Vol. I.—23.
Bridge on the Road to Beckenham.
Bridge on the Road to Beckenham.
—Ancient Charity let flow this brook
Across the road, for sheep and beggar-men
To cool their weary feet, and slake their thirst.
*
On our way from Penge,[204] W. thought [this object] worth sketching. He occupied himself with his pencil, and I amused myself with dropping grains of dust among a fleet of tadpoles on the yellow sands, and watching their motions; a few inches from them, in a clearer shallow, lay a shoal of stickle-backs as on their Dogger-bank: a thread and a blood-worm, and the absence of my friend, and of certain feelings in behalf of the worms, would have afforded me excellent sport. The rivulet crosses the road from a meadow, where I heard it in its narrow channel, and muttering inwardly “the rapids are near,” from the “Canadian Boat-song,” I fell into a reverie on Wilson’s magnificent painting of the falls of Niagara, in Mr. Landseer’s painting-room. While I seated myself by the wayside, and, among ground-ivy and periwinkle, discriminating the diminutive forms of trees in the varied mosses of an old bank, I recollected descriptions I had read of transatlantic scenery, and the gigantic vegetation on the Ohio and Mississipi.
A labourer told us, that this little brook is called “Chaffinch’s River,” and that it springs from “the Alders,” near Croydon, and runs into the Ravensbourne.