Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861)

Extracts from The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich: The Highland Stream

THERE is a stream (I name not its name, lest inquisitive tourist

Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide-books),

Springing far off from a loch unexplored in the folds of great mountains,

Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped

Then for four more in a forest of pine, where broad and ample

Spreads, to convey it, the glen with heathery slopes on both sides:

Broad and fair the stream, with occasional falls and narrows;

But, where the glen of its course approaches the vale of the river,

Met and blocked by a huge interposing mass of granite,

Scarce by a channel deep-cut, raging up, and raging onward,

Forces its flood through a passage so narrow a lady would step it.

There, across the great rocky wharves, a wooden bridge goes,

Carrying a path to the forest; below, three hundred yards, say,

Lower in level some twenty-five feet, through flats of shingle,

Stepping-stones and a cart-track cross in the open valley.

But in the interval here the boiling pent-up water

Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a basin,

Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury

Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror;

Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under;

Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam uprising

Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness,

Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch boughs,

Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway,

Still more enclosed from below by wood and rocky projection.

You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water,

Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.

Here, the pride of the plunger, you stride the fall and clear it;

Here, the delight of the bather, you roll in beaded sparklings,

Here into pure green depth drop down from lofty ledges.