“Sitting like patience on a monument,”
and selling the remnant of his life below cost price in the pursuit of angling,—that “art of ingeniously tormenting,”—a feeling,
“More in sorrow than in anger,”
is excited at his profitless inhumanity.
Vainly do all the disciples of honest Izaak Walton discourse, in eulogistic strains, of the pleasure of the sport. I can imagine neither pleasure nor sport derivable from the infliction of pain upon the meanest thing endowed with life.
This may be deemed Brahminical, but I doubt that man's humanity who can indulge in the cruel recreation and murder while he smiles.
“What, heretical sentiments,” exclaims some brother of the angle, (now I am an angle, but no angler.) “This fellow hath never trudged at early dawn along the verdant banks of the 'sedgy lea,' and drunk in the dewy freshness of the morning air. His lines have never fallen in pleasant places. He has never performed a pilgrimage to Waltham Cross. He is, in truth, one of those vulgar minds who take more delight in the simple than the—gentle!—and every line of his deserves a rod!”
PRACTICE.
“Sweet is the breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds.”—-MILTON.