Beside Freneau's own stream running through the valley of young pine-trees near the Hall the romantic Eleanor loved to come to dream. There one day she found another dreamer, and the chance meeting was the beginning of one of the most poetic love-affairs.
This pleasant stream was almost a human thing to the poet. In the days before he found his Eleanor seated on its bank he addressed to it his last musings on the vanished Belinda:
"Where the pheasant roosts at night,
Lonely, drowsy, out of sight,
Where the evening breezes sigh,
Solitary, there stray I.
"Close along the shaded stream,
Source of many a youthful dream,
Where branchy cedars dim the day,