[6] The ditches of a fen so near the ocean are lined with irregular patches of a coarse and stained lava; a muddy sediment rests on the horse-tail and other perennial herbs, which in part conceal the shallowness of the stream; a fat-leaved pale-flowering scurvy-grass appears early in the year, and the razor-edged bull-rush in the summer and autumn. The fen itself has a dark and saline herbage; there are rushes and _arrow-head_, and in a few patches the flakes of the cotton-grass are seen, but more commonly the _sea-aster_, the dullest of that numerous and hardy genus; a _thrift_, blue in flower, but withering and remaining withered till the winter scatters it; the _saltwort_, both simple and shrubby; a few kinds of grass changed by their soil and atmosphere, and low plants of two or three denominations undistinguished in a general view of the scenery;--such is the vegetation of the fen when it is at a small distance from the ocean; and in this case there arise from it effluvia strong and peculiar, half-saline, half-putrid, which would be considered by most people as offensive, and by some as dangerous; but there are others to whom singularity of taste or association of ideas has rendered it agreeable and pleasant. TALE XI. _EDWARD SHORE._ Seem they grave or learned? Why, so didst thou [. . . . . . . . . . . .] seem they religious? Why, so didst thou; or are they spare in diet, Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger, Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood, Garnish’d and deck’d in modest compliment, Not working with the eye without the ear, And but [in] purged judgment trusting neither? Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem. _Henry V_. Act II. Scene 2. Better I were distract: So should my thoughts be sever’d from my griefs, And woes by strong imagination lose The knowledge of themselves. _Lear_, Act IV. Scene 6. TALE XI. _EDWARD SHORE._