Mr. Blennerhassett dawned upon me this morning, at the Lower End.
Before I permit him to dawn upon you, let me say something of the Lower End. I want you to know this length of the Clere because it is the most beautiful place in the world. Thus, as we go along I propose to do my best—my insufficient, my miserably insufficient best—to make you see it all as I see it.
I fancy that the sadness which sharpens our delight in any rarely beautiful experience arises from our knowledge that it is not to be captured. We are doomed to lose it. There is to be no putting of it away in a drawer, whence we shall be able to take it out and relive it again and again. Presently it will be gone, and no trick or force of memory shall bring it back. Again, we feel the hopelessness of any such attempt. These exquisite things of the senses may not be translated into any such cumbrous medium as language. But though we despair, we try.
Of the Lower End, then, I will say that it is broad and deep, dark, heavily weeded, flowing leisurely between rushes and reed beds and withy beds, under thick woods of beech and aspen and willow; a water for great fishes (not many), unfriendly to small, not to be netted, pike haunted.
