ASHOW
this, we yearn to live here and pass our days in gratuitous melancholy.
We revisited Ashow next morning, and were less exacting. And the reason was, that it rained. Indeed, we were soaked to the skin before paddling a mile; and as for the canoe,
“Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.”
CHESFORD BRIDGE
We passed, like Mrs. Haller’s infant, “not dead, but very wet,” under old Chesford Bridge, whereby the road runs to Kenilworth, that lies two miles back from the river, and shall therefore, for once in its history, escape description; and from Chesford Bridge reached Blakedown Mill and another old bridge beside the miller’s house. This “simply elegant form of landscape” led Samuel Ireland to ask “why man should with such eager and restless ambition busy himself so often in the smoke and bustle of populous cities, and lose his independence and too often his peace in the pursuit of a phantom which almost eludes his grasp, little thinking that with the accumulation of wealth he must create imaginary wants, under which, perhaps, that wealth melts away as certainly as under the more ready inlet of inordinate passion happiness is sacrificed.” We infer that Mr. Samuel Ireland was never rained upon hereabouts.
BLAKEDOWN MILL