With rushes fenced, with swaying osiers crowned, Old Thames from out the western country hies; By daisy-dappled meads his course is found, Bearing upon his breast brave argosies Of stately lilies. Poets loved to praise The stream whose tide doth calmly flow along, And this the echo of their tuneful lays: “_Sweet Themmes, runne softly till I ende my song._” Past town and village, cot and lonely farm, His silver stream with murm’ring music goes; Singing glad anthems, full of drowsy charm; Sweet songs of praise, unheeded not by those Who know his banks full well, who often love To roam his course, his marge to pace along, While Spenser’s line re-echoes as we rove: “_Sweet Themmes, runne softly till I ende my song._” THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES INTRODUCTORY The Thames we all know intimately, for the river was discovered by the holiday-maker in the ’seventies of the nineteenth century; but we do not all know the villages of the Thames Valley, and it was partly to satisfy a long-cherished curiosity on this point, and partly to make holiday in some of the little-known nooks yet remaining, that this tour was undertaken. To one who lives, or exists, or resides—the reader is invited to choose his own epithet—beside the lower Thames, there must needs at times come a longing to know that upper stream whence these mighty waters originate, to find that fount where “Father Thames” starts forth in hesitating, infantile fashion; to seek that spot where the stream, instead of flowing, merely trickles. To such an one there comes, with every recurrent spring, the longing to penetrate to the Beyond, away past where the towns and villages, the water-works and breweries cluster thickly beside the river-banks; above the town of Reading, the Biscuit Town, and town of sauce and seeds; beyond the fashionable summer scene of Henley Regatta, and past the city of Oxford, to the Upper River and its unconventionalised life.