Thames, the most loved of all the Ocean's sons
By his old sire, to his embraces runs:
Hasting to pay his tribute to the sea,
Like mortal life to meet eternity.
There is a pretty reach below Old Windsor, where willows and poplars are massed effectively. It is in places like this, where they grow abundantly, that the beautiful tawny colour which willows assume in the spring, just before bursting into leaf, can be best seen.
The Bells of Ouseley stands at a bend, and with its tinted walls and the old elm tree growing close to the entrance, is a typical old-English Inn. The road to Staines passes by the water's edge, and the guide-post is less reticent than guide-posts are wont to be, for it tells us this is the "Way to Staines, except at high-water."
As we pass softly back up the current to Eton, we think how often in this reach the incomparable Izaak and his friend Sir Henry Wotton fished together.
I sat down under a willow tree by the water side ... for I could there sit quietly, and, looking on the water, see some fishes sport themselves in the silver streams, others leaping at flies of several shapes and colours; ... looking down the meadows, could see here a boy gathering lilies and ladysmocks, and there a girl cropping culverkeys and cowslips.
Wotton built a fishing box a mile below the college, from which he and Walton often sallied forth during the fifteen years he was provost of Eton, and to his rod many a "jealous trout that low did lie, rose at a well dissembled fly," as he himself has left on record.
Ye distant spires, ye antique towers