Doth stand without compare, the very paragon.”
So began England’s descriptive poet, Michael Drayton, to sing the praises of the glorious Trent in his “Polyolbion;” but Milton was more terse in his invocation—
“Rivers, arise! whether thou be the son
Of utmost Tweed, or Ouse, or gulfy Don,
Or Trent, who, like some earth-born giant, spreads
His thirty arms along the indented meads.”
Thus much the poets; but in plain prose be it told that the Trent needed no invocation to “arise.” It had, and has, a tendency to arise and flood the meadows in its course most disastrously, as it did no later than last May. The many arches of its bridges tell the tale.
But long before bridges were built or were common, there was need to cross the river, either by ford or ferry, and its treachery must have been known in very ancient days, since Swark—whoever he might be, and whether he found a natural ford or made an artificial one—set up on end an unwrought monolith above the height of a man as a guide for wayfarers to find the crossing-place when the waters happened to be “out”; since there the waste and meadow-land lay low for many a broad mile.
There was scarcely a speck in the blue vault of heaven when Earl Bellamont and his friends, leaving a cloud of dust behind them, crossed the shrunken, snake-like river that mirrored their gleaming armour in its broken, scale-like wavelets, as if it held their images and would fain clasp them. And so the sun had shone for weeks,
“All in a hot and copper sky,”