342 THE BROOK. 



safety, the songsters of the neighbouring trees perform 

 their ablutions, the small quadrupeds drink, and the 

 insect tribes spend their brief hours in joy ; that gentle 

 stream is the cause of no inundation, tears up no soil, 

 and hardly bends a rush or drowns a fly. There is no 

 din of wings, no shadow of the eagle, no rushing of the 

 hawk, not a death-doer, or a death-cry, from all unrea- 

 soning nature in this little place ; and if man come not 

 in with his snare, or his weapon, he may make it, or 

 rather have it, the very Eden of innocence. How easily 

 can we trace it upward to the fountains, or downward 

 to the point at which it blends its waters, and loses its 

 name in the river. The well under the hawthorn, by 

 the base of the rock, the depth of whose sources defy 

 the heat of summer and the cold of winter, and which, 

 for virtues more valuable than those for which modern 

 idols are worshipped, the simple people called by the 

 name of their favourite saint; and, for the health that the 

 draught of liquid diamond had given them, hung with 

 garlands and other votive offerings, as they hymned him 

 in their grateful hearts ; that shining and sainted well 

 is the farthest source of our little brook. And though 

 the brook apparently loves to linger in the shade of its 

 little grove where the willows, whose rough stems are 

 the parents of fifty generations of osier twigs, and are 

 as likely as ever to enrich the peasants with fifty 

 more, stand rooted in the water among lofty reeds and 

 glowing iris, and sport the soft glory of their green 

 and silver in the waveless pool ; where, too, the alder 

 and the elm blend their passage, and all is so still that 

 the fluttering leaves of the aspen, ever in motion in 

 other places, are here still as if the zephyrs themselves 



