I
am no farmer: but they seem surely to be somewhat altered since then."
As he spoke, they turned off the main line of the rolling clays toward
the foot of the chalk hills, and began to brush through short cuttings
of blue gault and "green sand," so called by geologists, because its
usual colours are bright brown, snow-white, and crimson.
Soon they get glimpses of broad silver Whit, as she slides, with
divided streams, through bright water-meadows, and stately groves of
poplar, and abele, and pine; while, far aloft upon the left, the downs
rise steep, crowned with black fir spinnies, and dotted with dark box
and juniper.
Soon they pass old Whitford Priory, with its numberless gables,
nestling amid mighty elms, and the Nunpool flashing and roaring as of
old, and the broad shallow below sparkling and laughing in the low,
but bright December sun.
"So slides on the noble river, for ever changing, and yet for ever the
same--always fulfilling its errand, which yet is never fulfilled,"
said Stangrave,--he was given to half-mystic utterances, and
hankerings after Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he
worshipped Emerson, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to worship Margaret
Fuller Ossoli,--"Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature,
when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a semi-human
personality, a river-god of its own. It may be but a collection
of ever-changing atoms of water;--what is your body but a similar
collection of atoms, decaying and renewing every moment? Yet you are a
person; and is not the river, too, a person--a live thing? It has
an individual countenance which you love, which you would recognise
again, meet it where you will; it marks the whole landscape; it
determines probably the geography and the society of a whole district.
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