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.
It draws you, too, to itself by an indefinable mesmeric attraction. If
you stop in a strange place, the first instinct of your idle
half-hour is, to lounge by the river. It is a person to you; you call
it--Scotchmen do, at least--she, and not it. How do you know that you
are not philosophically correct, and that the river has a spirit as
well as you?"