At dawn a shallow crystal river runs over stones and waves green hair past ancient walls of flint, tall towers and many windows, with vines about the mullions, past desolate grass of old elmy meads, high-gated, and umbrageous roads winding white by carven gateways, under sycamore and elm and ash and many alders and haughty avenues of limes, past an old great church, past a park where elms and oaks and bushy limes hide a ruin among nettles and almost hide a large stone house from which peacocks shout, past a white farm, red-tiled, that stands with a village of its own thatched barns, cart-lodges and sheds under walnut and elm, enclosed within a circuit of old brick with a tower that looks along the waters. It is a place where man has known how to aid his own stateliness by that of Nature. The trees are grand and innumerable, but they stand about in aristocratic ways; the bright young water does not flout the old walls but takes the shadow of antiquity from them and lends them dew-dropping verdure in return. The pebbles under the waves are half of them fallen from the walls; the curves round which they bend are of masonry; so that it is unapparent and indifferent whether the masonry has been made to fit the stream or the stream persuaded to admit the masonry. As I look, I think of it as Statius thought of the Surrentine villa when he prayed that Earth would be kind to it and not throw off that ennobling yoke. Everywhere the river rushes and shines, or roars unseen behind trees. The sun is warm and the golden light hangs as if it were fruit among the leaves over the ripples. Above the stream the elms open apart and disclose a wandering grey land and clumps of beeches, a grey windy land and a grey windy sky in which the dark clumps are islanded. Flocks of sheep move to and fro, and with them the swallows. Two shepherds, their heavy grey overcoats slung about their shoulders and the sleeves dangling, their flat rush baskets on their backs, stand twenty yards apart to talk, leaning on their sticks, while their swallow-haunted flocks go more slowly and their two dogs converse and walk round one another.