sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen
into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower
barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and shaggy
with bristling reeds. It is a wilderness, but not unrelieved with
here and there an oasis, where, like islands left high and dry in a
deserted ocean bed, one and another rocky knoll lift up above the
waste flats around them some acres of sweet grass, or a broad field of
flowering mustard, shining with a splendour as of cloth of gold, and
fringed with a loop or two of silver braid by the river winding at the
base. There is animate life, too, sprinkled not stintedly over its
surface, not only of visitant sea-fowl from the shore, or solitude-
loving creatures native to the place--plover and duck and long-winged
herons, but also of cattle and horses grazing on the cultivated edges
of the marsh, which make us look for the homes of their human masters
at no great distance. Why there they are, lying overlooked at our
feet all the while, a straggle of lowly white-roofed dwellings
clinging to the long pebble ridge like barnacles on a rock, breathing
a thin smoke from their scattered chimneys, whence the blessed smell
of peat-fires is wafted through the dry air to our nostrils. But one
great house I notice with a crowd about its door-steps, and a flag
waving over them a device I have somewhere seen before, where the
kitchen chimney smokes with a most hospitable volume; guests must be
plenty there. Yes; and if further signs of life be needed, you may
listen to the puff of a farmer's steam-engine planted in the swamp,
and see the glitter of the steel ropes, with which it draws its
ploughshares, resistless as fate, through the oozy fallows. Well, if
it is come to this, the farmers and their engines will soon civilise
away the beauty of this romantic wild. But shall we complain? If
they have begun to drain these intractable marshes, then there is a
chance for other places, where the interest on the cost of drainage