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.
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