CHAPTER V. 







IN THE MIDLANDS. 



" The stately homes of England! 



How beautiful they stand, 

 Amidst their tall ancestral trees, 



O'er all the pleasant land ! 

 The deer across the greensward bound, 



Through shade and sunny gleam ; 

 And the swan glides past them with the sound 

 Of some rejoicing stream." 



HEMANS. 



COWPER must indeed have been a poet to find so much in 

 the River Ouse worthy of his attention. True, his was a 

 humble soul, and very little gave him content. Musing and 

 wandering he saw more sermons in stones, books in the 

 running brooks, and good in everything than most men. 

 The Ouse is an interesting river, but it is not romantic. It 

 is prosaic and business-like from beginning to end, fulfilling 

 its course through the fat broad pastures of Northampton, 

 Oxford, Buckingham, Bedford, Huntingdon, Cambridge, and 

 Norfolk, like a respectable commercial traveller who has to 

 " work " a certain district, and is prepared to do it conscien- 

 tiously to the last. 



Cowper had a favourite expression for the Ouse. He 

 called it " slow-winding." The poet was accurate : the 

 river is slow, and I believe it pursues the most serpentine 

 journey of all our rivers, through the flattest part of the 



