There we chartered a boat, and all that hot forenoon rowed lazily on, the oars grunting and dripping, the rudder clicking softly through avenues of reeds and water-plants, from reach to reach, from pool to pool.  Here we had a glimpse of the wide-watered valley rich in grass, here of silent woods, up-piled in the distance, over which quivered the hot summer air.  Here a herd of cattle stood knee-deep in the shallow water, lazily twitching their tails and snuffing at the stream.  The birds were silent now in the glowing noon; only the reeds shivered and bowed.  There, beside a lock with its big, battered timbers, the water poured green and translucent through a half-shut sluice.  Now and then the springs of thought brimmed over in a few quiet words, that came and passed like a breaking bubble—­but for the most part we were silent, content to converse with nod or smile.  And so we came at last to our goal; a house embowered in leaves, a churchyard beside the water, and a church that seemed to have almost crept to the brink to see itself mirrored in the stream.  The place mortals call Hemingford Grey, but it had a new name for me that day which I cannot even spell—­for the perennial difficulty that survives a hundred disenchantments, is to feel that a romantic hamlet seen thus on a day of pilgrimage, with its clustering roofs and chimneys, its waterside lawns, is a real place at all.  I suppose that people there live dull and simple lives enough, buy and sell, gossip and back-bite, wed and die; but for the pilgrim it seems an enchanted place, where there can be no care or sorrow, nothing hard, or unlovely, or unclean, but a sort of fairy-land, where men seem to be living the true and beautiful life of the soul, of which we are always in search, but which seems to be so strangely hidden away.  It must have been for me and my friend that the wise and kindly artist who lives there in a paradise of flowers had filled his trellises with climbing roses, and bidden the tall larkspurs raise their azure spires in the air.  How else had he brought it all to such perfection for that golden hour?  Perhaps he did not even guess that he had done it all for my sake, which made it so much more gracious a gift.  And then we learned too from a little red-bound volume which I had thought before was a guide-book, but which turned out to-day to be a volume of the Book of Life, that the whole place was alive with the calling of old voices.  At the little church there across the meadows the portly, tender-hearted, generous Charles James Fox had wedded his bride.  Here, in the pool below, Cowper’s dog had dragged out for him the yellow water-lily that he could not reach; and in the church itself was a little slab where two tiny maidens sleep, the sisters of the famous Miss Gunnings, who set all hearts ablaze by their beauty, who married dukes and earls, and had spent their sweet youth in a little ruined manor-house hard by.  I wonder whether after all the two little girls, who died in the time of roses, had not the better part; and whether the great Duchess, who showed herself so haughty to poor Boswell, when he led his great dancing Bear through the grim North, did not think sometimes in her state of the childish sisters with whom she had played, before they came to be laid in the cool chancel beside the slow stream.