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It must, however, be confessed that it would be difficult at the present day to find poetry or beauty in the Fen country. The meres have been drained, the swamps have been reclaimed. The profusion of aquatic plants and wild-fowl has disappeared. Whittlesea Mere and Ramsey-Mere have been brought under the plough. Even the picturesque old windmills have given place to the hideous chimney-shafts of pumping stations worked by steam. We may almost parody the famous chapter of Olaus Magnus on "Snakes in Iceland," and say—there are no fens in the fen country. If we would know what the fens were once like, we must, read some of Tennyson's earlier poems, or better still perhaps, one of Kingsley's prose Idylls:
"A certain sadness is pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden of the Lord, where
'All the land in flowery squares,
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind,
Smell of the coming summer.'
And yet the fancy may linger, without blame, over the shining meres, the golden reed-beds, the countless water-fowl, the strange and gaudy insects, the wild nature, the mystery, the majesty—for mystery and majesty there were—which haunted the deep fens for many a hundred years. Little thinks the Scotsman, whirled down by the Great Northern Railway from Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place, even twenty years ago, was that Holme and Whittlesea which is now but a black, unsightly, steaming flat, from which the meres and reed-beds of the old world are gone, while the corn and roots of the new world have not as yet taken their place.
