ropes in passing the bridge. The fighting reddened the river for a day; the building was reflected there for a century or two; but the slow toil of man has outlasted them both. And, looking westward over the homely landscape, we realized the truth that Nature, too, is most in earnest when least dramatic; that her most terrible power is seen neither in the whirlwind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the catkins budding on the hazel—the still, small voice that proves she is not dead, but sleeping lightly, and already dreaming of the spring.
“Sed neque Medorum silvæ, ditissima terra—”
the note of Virgil’s praise of Italy was ours for a while, and
NEAR ECKINGTON
his pride to inherit a land of immemorial towns—a land made fertile by tillage and watered by “rivers stealing under hoary walls.”
STRENSHAM CHURCH
A little below the bridge Avon is joined by the Defford (or, as it was once called, Depeford) Brook, its last considerable tributary, which rises on the west of the Lickey Hills; and a little farther on we turn a sharp bend where, above the old willows on our right, a field of rank grass rises steeply to Strensham church and vicarage. Behind the stumpy tower lies Strensham village, not to be seen from the river. Here, in 1612, Samuel Butler was born, the author of “Hudibras,” and a monument stands to his memory within the church, beside other fine ones belonging to the Russell family. He was born in obscurity, and died a pauper—a poet (to use the words which Dennis wrote for his other monument in Westminster Abbey) who “was a whole species of poets in one; admirable in a manner in which no one else has been tolerable—a manner in which he knew no guide, and has found no follower.” Very few can read that epitaph without recalling the more famous epigram upon it: