their home by the springs, for whether in ancient Greece or in our Western
island, they breathe the sense of peace, security, and quiet, and to them
all living things, animal and human, come by instinct to enjoy the sense
of refreshment and repose. A spring is always old and always new. It is
ever in movement, yet constant, seldom greater and seldom less, in the
case of most natural upspringing waters, syphoned from the deep cisterns
of earth. Absolutely material, with no mystery in its origin, it impresses
the fancy as a thing unaccountable, like the source of life embodied,
something self-engendered. It has pulses, throbbing like the ebb and flow
of blood. Its dancing bubbles, rising and bursting, image emotion. It is
the only water always clear and sparkling. Streams gather mud, springs
dispel it. They come pure from the depths, and never suffer the earth to
gather where they leap from ground. They are the brightest and the
cleanest things in Nature. From all time the polluter of a spring has been
held accursed.

One of the sources of the Thames was a real spring, rising from the earth
in a meadow, until the level of the subterranean water was reduced.

These suddenly uprising springs are not common in our country, and need
seeking. Our poets, who borrowed from the classics all their epithets for
natural _fountains_, wrongly applied them to our modest springs
welling gently from the bosom of the earth. The springs of old Greece and
Italy gushed spouting from the rocks or flowed like the fountains of
Tivoli in falling sheets over dripping shoots of stone. Even a Greek of
to-day never speaks of a "spring," because he seldom sees one. "Fountain"
is the word used for all waters flowing from the earth, and the difference
of words corresponds to a difference of fact. The springs of his land
_are_ fountains, waters gushing from the rock or flowing from caverns
and channels in the hills. The fountains of Greece flow down from above,