thousand reasons for their love; but the rushes, more strongly tethered,
are swept into a single attitude, again and again, at every renewal of
the storm.

Between the pasture and the wave, the many miles of rushes and reeds in
England seem to escape that insistent ownership which has so changed
(except for a few forests and downs) the aspect of England, and has in
fact made the landscape. Cultivation makes the landscape elsewhere,
rather than ownership, for the boundaries in the south are not
conspicuous; but here it is ownership. But the rushes are a gipsy
people, amongst us, yet out of reach. The landowner, if he is rather a
gross man, believes these races of reeds are his. But if he is a man of
sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts. His property, he
says, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a
wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, and
obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction of
increase. We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and their
cargo. It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon his
neighbour's land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his
showers elsewhere. But the great thing is the view. A well-appointed
country-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. But
he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly
disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes should
happen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his--he had the
pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time. But the
bulrushes, the reeds! One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but
a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no
longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to
death.