240 An English Stream. 



a sense of dreamlike absorption and half trance, as 

 one stood and looked into the wondrous world reversed 

 and almost more beautiful below. Wordsworth, it is 



true, speaks of 



" that uncertain heaven received 

 Into the bosom of the steady lake." 



But here very often there is little of uncertainty the 

 more you gaze the less you realise that element. My 

 favourite walk from my house to this stream is over a 

 series of gentle swelling hills that rise and dip, and rise 

 again, and all along the course you come on little bits 

 of broken ragged hedgerow, where the furze bushes 

 rise and hang out their flowers like lamps along the 

 pathway, where if there is no legal right-of-way, there 

 is a kind of neighbourly allowance and indulgence that 

 makes the privilege the more appreciated, as the journey 

 is all the more quiet and solitary. And now and then the 

 eye is gladdened with a tuft of broom, and a few thistles 

 will rise beside them, and, oh ! the stir and chatter that 

 you are guilty of interrupting at certain seasons, when 

 the thistles are in seed, and the linnets and the gold- 

 finches are busy fluttering over it, and now and then 

 utter little shrill protests against the presence of so 

 many rivals just there. 



"When three gray linnets wrangle for the seed" 



sings the late laureate. Three ! In a little patch no 

 bigger than the top of the table on which I write, I 

 have seen twenty, and now and then their motions 

 making the thistle down fly like a mist, and that 

 flutterings on my approach making the narrow space 

 seem alive, as they uttered their cries of alarm or 

 warning, and simply dropped down and disappeared 



