to mankind?but here on earth, where he set them, that they might go on in his path, after his example, and prosper and triumph long years after he is dead, when his memory shall be blessed by generations not merely "yet unborn," but who never would have been born at all, had he not inculcated into their unwilling fathers the simplest laws of physical health, decency, life-laws which the wild-cat of the wood, burying its own excrement apart from its lair, has learned by the light of nature; but which neither nature nor God himself can as yet teach to a selfish, perverse, and hypocritical generation.

CHALK-STREAM STUDIES.

[Fraser's Magazine, September, 1858.]

FISHING is generally associated in men's minds with wild mountain scenery; if not with the alps and cataracts of Norway, still with the moors and lochs of Scotland, or at least with the rocky rivers, the wooded crags, the crumbling abbeys of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Hereford, or the Lowlands. And it cannot be denied that much of the charm which angling exercises over cultivated minds, is due to the beauty and novelty of the landscapes which surround him; to the sense of freedom, the exhilarating upland air. Who would prefer the certainty of taking trout out of some sluggish preserve, to the chance of a brace out of Edno or Llyn Dulyn? The pleasure lies not in the prize itself, but in the pains which it has cost; in the upward climbs through the dark plantations, beside the rock-walled stream; the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay flower-bed of blue and purple butterwort; the steady breathless climb up the crags, which looked but one mile from you when you started, so clear against the sky stood out every knoll and slab; the first stars of the white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropped, as if a fairy had pricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon some green cushion of wet moss, in a dripping crack of the cliff; the first gray tufts of the Alpine clubmoss, the first shrub of crowberry, or sea-green roseroot, with its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the two-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning

of the Alpine world; the scramble over the arid waves of the porphyry sea aloft, as you beat round and round like a weary pointer dog in search of the hidden lake; the last despairing crawl to the summit of the sienite pyramid on Moel Meirch; the hasty gaze around, far away into the green vale of Ffestiniog, and over wooded flats, and long silver riverreaches, and yellow sands, and blue sea flecked with flying clouds, and isles and capes, and wildernesses of mountain peaks, east, west, south, and north; one glance at the purple gulf out of which Snowdon rises, thence only seen in full majesty from base to peak; and then the joyful run, springing over bank and boulder, to the fathomless tarn beneath your feet; the pull at the whisky-flask, as you toss yourself, bathed in perspiration, on the turf; the almost awed pause, as you recollect that you are alone on the mountain-tops, by the side of the desolate volcano crater, out of all hope of speech or help of man; and, if you break your leg among those rocks, may lie there till the ravens pick your bones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from Amboyna or New Guinea · tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those sienite cubes which will twist your ankles and break your shins for the next three hours. What matter (to a minute philosopher, at least) if, after two hours of such enjoyment as that, he goes down again into the world of man with empty creel, or with a dozen pounders and two-pounders, shorter, gamer, and redder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or Kennet? What matter? If he has not caught them, he might

may

have caught them; he has been catching them in imagination all the way up; and if he be a minute. philosopher, he holds that there is no falser proverb than that devil's beatitude, "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed."

Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoys everything once at least; and if it falls out true, twice also.

Yes. Pleasant enough is mountain-fishing. But there is one objection against it, that it is hard work to get to it; and that the angler, often enough halftired before he arrives at his stream or lake, has left for his day's work only the lees of his nervous energy.

Another objection, more important perhaps to a minute philosopher than to the multitude, is, that there is in mountain-fishing an element of excitement, an element which is wholesome enough at times for every one; most wholesome at all times for the man pent up in London air and London work; but which takes away from the angler's most delicate enjoyment, that dreamy contemplative repose, broken by just enough amusement to keep his body active, while his mind is quietly taking in every sight and sound of nature. Let the Londoner have his six weeks every year among crag and heather, and return with lungs expanded and muscles braced to his nine months' prison. The countryman, who needs no such change of air and scene, will prefer more homelike, though more homely pleasures. Dearer to him than wild cataracts or Alpine glens, are the still, hidden streams which Bewick has immortalized in his vignettes, and Creswick in his pictures; the long glassy shallow, paved with yellow gravel, where he wades up between low walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut and oak and alder, to the low bar over which the stream comes swirling

and dimpling, as the water-ousel flits piping before him, and the murmur of the ringdove comes soft and sleepy through the wood. There, as he wades, he sees a hundred sights and hears a hundred tones, which are hidden from the traveller on the dusty highway above. The traveller fancies that he has seen the country. So he has; the outside of it, at least; but the angler only sees the inside. The angler only is brought close face to face with the flower, and bird, and insect life of the rich river banks, the only part of the landscape where the hand of man has never interfered, and the only part in general which never feels the drought of summer, "the trees planted by the water-side, whose leaf shall not wither."

Pleasant are those hidden water-ways; but yet are they the more pleasant because the hand of man has not interfered with them?

It is a question, and one which the older one grows, the less one is inclined to answer in the affirmative. The older one grows, the more there grows on one the sense of waste and incompleteness in all scenery where man has not fulfilled the commission of Eden, · "to dress it and to keep it ;" and with that, a sense of loneliness which makes one long for home, and cultivation, and the speech of fellow-men.

Surely the influence of mountain scenery is exaggerated nowadays. In spite of the reverend name of Wordsworth, (whose poetry, be it remembered, wants exactly that element of hardihood and manliness which is supposed to be the birthright of mountaineers,) one cannot help, as a lowlander, hoping that there is a little truth in the threnodes of a certain peevish friend who literally hates a mountain, and justifies his hatred in this fashion:

"I do hate mountains. I would not live among them for ten thousand a year. If they look like paradise for three months in the summer, they are a