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Updated: April 30, 2025
Sweet they would have been anywhere to any eye or mind; but I was a homeless trooper lad, and sweeter to the soldier boy than water on the battlefield are short hours with ladies who love him for his banner and his rags. These four were charmed with an old field given up to sedge, its deep rain-gullies as red as gaping wounds, its dead trees in tatters of long gray moss.
By and by, however, I hooked a four-pound pickerel and he stirred my lagging ambition. I waded on, casting and playing beyond the lily pads and sedge. At last I got my first bass, a small one, and had scarcely landed him than a big fellow struck, fought, rose and broke away. That was spur sufficient. All the forenoon I waded about the shores of that pond.
But we soon found the stream in the hollow. Broader than a brook and yet not quite a river, it flowed swift and clear, so that every flint at the bottom was visible. The nut-tree bushes came down to the edge: the ground was too firm for much rush or sedge; the streams that come out of the chalk are not so thickly fringed with vegetation as others.
Beautifully new, again, is the poem beginning, "I wander by the edge," which expresses the desolation of love as it is expressed in few modern poems: I wander by the edge Of this desolate lake Where wind cries in the sedge: Until the axle break That keeps the stars in their round And hands hurl in the deep The banners of East and West And the girdle of light is unbound, Your breast will not lie by the breast Of your beloved in sleep.
On a sudden, having uttered a most impious oath, he cried, `I am resolved to bear it no longer, and directly threw himself into the water. I immediately started, and ran towards the place, calling at the same time as loudly as I could for assistance. An angler happened luckily to be a-fishing a little below me, though some very high sedge had hid him from my sight.
"I'm a stranger; and when I saw yon bit of cool, gray water, and the pines clustering round, and the wee green faery isle in the midst with the bridge holding onto it to keep it from disappearing entirely and the sand so white, and the lawns so green why, it looked like a Japanese garden set in a great sedge bowl. Do you wonder I had to come closer and see it better?"
The sweet notes set Frank Gowan thinking of the broad marshy fields down by the river, bordered with sedge, reed, and butter-bur, where the clear waters raced along, and the trout could be seen waiting for the breakfast swept down by the stream where the marsh marigolds studded the banks with their golden chalices, the purple loosestrife grew in brilliant beds of colour, and the creamy meadow-sweet perfumed the morning air.
It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down but with a shudder even more thrilling than before upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
At times, over the sloping stubbles, broke the sound of the sportsman's gun; and ever and anon, by stream and sedge, they startled the shy wild fowl, just come from the far lands, nor yet settled in the new haunts too soon to be invaded. But there was no longer in the travellers the same hearts that had made light of hardship and fatigue.
Just then the road was leading them along by the bank of a fine old hammer pond, a great black-looking pool surrounded by a dense growth of alders and water-loving shrubs, while sedge, reed, and rush flourished wonderfully, and formed a mazy home for the abundant moorhens and coots.
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