A few paces from the church the river runs silently and strongly to the great weir below.  To-day it was swollen with rain and turbid, and plucked steadily at the withies.  To-day the stream, which is generally full of life, was almost deserted.  But it came into my head what an allegory it made.  Here through the unvisited meadows, with their huge elms, runs this thin line of glittering vivid life; you hear, hidden in dark leaves, the plash of oars, the grunt of rowlocks, and the chatter of holiday folk, to whom the river-banks are but a picture through which they pass, and who know nothing of the quiet fields that surround them.  That, I thought, following a train of reflection, is like life itself, moving in its bright, familiar channel, so unaware of the broad tracts of mystery that hem it in.  May there not be presences, unseen, who look down wondering—­as I look to-day through my screen of leafy boughs—­on the busy-peopled stream that runs so merrily between its scarped banks of clay?  I know not; yet it seems as though it might be so.

Beneath the weir, with its fragrant, weedy scent, where the green river plunges and whitens through the sluices, lies a deep pool, haunted by generations of schoolboys, who wander, flannelled and straw-hatted, up through the warm meadows to bathe.  In such sweet memories I have my part, when one went riverwards with some chosen friend, speaking with the cheerful frankness of boyhood of all our small concerns, and all we meant to do; and then the cool grass under the naked feet, the delicious recoil of the fresh, tingling stream, and the quiet stroll back into the ordered life so full of simple happiness.

    “Ah! happy fields, ah! pleasing shade,
      Ah! fields beloved in vain!”

sang the sad poet of Eton—­but not in vain, I think, for these old beautiful memories are not sad; the good days are over and gone, and they cannot be renewed; but they are like a sweet spring of youth, whose waters fail not, in which a tired soul may bathe and be clean again.  They may bring back

    “The times when I remember to have been
      Joyful, and free from blame.”

To be pensive, not sentimental, is the joy of later life.  The thought of the sweet things that have had an end, of life lived out and irrevocable, is not a despairing thought, unless it is indulged with an unavailing regret.  It is rather to me a sign that, whatever we may be or become, we are surrounded with the same quiet beauty and peace, if we will but stretch out our hands and open our hearts to it.  To grow old patiently and bravely, even joyfully—­that is the secret; and it is as idle to repine for the lost joys as it would have been in the former days to repine because we were not bigger and stronger and more ambitious.  Life, if it does not become sweeter, becomes more interesting; fresh ties are formed, fresh paths open out; and there should come, too, a simple serenity of living, a certainty that, whatever befall, we are in wise and tender hands.