Mass
of the Ballon d'Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its richness is
used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of trees grow about it as
though they had been planted to please the eye.
Nothing can take from the sources of rivers their character of
isolation and repose. Here what are afterwards to become the
influences of the plains are nurtured and tended as though in an
orchard, and the future life of a whole fruitful valley with its regal
towns is determined. Something about these places prevents ingress or
spoliation. They will endure no settlements save of peasants; the
waters are too young to be harnessed; the hills forbid an easy
commerce with neighbours. Throughout the world I have found the heads
of rivers to be secure places of silence and content. And as they are
themselves a kind of youth, the early home of all that rivers must at
last become - I mean special ways of building and a separate state of
living, a local air and a tradition of history, for rivers are always
the makers of provinces - so they bring extreme youth back to one, and
these upper glens of the world steep one in simplicity and childhood.
It was my delight to lie upon a bank of the road and to draw what I
saw before me, which was the tender stream of the Moselle slipping
through fields quite flat and even and undivided by fences; its banks
had here a strange effect of Nature copying man's art: they seemed a
park, and the river wound through it full of the positive innocence
that attaches to virgins: it nourished and was guarded by trees.
There was about that scene something of creation and of a beginning,
and as I drew it, it gave me like a gift the freshness of the first
experiences of living and filled me with remembered springs. I mused
upon the birth of rivers, and how they were persons and had a
name - were kings, and grew strong and ruled great countries, and how
at last they reached the sea.
But while I was thinking of these things, and seeing in my mind a kind
of picture of The River Valley, and of men clustering around their
home stream, and of its ultimate vast plains on either side, and of
the white line of the sea beyond all, a woman passed me. She was very
ugly, and was dressed in black. Her dress was stiff and shining, and,
as I imagined, valuable. She had in her hand a book known to the
French as 'The Roman Parishioner', which is a prayer-book. Her hair
was hidden in a stiff cap or bonnet; she walked rapidly, with her eyes
on the ground. When I saw this sight it reminded me suddenly, and I
cried out profanely, 'Devil take me!
