The Thames

IN American eyes the scenery of England looks over-trim and opulent, and of all the garden - country the tourist finds nothing more “handsome and genteel,” as Swift says, than the upper Thames. But this is because the wayfarer upon those waters turns his eyes too much to one side of the stream. Forests are there by intervals, but there also are the gardens of villas, their little embankments, their steps, their painted boathouses, their scarlet umbrellas, edges of lawns clean cut by the gardener’s knife, hardly so much as a water-rat really wild. Let him look on the other bank, and he will find a much simpler England, an ancient country of the hind and the teamster, a lowly England smelling of hay and cowslips, facing, at these close quarters, the England that smells of tea-roses. For over against the garden walk is the tow-path; and the walk winds and loiters, the tow-path trudges. There the cattle graze, and there the horses labor with the heavy barges far behind. Even away from this fragrant country of the upper river, the tow-path is a primitive thing and a sign of the simplest labor. The canal that passes through a part of London, to debouch into the Thames below bridge, has also its tow-path; and on that ambiguous shore, too, it looks honest and ancient, and un-Londonlike under the very gasworks — man or horse slanting slowly under the rope, and the flat black barge coming. If there is so much as a blade of wild grass making a little local spring or summer upon that blackened bank, between the ashes and the dust, it grows by the tow-path, and it is wild, veritably wild, and has more of the spirit of authentic country than has the emerald-green grass of Hyde Park.

Have the rivers of America tow-paths ? Have Abana and Pharpar this little grace of our narrow Jordan ? They have remoter beauties; but without the tow-path this Thames would be another river, and when steam barges go upstream, and there are no more horses, it will be another river. Meanwhile it is the tow-path that keeps the Thames always open to the sun. The gardener’s scissors ply on their own bank, but the tow-path bank has been preserved, all these centuries, free of trees, inclosures, or too tall flowers. For even here the rushes and reeds know their place; they stand in slender rank, a step below the bank, where their height will incommode nobody, much like some wild poor people permitted to abide between the roadway and the curb, in a thin line, to see a jubilee go by; they stand at the passage of the jubilee of waters. Here harbor little living creatures of the more secret kind. The gallant swimming of the vole is an every-day show; and because one day we were keeping very still by the root of a willow to watch the dragon-fly with its four bronze wings, a wavy snake landed near. It was a wild surprise, to our ignorance, to see a serpent swim; and this undulant creature carried its little head clear out of water and came across the Thames, closing its journey so near our boat as to show us the eyes of color upon its flexible side. When, in the evening, we told a lifelong resident about the swimming snake, she said, “Perhaps it was a heel.” We told her that eels kept their heads under water. In the thickets of rushes, besides, dwell all kinds of water-birds; the dabchicks nest there in the season; so the son of the Thames resident told us. His appreciations of the river-life seemed to be rather destructive. He was an extremely small boy of eleven, who looked no more than seven years old; but he had an earnest manner. “There used,” he said, “to be a lot of water-rats under our terrace, but we soon put an end to them.” Frogs, too, but they were no more. Of gudgeon, he said, “Gudgeon’s the sweetest fish in the Thames.” And of roach, “There’s a lovely amount of roach.” Another speaker of phrases that had the character of the reedy river — or, at any rate, not of London — was the bellringer of an ancient riverside church, who came out between the two periods of bell-ringing and asked the stranger to go in and look at the altar - plate, — solid gold, presented by Such-an-one, son of King William the Fourth; and the old man looked for a moment with a respectfully confidential glance, dropping his voice as he mentioned the sinister lineage. He led his captive visitor up to the altar, and insisted that every piece of the golden ware should be lifted and looked at. “There’s not a set like it,” he said, turning back for yet another view, as he led us out again. The church had been restored in such a year, he told us; and when, seeing two thirteenth - century tombs, we asked what had been its date of building, he replied that “it had n’t got no date,” — a baffling reply, to which there was no effectual rejoinder. Next to the gold service he was eager to show a little modern window with a design of lilies, dedicated to the memory of a woman. “She was drowned,” said the old man. “Before this argan was put up, I used to play the bar’l argan here, I did. And she used to stand up by me and sing, something splendid, she did. I’m a cripple, I am; I was born a cripple, but I was always kind. Always kind, I was, and she used to stand up and sing, she did, something splendid.”

But I have strayed from the tow-path, and hasten to tread again that serviceable road. It lets the sun in upon the Thames, I said; for the tow-rope must have plain and unencumbered banks, whether it draw tons of timber or only a little boat, and the boat be towed by a woman.

A quite childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided must have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith I girt my shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but useful, on the even path of the lopped and grassy side of the river, — the side of meadows. The elastic resistance of the line is a “heart-animating strain,” only too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of the Thames-side plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink, are swept aside like a long breaker of flourishing green. The line drums lightly in the ear when the bushes are high and it grows taut; it makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress of easy power.

The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the joys of “feeling hearts” according to the entirely erroneous sentiment of a verse of Tom Moore’s. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the joys of sensitive hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual act of towing, is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the happy laborers with the oar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means of violence. Here, on the long tow-path, between warm, embrowned meadows and opal waters, I need not save to walk in my swinging harness, and so take my friends upstream.

I work merely as the mill-stream works, — by simple movement. At lock after lock along a hundred miles, deep-roofed mills shake to the wheel that turns by no greater stress, and I and the river have the same mere force of progress. There never was any kinder incentive of companionship. It is the bright Thames walking softly in my blood, or I that am flowing by so many curves of low shore on the level of the world.

Now I am over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as the wheeling river makes the sky wheel about my head and swings the lighted clouds or the blue to face my eyes. The birds, flying high for mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight. I will not envy them that liberty. Did not Wordsworth want a “little boat” for the air? Did not Byron call him a blockhead therefor? Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing. All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry. Even the athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than I, walking an effectual walk with the line attached to the willing steps. The moderate strength of a mere every-day physical education gives sufficient mastery of the tow-path. If the natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give it life; and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the buoyant burden — the yielding check — than ever before. An unharnessed walk begins to seem a sorry incident of insignificant liberty. It is easier than towing ? So is the drawing of water in a sieve easier to the arms than the drawing in a bucket, but not to the heart.

To walk unbound is to move in prose, without the friction of the wings of metre, without the encouraging tug upon the spirit and the line. No dead weight follows me as I tow. Mine is not the work of a ploughing ox or of a draught-horse. There is no lifeless stopping of the burden if I pause, but a soft, continuing impetus, so that I am all but overtaken by the boat if the latches of the gates in the pastures are long to lift, or if a company of cows are slow to move from that extreme brink which is mine by necessity. The burden is willing; it depends upon me gayly, as a friend may do, without making any depressing show of helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set me at naught, or charge me with a make-believe. It accompanies, it almost anticipates; it pulls when I am brisk, just so much as to give briskness good reason, and to justify me if I should take to still more nimble heels. All my haste, moreover, does but waken a more brilliantly sounding ripple.

The bounding and rebounding burden I carry (it nearly seems to carry me, so fine is the mutual good-will) gives work to the figure, enlists erectness and gait, but leaves the eyes free. No watching of mechanisms for the laborer of the towpath. What little outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer, smoothly towed. The easy and efficient work lets me carry my head high and watch the birds, or listen to them. They fly in such lofty air that they seem to turn blue in the blue sky. A flash of their flight shows silver for a moment, but they are blue birds in that sunny distance above, as mountains are blue, and horizons. The days are so still that I do not merely hear the cawing of the rooks, — I overhear their hundred private croakings and creakings, the soliloquy of the solitary places swept by wings.

What idle afternoon on the opposite bank, what “tea and comfortable advice in an arbour,” as Keats says, were worth these few miles of the country people’s side of the Thames ? I will keep the tow-path even when the region of villas is left far behind, when the opposite margin bears not gardens, but woods and willows. For even then there is a sense of property in land altogether out of place; whereas the tow-path side is more the nation’s. Its wild flowers are, like the cottage flowers in Wordsworth’s sonnet, “sacred to the poor.” This bank is never tired of a small pink flower that grows in multitudes, sprinkled on green bushes. A hundred miles and more of the little, open, pastured bank that carries the towpath, carry also this little but innumerable flower, mixed with the long purples that wear the color dear to young Autumn.

Monotonous in its constancy to the simple flower of the month, this tow-path garden has the wild variety of its mingled seed-time and flower-time. Not here, as in the house-garden, are the flowers timed for the month and collected for their date, and not here are the ashes and the seeds swept away with their little history of months. The bank is dim with seeds not yet on the wing; the air will carry them full-fledged. Bird, butterfly, and the seed that resembles a star go abroad on the brilliant winds; and the seed is like the poplar for moving when the air is all but asleep. The other trees have no secret winds. When they wave they tell us what we knew well enough; and there is something less than summerlike in the day that swings the beeches by the tops, and makes even the elm stand tumultuously in the wild steadfastness of its dark leaves. But when the large willows have not a leaf astir, and yet the poplar has the perpetual thrill of its most delicate vigilance, you are indeed rowing in a peaceful day. Peace is the proper effect of summer, and the poplar does not break that calm by his tender wakefulness. The willow gives tidings of a breeze, the poplar does but mark that the stillness is alive. His excess of mobility makes him a gentle friend. He has a lofty place wherefrom to watch our day, with signals of lights that tremble yet never pass.

It is not only the land that flowers. The water has its hour for blossoming. As the remote constellations open and rise at their time of year, — the constellations that are not tethered close to the pole-star, — so do a multitude of waterflowers remote from the familiar series of the fields. They come up to bud and open in the air, taking their share of the upper world, fresh from their shades. They are the “daughters of Hades,” and have their “day.” Few are the waterplants that do not come up once a year to breathe by flowers under blue sky. Something lusty and green, squat and full, that grows low, much like a sort of water-cabbage, seems to be the only plant that remains in the massive water below, and if it flower at all, flowers deep within the floods. But all the rest make a season’s growth of the long stalk, slanting downstream until it shall come to the sun, and put out one brief blossom. Every one knows the water-lily, — the large white chalice,— a design for fine metal-work, with its centre of a great color that is not fiery or golden, but only the pure yellow of flowers, at its richest and fullest; and every one knows its leaf, which is the flattest thing under that sky to which it is so absolutely open. On the flat of the world, on the level of the seas, flatter than the calm water which ripples to the oar, is this green leaf. Familiar, moreover, is the little yellow lily, round and as yellow as a celandine, and quite unlike in color to the soft and splendid centre of the largepointed and argent flower.

The river blossoms at the summits of many stems besides those of white and yellow lilies. It flowers, indeed, with a greater effect of life at the top of a stem that bears a little cone of small white river-roses, whiter and brighter than the blackberry - flower, yet otherwise like it, although it grows from a rich water-stem and not from thorns. The lilies flower as soon as they reach the winds and the beams of the world, and they rest blooming on the waters, cheek to cheek, after their long growth; but these little flowers have a spring and strength that carry them up where they can see the fields, erect, free of the water, bathed in air, with a stiff vitality. They break off short if you gather them, like hyacinths. Low in a Canadian canoe should your seat be, so that you may have the frosty, cold, green rushes high against the sky, and the soft winter-color of the water carrying its little round roses in the sun, with their shadows upon the mid-stream leaves.

During half the day there is a slight haze of heat over the hills, — steep pasture hills, hills profoundly wooded, and hills at the point of harvest, — and, indeed, throughout the horizon; and the sunshine is white. But for the freshness of aspens and poplars — runnels and brooks of trees, freshets and breezes of leaves — there would be a touch of dreariness about so much uncolored sunshine, so many green willows and dark green elms, and so many fields. It is the flame and not the glow of day, as when a fire is newly alight; and except that, happily, there is no town to speak of within reach of a breeze or of reasonable suspicion, you would almost say that with the flame of day there was a trail of the smoke of flames. But it is not smoke. The August of Florence wears the same slight dinginess over all its heights. Especially does this somewhat disenchanted midday look tedious when you take the view that is not the sunward view, and therefore does not meet the array of sun-shadows. Hardly has the day, however, worn toward four o’clock when the color of August kindles so rich a fire as no summer in the south could over-shine.

With the glow of this profounder illumination arises the solemnity that is the greatest beauty and the highest honor of light, and by no means waits for evening and dusk, though it walks at that time too; waits for the twilight no more than the solemnity of the year waits for autumn. When the afternoon grows golden all trees, moreover, that are generally so various in their spirit and have various and unequal shares of every man’s love and memories, begin to take the same expression and the same attitude, standing up to face the west. But just after sunset, when the eastern sky is exceedingly fresh and mysterious, it is the time for the full-grown willows. There is nothing more keenly pure than their western color against that soft and yet keen east.

When you have grown to know thoroughly your own weir and its lock, and the mill thereby, and the ways of the waters there, you begin to look upon all other weirs with an alien eye. They differ greatly. About this one there is luckily no trace of iron. The ancient stone steps, for the cascade of flood-time, reach for several hundred feet side-long across the river; in the summer their tops are dry, and covered with a season’s growth of tall grass and wild flowers; they are like long and low fortresses, and of antique strength. The closed and creviced watergates, through which the summer river pours its controlled waters, link one stonestepped weir-terrace to another, and are all of wood; so is the lock. Soon your local patriotism of a month will cause you to hold weirs above and below in disesteem. Of this one you know the ways, and the order, and the never - ceasing voice.

And all the while the thrilling reflections lie close about the long stone amphitheatre of the weir, close under the white cattle on the pastures, close under the white lilies on the water, far and deep under the white pigeons that cross and recross in pairs. Of all that is white the river makes a water vision better than that of green trees, and better than the doubling of cool hollows, and hidingplaces under hawthorn and alder. A rare white sail, white bird, white heifer, the white crescent moon that sets too soon, — all this is the best and the gayest that the fleeting water seems to hold and does but perpetually forsake. As for the flowers, you can hardly tell, in the opal calm of the evening, which are the images of the flowers of the tall margin grasses, and which are the very flowers of the flowering river, his own summer and success, the warm summit of the cold year of waters.

Evening rules assuredly not by shadow, but by the effacing of shadows. It plucks all the dazzling darkness from the landscape of summer. Out of the foliage of the trees the distinct deep colors are gone, and the tree stands up opposite to the west, looking unearthly. Nay, the dim brightness makes of the whole world a moon; and the eastern sky behind the tree is a sky for moons. The distances draw near unawares, and it is but a fold of west-lighted color between this bank and yonder hill. And soon in the east stands the gentle and lighted cloud that doubles its wild-rose upon the river, and lays its lofty image in beneath the lilies, between the gray reeds, under the blue bloom of water, — erect, profound, having sight of the sun of an ended day, and of a new light in the east.

It is no small thing — no light discovery — to find Andromeda and Arcturus and their bright neighbors wheeling for half a summer night around a pole-star in the waters. One star or two — delicate visitants of streams — we are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of the eyes, so fine and so fleeting is that apparition. Or the southern seas may show the light — not the image — of the evening planet. But this, in a pool of the country Thames at night, is no ripple-lengthened light; it is the startling image of a whole large constellation burning in the flood. The smaller stars are darkened out, and the figure of the constellation is marked by its few and splendid lights.

These reflected heavens are different heavens. On a darker and more vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or the Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play a painter’s part in setting their splendid subject free; a dream’s part, also, inasmuch as the intervals of the reflected skies are unexplained. They are not blanks, but significant lapses of immeasurable character. If the astronomer’s sky shows its two starless “coal-sacks,” the sky in the wavering flood is all one such final darkness, except where the great constellations flicker. The minor lights effaced, the shape of stars is distinct in a new darkness.

The sky above is not all bright, nor are the waters below all quiet. There is more fire in southern nights, with their innumerable arrows of starlight and their separate points of Pleiades, but hardly more beauty, than in this soft northern midnight. Even after the last light has gone from the west, and before the waning moon has risen in the east, there is a general soft whiteness, doubtless due to the subtle mist that gathers and carries vague lights aloft, whether from the vanishing or the coming gleam, or from the stars themselves. The cloudless sky has a softness sweeter than that of any cloud, nor is any distance narrowed by such a tender and universal mist. You may see the ends of the skies and extremities of milder stars.

Of all gentle things these wavering heavens seem the gentlest; they are the skies of a windless harvest night. All the trees stand free from wind. Upright poplars are disengaged from the daylight breeze that curved their high slenderness so many hours against the north. The branches of all trees recover themselves into their own composure and stand silent in the symmetry of a man. It must be this recollection that restores to them their singular presence when the wind vanishes. The darting of the stars is shortened, and the birds that took the last of all the sunshine on their high evening flight are all in their trees and under their eaves till dawn. It is so silent that you can hear watchdogs answering one another from farms far away and wide apart.

And in this general restoration — of form, of balance, and of attention — the riverside landscape has these two movements: the bright flashing of constellations in a deep weir-pool, and that which might be called the dark flashes of the vague bats flying. When everything else is thus quiet, the stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion. Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes and returns. Fitful in the steady night, those constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have a suddenness of gleaming life. You imagine that some unexampled gale might make them to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing but deep water, seeming still in its incessant flight and rebound, could really show such altered stars. The flood lets a constellation fly, as Juliet’s “wanton” with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again. At moments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly set, widespaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars, and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then one broken star returns; then fragments of another, and a third and a fourth flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable. There is nothing else at once so keen and so elusive. The aspen-poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no such vanishings as these. Or, when the deep pool keeps the image of wide groups of stars still and clear, they are still shaken by the clash of the weir, and look as though nothing in the world were so delicate and so sure.

The dimmer constellations of the soft night are reserved by the skies. Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large and vague eyes of the stream. They are blind to the Pleiades which begin to show, when the noon of night is past, in the van of the winter stars. Nothing more definite than a small lighted cloud that does not change or fade, this cluster shows the place where a coming Orion is on his way, as yet close to the morning.

There is another kind of star that drowns itself by hundreds in the river Thames, — the many-rayed, silver-white seed that makes journeys on all the winds up and down England and across it in the end of summer. It is a most expert traveler, turning a little wheel a-tiptoe wherever the wind lets it rest, and speeding on those pretty points when it is not flying. The streets of London are among its many highways, for it is fragile enough to go far in all sorts of weather. But it gets disabled if a rough gust tumbles it on the water so that its finely feathered feet are wet. On gentle breezes it is able to cross dryshod, even walking.

What has this pilgrim star to do with the tethered constellations ? There is nothing in the country so far adrift. It goes singly to all the winds. It offers thistleplants (or whatever is the flower that makes such delicate ashes) to the tops of many thousand hills. Doubtless the farmer would rather have to meet it in battalions than in these invincible units astray. But if the farmer owes it a lawful grudge, there is many a riverside garden wherein it would be a great pleasure to sow the thistles of the nearest pasture. Such a lawn — happily not frequent in some of the beautiful reaches of the upper river — is fitted tightly to the face of a high garden bank, having toy conifers along its upper edge. So many yards of it, and not a sign of vitality in any part of the green floor and the green hillside. The garden grass has nothing whatever to report as to the season of the year; it would bear the same aspect in May and the same in a rainy summer. Dissatisfied, then, with the “English” garden (as they call it on the Continent) that winds by contrived mounds, and prepares a tediously careless opening of views; equally ill content with the box-full of bordered flower-beds close packed with all the uninteresting flowers in the world, one is on the point of giving up gardens, with no slight reluctance, but for the memory of a garden one can love. That best of all gardens is somewhat bygone — has once been rigid and most successful, but has lapsed more or less. One need not ask for perfect neglect; and abandonment must have a southern climate for its happiest sequel; but there is hardly any climate or any latitude in which a formal plan and a term of exclusiveness, trimming, and weeding, followed by a little carelessness or a little poverty, or a little idleness,— this will serve our turn well enough,— or, perhaps better still, a little absence, will not have consequences of the utmost sweetness. Let the sun and the wind walk those precise paths for a while behind the owner’s back, and let his fountains and his borders wear some of the uncovenanted graces of oblivion.

The Thames has, in all its reaches, a Spirit of Place. And if the Spirit of Place abides in its own peculiar peace within the town, shutting the gates upon itself, if it lives between two hills, and withdraws within the ramparts of a lake, it journeys with rivers, a pilgrim.