to time by an artless array of shelves on the sloping banks of
some meadow spring. On the shelves are scanty votive offerings,
piteous to see. Piteous, not on the score of the superstition
which prompts them--that is a matter to be dealt with
in a spirit of broad sympathy, on its historic and social
merits--but because of the dire poverty they reveal. Even its of
broken crockery are held worthy of a place at these little
shrines; so bereft are the peasantry of the simplest
accompaniments of civilised life.

How thoroughly natural is the growth of such sentiments and
beliefs! Jefferies felt the charm. "There was a secluded spring"
(he writes) "to which I sometimes went to drink the pure water,
lifting it in the hollow of my hand. Drinking the lucid water,
clear as light itself in solution, I absorbed the beauty and the
purity of it. I drank the thought of the element; I desired
soul-nature pure and limpid."

Nor has the charm ceased to be potent for the new man in the
new world. Walt Whitman knew it. Here is a delightful
paragraph from his notes of "Specimen Days": "So, still
sauntering on, to the spring under the willows--musical and soft
as clinking glasses--pouring a sizeable stream, thick as my neck,
pure and clear, out from its vent where the bank arches over like
a great brown shaggy eyebrow or mouth roof--gurgling,
gurgling ceaselessly--meaning, saying something of course (if
one could only translate it)--always gurgling there, the whole
year through--never going out--oceans of mint, blackberries in
summer--choice of light and shade--just the place for my July
sun-baths and water-baths too--but mainly the inimitable soft