XIV. 

 AN ENGLISH STREAM. 



It has been much the habit of poets and essayists to 

 moralise the stream by finding in it a symbol of human 

 life. Such poems as Miss Ingelow's " Divided " savour 

 of it; and Lord Tennyson's exquisite lyric in "The 

 Brook : an Idyl " brings the parabolic element into fine 

 prominence — a point which the famous "C. L. S.", the 

 late Mr. Calverley, very cleverly took advantage of and 

 fully brought out in his well-known parody of it. • For 

 the stream has its quiet secluded infancy up in some 

 remote mountain cradle, where the winds fan it, and 

 the sunshine makes it radiant, as it goes laughing play- 

 ful through its sobbing grasses, waving sedges, or by 

 banks bright with starlike primroses, and ragweed and 

 ranunculus in their season, then on, like flushing youth, 



as it broadens its breast to sun and moon, to receive 



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