Prose Idylls

its destruction bring blessings to the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good

nd in flowe

ad and equal-

the comi

here were-which haunted the deep fens for many a hundred years. Little thinks the Scotsman, whirled down by the Great Northern Railway from Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place, even twenty years ago, was

he birds around; while high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far off, upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness and its white paint. Then down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound, l

ins to breed. Gone, too, not only from Whittlesea but from the whole world, is that most exquisite of English butterflies, Lyc?na dispar-the great copper; and many a curious insect more. Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking

pumped the whole fen dry-even too dry, as the last hot summer proved; when the only bit of the prim?val wilderness left, as far as I know, is 200 acres of sweet sedge and Lastr?a thelypteris in Wicken Fen: there can be no harm in lingering awhile over

n age shrouded in mystery, and to be spoken of only in guesses. To assert anything positively concerning that age, or ages, would be to show the rashness of ignorance. 'I think

er the chalk had been laid on the top of them, at the bottom of some ancient ocean; after (and what a gulf of time is implied in that last 'after!') the boulder-clay (coeval probably with the 'till' of Scotland) had been spread out in the 'age of ice' on top of all; after the whole had

in and rivers by which they are sawing backward into the land even now-I 'seem to see' a time when the Straits of Dover did not exist-a time when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land. Through it, into a

ficient one may be found in one look over a bridge, in any river of the East of England. There we see various species of Cyprini

ey are not indigenous. They may be found in the streams of south and western England; but in every case, I believe, they have been introduced either by birds or by men. From some now submerged 'centre

ancestors have been. Originally a deep-sea form, he has found his way up the rivers, even to Cambridge, and there remains. The rivers by which he came up, the land through which he passed, ages and ages since, have been all swept away; and he has never found his way back to his nat

n. It is a still stronger argument against his being indigenous, that he is never mentioned as an article of food by the medi?val monks, who would have known-Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, as many o

rmicus). Tit he is none; rather, it is said, a finch, but connected with no other English bird. His central home is in the marshes of Russia and Prussia; his food the mollusks which swarm among the reed-beds where he builds; and feeding on those

cotch and Western Sphagnum palustre, but an altogether different moss, Hypnum fluitans), remains of an ancient lake-dwelling, supported on piles. A dwelling like those which have lately attracted so much notice in the lakes of Switzerland: like those which the Dyaks ma

o shells of the fresh-water tortoise, Em

ates). They may be bought at Paris, at fashionable restaurants. Thither they may have been sent from Vienna or Berlin; for in north France, Holland, and north-west Germany they are unknown. A few specimens have been found buried in peat in Sweden and Denmark; and there is a tal

here off the Doggerbank, in that great network of rivers which is now open sea, he or his descendants turned up Ouse and Little Ouse, till they found a mere like their old Prussian one, and ther

has found that many forms of Entomastraca are common to th

e presence of some of the common animals of the f

h-east corner of the Wash, testify to this day. But the main agent of destruction has been, doubtless, that same ever-gnawing sea-wash which devours still the soft strata of the whole east coast of England, as far as Flamborough Head; and that great scavenger, the

d grind slowly, yet the

with patience, with ex

ill to this day, have been carried far out to sea, and deposited as ooze. The heavier and coarser

. With them wandered the woolly rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), the hippopotamus, the lion-not (according to some) to be distinguished from the recent lion of Africa-the hy?na, the bear, the horse, the reindeer, and the musk ox; the great Irish elk, whose vast horns are so well known in every museum of northern Europe; and that mig

(so I am informed) in these islands a single perfect skeleton of Bos primigenius; while the Museum of Copenhagen, to its honour, possesses five or six from a much smaller field than is open to us; and be public

bones, prove him to have been fitted for a cold climate, and to have browsed upon the scanty shrubs of Northern Asia. But, indeed, there is no reason, à priori, why these huge mammals, now confined to hotter countries, should not have once inhabited a colder region, or at least have wandered northwards in whole herds in summer, to escape insects, and find fresh food, and above all, water. The same is the case with the lion, and other huge beasts of prey. The tiger of Hindostan ranges, at least in summer, across the snows of the Himalaya, and throughout China.

hy?nas? We must talk not of days, but of ages; we know nothing of d

length. And if we limit our inquiries, and ask what was the interval of time between the newest bed of gravel near Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or silt in

by rivers to about their present depth. What was the special cause of the fen itself? why di

t and provable from Cramond (the old Roman port of Alaterna) up to Blair Drummond above Stirling, where whales' skeletons, and bone tools by them, have be

away to sea. From Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, all down the Lincolnshire coast, the land is falling, falling for ever into the waves; an

sels quiver, fantastically distorted and lengthened, sometimes even inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas. Along the top of the mud banks lounge the long black rows of seals, undistinguishable from their reflection in the still water below; distorted too, and magnified to the size of elephants. Long lines of sea-pies wing their way along at regular tide-hours, from or to the ocean. Now and then a skein of geese paddle hastily out of sight round a

pread it inland into a labyrinth of shifting streams, shallow meres, and vast peat bogs, on those impervious clays which floor the fen. Each river contributed to the formation of those bogs and meres, instead of draining them away; repeating on a huge scale the process which may be seen in many a highland strath, where the ground at the edge of the stream is firm and high; the meadows near the hillfoot, a few h

easy to understand how peat, the certain product of standing water, has slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, fattened by the washing of those phosphatic greensand beds, which (discovered by the science of the lamented Professor Henslow) are now yielding round Cambridge supplies of manure seemingly inexhaustible. Easy it is to understand how the all-devouring, yet all-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually the stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once grew

Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of the prim?val forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least of those wild beasts which roamed on the older continent

ferior, abound; so does the roe, so does the goat, which one is accustomed to look on as a mountain animal. In the Woodwardian Museum there is a portion of a skull of an ibex-probably Capra sibirica-which was found in the drift gravel at Fulbourne. Wild sheep are unknown. The horse occurs in the peat; but whether wild or tame, who can tell? Horses enough have been mired and drowned since the Romans set foot on this island, to account for the presence of horses' skulls, without the hypothesis of wild herds, such as doubtless

fen-isles, in the eyes of the monks who

drought or over the winter ice, and never able to return, was found, fat beyond the wont of rams, feeding among the wild deer. He tells of the stately ashes-most of them cut in his time, to furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the

without a knot doth emulate the stars. The plain there is as level as the sea, which with green grass allures the eye, and so smooth that there is nought to hinder him who runs through it. Neither is therein any waste place for in some parts are apple trees, in other vi

ght of all the French army forces his way into the isle of St. Etheldreda, and, hospitably entertained there by

stag, roe, and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were caught in snares or gins. But of the kind of fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I say? In the pools around are netted eels innumerable, great water wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French called sea-serpents; smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely a mistake for sturgeon], are said often to be taken. But of the birds which haunt around, if you be not tired,

the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Age. And ugly enough those winters must have been, what with snow-storm and darkness, flood and ice, ague and rheumatism; while through the long drear winter nights the whistle of

any public works. Each village was isolated by its own 'march' of forest; each yeoman all but isolated by the 'eaves-drip,' or green lane round his farm. Each 'cared for his own things, and none for those of others;' and gradually, during the early Middle Age, the fen-save those old Roman villages-returned to its prim?val jungle, under the neglect of a race which caricatured local self-government into public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an alien enemy, who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest without call

for isolated independence which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled into the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be alone with God and their own souls. Like St. Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for

a form of thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be reading of the inhabitants of another planet. Most amusing and most human is old Ingulf and his continuator, 'Peter of Bl

c, written possibly as early as the eighth century, a

the trees, nought but an old 'law,' as the Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit's cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his servant; and how as Beccel was shaving th

d in on every side, from above, and from beneath, and everywhere. They were in countenance horrible, and they had great heads, and a long neck, and a lean visage; they were filthy and squalid in their beards, and they had rough ears, and crooked nebs, and fierce eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth were like horses' tusks; and their throats were filled with flame, and they were grating in their voice; they had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, and twisted toes, and cried hoarsely with their voices; and th

rs; and then, seized with compunction at his reproofs, brought them back, or hanged them on the reeds; and how, as Wilfrid, a holy visitant, was sitting with him, discoursing of the contemplative life, two swallows came flying in, and lifted up their song, si

f monks, companies of pilgrims who came to worship, sick who came to be healed; till, at last, founded on great piles driven into the bog, arose the lofty wooden Abbey of Crowland; in its sanctuary of the four rivers, its dykes, parks, vineyards, orchards, rich ploughlands, from which, in time of famine, the monks of Crowland fed all people of the neighbouring fens; with its t

iff of the king, nor armed force of knight or earl, could enter 'the inheritance of the Lord, the soil of St. Mary and St. Bartholomew, the most holy sanctuary of St. Guthlac and his monks; the minster free from worldly servitude; the special almshouse of most illustrious kings; the sole refuge of anyone in worldly tribulation; the perpetual

ichard of Rulos, who, two generations after the Conquest, marrying Hereward's granddaughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought that he could do the same work from the hall of Bourne as the monks did from their cloisters; got permission from the

ns are still standing, the French abbot of Crowland sent French monks to open a school under the new French donjon, in the little Roman town of Grante-brigge; whereby-so does all earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever-St. Guthlac, by his canoe-v

p waters of the whole higher bogs; that rivers were running backwards, brooks swelling to estuaries, and the whole north-eastern fen ruinate, to be yet more ruinate by banks confusedly thrown up in self-defence, till some order was restored in 1332, and the fens prospered-such little of them as could be drained at all-for nigh two hundred

ons had already fallen, and which alone made their dissolution possible, must have extended itself to these fen-lands. No one can read the account of their debts, neglect, malversati

f of the seventeenth century there went on, more and more rapidly, that great series of artificial works which, though often faulty in principle, often

looked on Francis of Bedford as their champion; how Charles I. persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the 'Lynn Law' of 1630, given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times; how Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the so-called 'Pretended Ordinance' of 1649, which was a compromise between Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that Charles II.'s Government were conten

rtant, is but half written-indeed, only h

t under William. After the St. Bartholomew they received a fresh cross of Huguenot, fleeing from France-dark-haired, fiery, earnest folk, whose names and physiognomies are said still to remain about Wisbeach, Whittlesea, and Thorney. Then came Vermuyden's Dutchmen, leaving some of their blood behind them. After

e green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one has ever seen a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper which there is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, the spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatal thread which is trickling over the dyke-or worse, through some forgotten rat's hole in its side-hundreds of men are clustered, without tumult, without complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting the brute powers of nature, not for their employer's sake alone, but for the sake of their own year's labour and their own year's bread. The sheep have been driven off the land below; the cattle stand ranged shivering on high dykes inland; they will be saved in punts, if the wor

so much depends. As for the outer land, it is gone past hope; through the breach pours a roaring salt cataract, digging out a hole on the inside of the bank, which remains as a deep sullen pond for years to come. Hundreds, thousands of pounds are lost already,

e wild venison of the prim?val jungle; and produces crops capable of nourishing a hundred times as many human beings; and more-it produces men a hundred times as numerous as ever it produced before; more healthy and long-lived-and if

changeth, yield

ils himself

ustom should co