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Updated: May 7, 2025
I left the road at a point where a low bank started across the marsh like a long protecting arm reaching out around the hay-meadows, dragging them away from the grasping river, and gathering them out of the vast undrained tract of coarse sedges, to hold them to the upland.
So, when the clouds have rolled away, and no more mists from the undrained swamps of selfishness and sin and animal nature rise up to hide the radiance, there shall be a fuller flood of light poured from the re-created sun. That brightness thus promised has for its highest and most blessed character that it is conformity to the Lord Himself.
Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and fever.
There is a sullenness in some men's minds, a gloom and a bitter air that rises up from the unploughed, undrained, unweeded, uncultivated fens of their hearts that chills and blasts all the feeble beginnings of a better life. The natural and constitutional obstinacy of the obstinate heart is exasperated when it comes to deal with the things of God.
As a river system advances toward maturity the deepening and extending valleys of the tributaries lower the ground-water surface and invade the undrained depressions of the region. Lakes having outlets are drained away as their basin rims are cut down by the outflowing streams, a slow process where the rim is of hard rock, but a rapid one where it is of soft material such as glacial drift.
The low wet grounds were still undrained, and the number of cases of eye-disease which we find in the legends of miraculous cures point to the prevalence of ophthalmia brought on by damp and low living, as the army of lepers points to the filth and misery of the poor .The "common fields" and pastures of the villages must have lain on the higher grounds which were not mere swamps during half the year.
These patriarchs, undeterred by the terrible solitudes to which they were going, by the undrained swamps and untracked forests, journeyed to their allotted possessions, and commenced the settlement of the continents. In seventy years the Asiatic family had increased to several hundred.
Nor was any poetry to be expected from the cowboys who managed the cattle ranches at the foot hills of the Alps and the buffalo herds along the undrained lowlands. Is Vergil's scenery then nothing but literary reminiscence? In point of fact the pastoral scenery in Vergil is Neapolitan.
It is a true copy of one of the features which make up the aspect 'of the State, and of every State where the moral leprosy of slavery covers the people with its noisome scales; a deadening lethargy benumbs the limbs of the body politic; a stupor settles on the arts of life; agriculture reluctantly drags the plough and harrow to the field, only when scourged by necessity; the axe drops from the woodman's nerveless hand the moment his fire is scantily supplied with fuel; and the fen, undrained, sends up its noxious exhalations, to rack with cramps and agues the frame already too much enervated by a moral epidemic to creep beyond the sphere of the material miasm."
There are earls and countesses as there used to be mastodons and other senseless, over-grown brutes roaming miserable and hungry through the undrained woods, cold, comfortless, unwieldy things, which have perished in the general progress. The big things have all to give way to the intellect of those which are more finely made."
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