The fly-fisher is a lover of Nature, pure and simple, and has a true and just appreciation of her poetic side, though he may lack the artist’s skill to limn her beauties, or the poet’s genius to describe them.
“To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.”
And what delightful converse she holds with the fly-fisher, as with rod and creel he follows the banks of the meandering stream, or wades its pellucid waters, easting, ever and anon, the gossamer leader and feathery lure into shadowy nooks, below sunny rapids, over foam-flecked eddies, and on silent pools. She speaks to him through the rustling leaves, murmurs to him from the flowing stream, and sighs to him in the summer breeze. She is vocal in a myriad of voices, and manifest in innumerable ways.
The still fisher, reclining on the mossy bank, is disposed to dreamy reveries, to pleasant fancies; but the fly-fisher, with quickened senses, has an ear for every sound, an eye for every object, and is alive to every motion. He hears the hum of the bee, the chirp of the cricket, the twitter of the sparrow, the dip of the swallow; he sees the gay butterfly in its uncertain flight, the shadow of the drifting cloud, the mossy rock, the modest violet, the open-eyed daisy; he is conscious of the passing breeze, of the mellow sunlight, of the odors of the flowers, of the fragrance of the fields. Nothing escapes his keen notice as he casts his flies, hither and yon, in the eager expectation of a rise.
Fly-fishing is, indeed, the poetry of angling. The capture of the salmon is an epic poem, the taking of the trout an idyl. But it is not my presumptuous purpose to ring the changes on the delights of salmon or trout fishing, for they have been immortalized by the pens of gifted anglers for ages. My feeble effort would be but a sorry imitation of those glorious spirits who have made their last cast, who have crossed to the other side of the river, and
“Gone before
To that unknown and silent shore.”
So, leaving the salmon, the trout, and the grayling to their well-earned laurels, I wish to say a word for several less pretentious, because less known, game-fishes, whose merits are perhaps as great for the fly-fisher as those familiar game-beauties of the waters.