Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide,
Deeds all done and songs all sung,
While others chant in sun and rain,
'Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,
Round the world and home again. '
THIS is the little span of English land threaded by the beginning of Thames of which I set out to tell you. That insatiable tyranny of places, upon which Shelley cries out in one of his letters, complaining that though you think you have departed you still inhabit and frequent them, pursues me thence implacably; as any beloved scene pursues a man, whether it be a village deep in Sussex, a headland of the coast, or the onward sweep of some princely Way of London. For often out of its limits there return to me visions of some secret bend of crystal streaming water, green floored with undulating weed; visions of some tiny church set amid inconsolable loneliness; visions of the silver gleam winding through the wooded purple valley. These are the villages, the roads and their sudden ancient bridges, this the immemorial landscape through which Thames flows down to his strength at Oxford. These histories that I have related serve sufficiently to assure me that there is much of the curious, much of the noble, still hidden from me; but my book must determine.
And now there remains but the vacuity of farewell; not that emptiness alone which always belongs to the abandonment of beautiful scenes, but one deepened by the sadness characteristic of all these sunlit meadows and rippling courses of remoter Thames. Over them broods all day long the very spirit of solitude, of aloofness from the dust and heat and the busy blood of fretful modern life. You will most keenly experience this influence if ever you float downstream on the twilight running water around the bends to Pinkhill, gazing meanwhile upon that Hill of Wytham flooded with the last golden glories of the setting sun. Elder men of an elder Faith built these churches and will return to build no more; nor do their descendants rebuild or greatly need to, with such masterfulness and communal devotion was the ancient work achieved. Departed husbandmen named these fields each one distinctively; and often the names remain, but without instant association with living men and other names survive, altered and not now understood: of rutted grass-lined tracks; of weedy watercourses only less old than the River itself, and seemingly negligible until some chance beam of history illuminates them with romance; of mowing plots and abolished weirs whose grey and mossy stones still buttress the crumbling River bank. Others may tell you of the flowers, the birds, the fish, the immemorial shells that fill the Riverside with other beauty and other interest. It has been largely sufficient for me to pursue the work and the ambition, achieved and now so often decaying, of bygone English life in this tiny breadth of English land; this little region so aloof, so haunted with imperishable memories of pathetic beauty and of secret, unmolested peace.
THE END
[ Copied by John Eade, 19th August 2007. Fred added 'Additions and Corrections'. They have been inserted in the appropriate places. ]
Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide,