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Read Ebook: Gabrielle of the Lagoon: A Romance of the South Seas by Myddleton W H William Henry
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Ebook has 15 lines and 3860 words, and 1 pages
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THE SEVERN 1
THE WYE 39
THE CHALK STREAMS 64
THE BORDER RIVERS 101
TWO AVONS 149
THE RIVERS OF DEVON 161
THE RIVERS OF THE SOUTH-EAST 209
THE YORKSHIRE DALES 227
AN EAST ANGLIAN RIVER 269
FACING PAGE 2. The Severn, near Arley, Shropshire 6
RIVERS AND STREAMS OF ENGLAND
THE SEVERN
There is surely some peculiar fascination in the birthplace of a famous river when this lies in the heart of moors and mountains. For myself, I admit at once to but scant interest in the infant springs of even such slow running rivers as I have some personal affection for. There is neither mystery, nor solitude, nor privacy about their birth. They come into the world amid much the same surroundings as those in which they spend the greater part of their mature existence--amid ploughed fields, cattle pastures, and villages, farmyards, game covers, and ozier beds. When full they are inevitably muddy, and when empty are very empty indeed; lifeless, and mute at the best, at the worst actually dry. The river of low-country birth acquires, in short, neither character nor quality worthy of consideration till as a full-grown stream it can trace a shining coil in the valley, or reflect the shadow of spire, bridge or mill, of willow or poplar.
How different is the source of a mountain-born river, above all when it boasts some name famous in story, and is to become the feeder of historic cities and bearer of great navies. Its hoarse voice plashing amid the silence of the eternal hills strikes the chord responsive to such scenes as these with singular force, and a little louder perhaps than its comparatively nameless neighbour, which leaves their common watershed for some other sea. As the lowland landscape of England is unique, so the mountain and moorland solitudes of these two islands are quite different from anything else in the whole universe. The mountain regions of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, exhibit, to be sure, some slight variety of detail, due partly to human and partly to natural agencies. But such differences are positively trifling compared to the contrast they each and all present to any other of the waste places of the earth, unles
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