heart: when you bait your hook with your heart the fish always bite;
they will jump clear from the water after it; they will dispute with
each other over it; it is a morsel they love above everything else.
With such bait I have seen the born angler (my grandfather was one)
take a noble string of trout from the most unpromising waters, and
on the most unpromising day. He used his hook so coyly and tenderly,
he approached the fish with such address and insinuation, he divined
the exact spot where they lay: if they were not eager, he humored
them and seemed to steal by them; if they were playful and
coquettish, he would suit his mood to theirs; if they were frank and
sincere, he met them halfway; he was so patient and considerate, so
entirely devoted to pleasing the critical trout, and so successful
in his efforts,--surely his heart was upon his hook, and it was a
tender, unctuous heart, too, as that of every angler is. How nicely
he would measure the distance! how dexterously he would avoid an
overhanging limb or bush and drop the line exactly in the right
spot! Of course there was a pulse of feeling and sympathy to the
extremity of that line. If your heart is a stone, however, or an
empty husk, there is no use to put it upon your hook; it will not
tempt the fish; the bait must be quick and fresh. Indeed, a certain
quality of youth is indispensable to the successful angler, a
certain unworldliness and readiness to invest yourself in an
enterprise that doesn't pay in the current coin. Not only is the
angler, like the poet, born and not made, as Walton says, but there
is a deal of the poet in him, and he is to be judged no more
harshly; he is the victim of his genius: those wild streams, how
they haunt him! he will play truant to dull care, and flee to them;
their waters impart somewhat of their own perpetual youth to him. My
grandfather when he was eighty years old would take down his pole as
eagerly as any boy, and step off with wonderful elasticity toward
the beloved streams; it used to try my young legs a good deal to
follow him, specially on the return trip. And no poet was ever more
innocent of worldly success or ambition. For, to paraphrase
Tennyson,--
"Lusty trout to him were scrip and share,
And babbling waters more than cent for cent."
He laid up treasures, but they were not in this world. In fact,
though the kindest of husbands, I fear he was not what the country
people call a "go
|