CHAPTER VI 

 WITH VERDANT ALDERS CROWN'D 



IF you will step across to your bookshelf and take down 

 that volume of Pope's miscellaneous works, you will 

 find the fable of Lodona, and the words which I borrow 

 for a heading. The little man so wrote of the River 

 Loddon, which he quite correctly described also as 

 slow. The Loddon is scarcely a river of itself to in- 

 spire a poem, being without cataracts going down to 

 Lodore, not being mountain born, nor overlooked by 

 crag and summit ; but it is in an especial degree the 

 kind of stream which pastoral poets have from time 

 immemorial loved to bring in as an indispensable adjunct. 

 Almost any portion of the country watered by this 

 river might have yielded the scenes of the immortal 

 Elegy in a country churchyard, though you may re- 

 member that Gray does not in the poem make mention 

 of a river, and only introduces the rill, and " the brook 

 that babbles by " as the habitual resort of the youth 

 whom melancholy marked for her own. But I have 

 heard the curfew toll the knell of parting day while 

 watching the float, have marked the beetle wheel his 

 droning flight (half inclined to chase him to tempt the 

 wayward chub), and have looked upon the lowing herds 

 winding slowly o'er the lea as the signal for bringing the 

 day's delights to a close by winding up my fishing line. 

 " Sweet native stream," Warton calls the Loddon, 



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