y with their pride of peaceful
gladness,--half-hidden--yet full-confessed. The place remains (1870)
nearly unchanged in its larger features; but with deliberate mind I
say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly in its inner tragic
meaning,--not in Pisan Maremma--not by Campagna tomb,--not by the
sand-isles of the Torcellan shore,--as the slow stealing of aspects
of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness
of the English scene: nor is any blasphemy or impiety, any frantic
saying, or godless thought, more appalling to me, using the best
power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, than the
insolent defiling of those springs by the human herds that drink of
them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure,
like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself
a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery
weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of
clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there
with the white grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of
the first spreading currents, the human wretches of the place cast
their street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken
shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes; which, having
neither energy to cart away, nor decency enough to dig into the
ground, they thus shed into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it
will float and melt, far away, in all places where God meant those
waters to bring joy and health. And, in a little pool behind some
houses farther in the village, where another spring rises, the
shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel
which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie
scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and
scoria, and bricklayer's refuse, on one side, which the clean water
nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead
earth beyond: and there, circled and coiled under festering scum,
the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black
slime, the accumulation of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men with one
day's work could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about
their banks, and make every breath of summer air above them rich
with cool balm; and every glittering wave