never still amidst the
arrow-headed reed. It moves like the high autumn wain, followed by many
children, who have time to leave it and gather flowers and are yet
never left behind. The heron comes to it at dawn, knowing from afar the
dark pool where it curves under a steep bank and grim oak roots, and
slopes down to it solemn and eager and alone in the winter morning. The
sand-martin and wagtail often pause in their flight and hover above
the placid water and the cool, reflected reeds and watermint. Where it
is all of one depth, between straight banks of cowslip, the boys sit
and let their feet waver in the flood and then roll or plunge in, with
shouts and gurgling talk, while in the reeds, the dabchick waits with
head just above water, trembling for her eggs or cheeping young. On
Sunday the country lover, cruel all the week, brings his maid to the
brook and, suddenly tender and a little proud, shows her the moist,
weed-covered nest and delights in her melting eyes. Fed now by other
brooks, from its own hills and from little woodland springs, the brook
consents to spread into a pool in an old garden, and in the sweet
imprisonment of lily and rose and iris and oleander lies as if asleep,
an indolent Leda contented with the white swan, and yet escaping
all the time, its wild soul rejoicing yonder beneath the heavily
overhanging honeysuckled thorns of the wide meadows again. Under the
white highway the brook runs and lures men to lean from the parapet
by the milestone and look at the water and take up some coolness and
some bitterness from it when they return to the blinding miles. Its
course is marked by alders and willows, shaping cornfield and pasture
in divine meanders that seem to have learnt rather to be contented
with travelling than to be eager for the goal. Could a man but wander
in that way once more, like the child in the field of flowers so
multitudinous that she did not know what to do, but closed her eyes and
was happy yet! Now the otter plays there, and where the ash roots twist
into many a cave. Through leagues of country the brook runs, passing
high, silent woods and misty, hot, luxuriant, flowering thickets and
wet, cloudy copses full at evening of confused birds’ singing, which no
one sees except the brook and the milk-white heifer who crowns herself
in white roses in the shade as she stands in tall, moist, sumptuous
angelica and watches her crowned image looking out of that fair sky in
purest waters; then, suddenly emerging from this lowly country it falls
into a river and is lost or seems to be lost in the turbid, serious
flow that is soon to know the sea.