COQUET SIDE. 499 



The merry morn is waking to the throstle's roundelay, 



Upon the bosom of the stream the fresh'ning breezes play ; 



A night of showers has steep'd the flowers in the jolly angler's path, 



As cheerily he wends his way by greenwood hill and strath. 



Hurra ! the streams are up, and from their mountain-hold so green, 

 Come rapid down in foamy falls, with blackening pools between ; 

 The breeze sweeps through the alder's bough, and curls the wave beneath, 

 Where the sullen trout leaps fiercely out, and plunges on his death. 



The brown drake wing my foremost fly, the heckle deadly black, 

 The hare's ear gray to sweep the stream, the blue wing on his back; 

 Then oh ! for Coquet's waters dark in the merry month of May, 

 And the deadliest hand with any man 'tween Tynedale-Head and Tay ! 



Let others toil for power and fame, or crouch to rank and wealth, 



Give me the angler's gentle sport, the angler's ruddy health ; 



To meet the sun upon the lake with a bosom light and free, 



And sink to rest when the glowing west drops down the distant sea ! 



Disciples of dear old Izaak Walton ! ye who are only familiar with 

 catching " a brace" of trout in a day, and who lug them from their 

 mud holes like lumps of lead ye who hang heavily over the canal- 

 like banks of a muddy river, with nought but fat cows feeding in 

 fat pastures around you, and a lazy current, that seems Lethe, flow- 

 ing, or rather seeming to flow, past you ; how shall we ever convey 

 to you the dimmest idea of the continual, free, wild delights of a 

 rambler and an angler among our moorland border streams ? Here 

 is little save silent mountains, and silent clouds flitting across their 

 sides, and but for the bleating of the lambs, or the whistle of the 

 whaups, you might deem the world was dead. You and the trouts 

 seem the only living things left from out the beings created at the 

 beginning. You seem the last of your race, waging a war of exter- 

 mination against the only creatures yet undestroyed. The running 

 stream before you is Time, and you are Death, your rod is the scythe, 



and you are mowing down Ha! your reverie is cut short, you drew 



your tail-fly round that bend in the bank ; the sullen curl you knew 

 not to be the natural eddy of the water ; you struck, and the sudden 

 spring upwards into the air of the terrified trout, displaying his 

 brawny back and yellow belly, shows you have hooked the demon 

 of the deep, whom no three pounds, fair fisher's weight, will weigh 

 down between Teviot and Tyne. Whirr ! bizz ! turrh ! goes the 

 wheel with the sound of a winnowing machine, your rod bends and 

 quivers, the rings make sweet music as the line flies through them, 

 your hands and arms tremble ; and there you stand, your frame 

 quaking with delight, every hair and pore alive with excitement; and 

 for ten minutes you feel all the stormy joys and fears of an angler ; 

 till at length, every shift of your finny foe exhausted every old 

 haunt visited every twist, turn, tumble, plunge, and convulsion de- 

 feated, you have him on the bank, walloping the daisies; and now, 

 awaking from the ferocious dream, you take off your hat, wipe the 

 big beads of sweat from your forehead, look around you, and dis- 

 cover that the hills and the skies are still in being, and not annihi- 

 lated in the madness of your late sensations. You feel that Livy lies 

 not in the tale of the " earthquake reeling unheededly away," when 



