nd whirl of
the water. He forgot everything else in the mere animal enjoyment
of sight and sound. Like many young men at his crisis of life, he
had given himself up to the mere contemplation of Nature till he had
become her slave; and now a luscious scene, a singing bird, were
enough to allure his mind away from the most earnest and awful
thoughts. He tried to think, but the river would not let him. It
thundered and spouted out behind him from the hatches, and leapt
madly past him, and caught his eyes in spite of him, and swept them
away down its dancing waves, and let them go again only to sweep
them down again and again, till his brain felt a delicious dizziness
from the everlasting rush and the everlasting roar. And then below,
how it spread, and writhed, and whirled into transparent fans,
hissing and twining snakes, polished glass-wreaths, huge crystal
bells, which boiled up from the bottom, and dived again beneath long
threads of creamy foam, and swung round posts and roots, and rushed
blackening under dark weed-fringed boughs, and gnawed at the marly
banks, and shook the ever-restless bulrushes, till it was swept away
and down over the white pebbles and olive weeds, in one broad
rippling sheet of molten silver, towards the distant sea. Downwards
it fleeted ever, and bore his thoughts floating on its oily stream;
and the great trout, with their yellow sides and peacock backs,
lounged among the eddies, and the silver grayling dimpled and
wandered upon the shallows, and the may-flies flickered and rustled
round him like water fairies, with their green gauzy wings; the coot
clanked musically among the reeds; the frogs hummed their ceaseless
vesper-monotone; the kingfisher darted from his hole in the bank
like a blue spark of electric light; the swallows' bills snapped as
they twined and hawked above the pool; the swift's wings whirred
like musket-balls, as they rushed screaming past his head; and ever
the river fleeted by, bearing his eyes away down the current, till
its wild eddies began to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun.
The complex harmony of sights and sounds slid softly over his soul,
and he sank away into a still daydream, too passive for imagination,
too deep for meditation, and

'Beauty born of murmuring sound,
Did pass into his face.'

Blame him not. There are more things in a man's heart than ever get
in through his thoughts.

On a sudden, a soft