Escape, and Other Essays

From the opening

I walked to-day down by the river side. The Cam is a stream much slighted by the lover of wild and romantic scenery; and its chief merit, in the eyes of our boys, is that it approaches more nearly to a canal in its straightness and the deliberation of its slow lapse than many more famous floods--and is therefore more adapted for the maneuvres of eight-oared boats! But it is a beautiful place, I am sure; and my ghost will certainly walk there, "if our loves remain," as Browning says, both for the sake of old memories and for the love of its own sweet peaceableness. I passed out of the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall looking over its barns and stacks. More and more willows, and then, lying back, an old grange, called Poplar Hall, among high-standing trees; and then a little weir, where the falling water makes a pleasant sound, and a black-timbered lock, with another old house near by, a secluded retreat for the bishops of Ely in medieval times. The bishop came thither by boat, no doubt, and abode there for a few quiet weeks, when the sun lay hot over the plain; and a little farther down is a tiny village called Horningsea, with a battlemented church among orchards and thatched houses, with its own disused wharf--a place which gives me the sense of a bygone age as much as any hamlet I know.

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