few rivers or brooks or burns are blue. Their Running 

 azure colour is a mirage wrought by distance Waters, 

 and the angle of vision, affected by the play 

 of wind, by the quality of light, by the blue- 

 ness of the sky. Every German poet has 

 sung of the blue Danube, the blue Rhine. 

 These rivers have no quality of blueness, save 

 by reflection from above, at a distance, and at 

 a certain angle of vision. Waters flowing 

 from the Lake of Geneva and from the Lake 

 of Lucerne are blue even on grey days and if 

 looked at on the shadow -side of a bridge. 

 We have many grey-blue and blue-white and 

 azure-shadowed running waters, but we have 

 more that are grass-green and far more that 

 are dappled hazel and nut-brown and golden- 

 brown and amber-shot black-brown. It is 

 not easy to say which of these running waters 

 one loves best : nor need one, nor should one 

 try. It would be like thinking of a garden- 

 close filled with wallflower and mignonette, 

 carnations and sweet -peas, dark violets and 

 yellow pansies and blue love-in-a-mist, white 

 tulips and lilies-of-the-valley and white roses, 

 damask rose and the flusht morning-glory and 

 the pink moss-rose and brier and eglantine, 

 and saying which is best of these, which 

 loveliest, which the most dear to the mind 

 as well as to the eyes. But, still, we have 



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