Forgotten classics, from one to another

Last week, the person who runs the web site which hosts text versions of
classic fishing books reminded us all of Viscount Grey's turn of the (last)
century book. Reading through the first bit of Grey, I'd forgotten that he
mentions other authors in the oeuvre, including "Chalk-stream Studies", a
short piece by Charles Kingsley, originally published in Fraser's Magazine.
I dug up that essay (and was mildly surprised to find we have the 1858
Fraser's on the shelf, along with the not-surprising collected works of
Kingsley), and am herewith recommending it to you as an excellent forgotten
classic. I won't post the whole text here, as others might :-), but will
give a snippet so you can get the flavor. Kingsley being a reasonably
important Victorian, the full text is available at the following:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7032

And the snippet:

Fishing is generally associated in men¹s minds with wild mountain scenery; if
not with the alps and cataracts of Norway, still with the moors and lochs of
Scotland, or at least with the rocky rivers, the wooded crags, the crumbling
abbeys of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Hereford, or the Lowlands. And it cannot be
denied that much of the charm which angling exercises over cultivated minds,
is due to the beauty and novelty of the landscapes which surround him; to the
sense of freedom, the exhilarating upland air. Who would prefer the certainty
of taking trout out of some sluggish preserve, to the chance of a brace out of
Edno or Llyn Dulyn? The pleasure lies not in the prize itself, but in the
pains which it has cost; in the upward climbs through the dark plantations,
beside the rock-walled stream; the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay
flower-bed of blue and purple butter-wort; the steady breathless climb up the
crags, which looked but one mile from you when you started, so clear against
the sky stood out every knoll and slab; the first stars of the white
saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropt, as if a fairy had pricked her finger in
the cup, which shine upon some green cushion of wet moss, in a dripping crack
of the cliff; the first grey tufts of the Alpine club-moss, the first shrub of
crowberry, or sea-green rose-root, with its strange fleshy stems and leaves,
which mark the two-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning of the Alpine world;
the scramble over the arid waves of the porphyry sea aloft, as you beat round
and round like a weary pointer dog in search of the hidden lake; the last
despairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramid on Moel Meirch; the
hasty gaze around, far away into the green vale of Ffestiniog, and over wooded
flats, and long silver river-reaches, and yellow sands, and blue sea flecked
with flying clouds, and isles and capes, and wildernesses of mountain peaks,
east, west, south, and north; one glance at the purple gulf out of which
Snowdon rises, thence only seen in full majesty from base to peak: and then
the joyful run, springing over bank and boulder, to the sad tarn beneath your
feet: the loosening of the limbs, as you toss yourself, bathed in
perspiration, on the turf; the almost awed pause as you recollect that you are
alone on the mountain-tops, by the side of the desolate pool, out of all hope
of speech or help of man; and, if you break your leg among those rocks, may
lie there till the ravens pick your bones; the anxious glance round the lake
to see if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance through your book
to guess what they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue,
and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from
Amboyna or Brazil - may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to
cease for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those
Syenite cubes which will twist your ankles and break your shins for the next
three hours. What matter (to a minute philosopher, at least) if, after two
hours of such enjoyment as that, he goes down again into the world of man with
empty creel, or with a dozen pounders and two-pounders, shorter, gamer, and
redder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or Kennet? What matter? If he
has not caught them, he might have caught them; he has been catching them in
imagination all the way up; and if he be a minute philosopher, he holds that
there is no falser proverb than that devil¹s beatitude - ŒBlessed is he who
expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.¹

Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoys everything
once at least: and if it falls out true, twice also.

Enjoy!
Bill

William Claspy typed:
snip
What matter
(to a minute philosopher, at least) if, after two hours of such
enjoyment as that, he goes down again into the world of man with
empty creel, or with a dozen pounders and two-pounders, shorter,
gamer, and redder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or Kennet?
What matter? If he has not caught them, he might have caught them;
he has been catching them in imagination all the way up; and if he
be a minute philosopher, he holds that there is no falser proverb
than that devil¹s beatitude - OBlessed is he who expecteth nothing,
for he shall not be disappointed.¹

Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoys
everything once at least: and if it falls out true, twice also.

Amen, brother.

Being one of little attention span, I doubt I'll read the whole thing, but
this snippet you provide was sure enjoyable. Thanks Bill.

BTW, thinking of you and Chuck as I read "A Reverence for Wood"
--
TL,
Tim
------------------------
http://css.sbcma.com/timj/

On 1/30/06 11:18 AM, in article , "Tim J."
wrote:


BTW, thinking of you and Chuck as I read "A Reverence for Wood"

Mmmm, good stuff. Check out his "A Museum of Early American Tools" as well.
Not as lyrical as "Reverence" but awfully good as well. Especially for us
old tool junkies.

We'll have you hewing oak and fishing 'boo in no time, Tim!

Bill
(He of insanely long attention span, who fishes 'boo every chance he can
mooch.)

Tim J. wrote:

Being one of little attention span, I doubt I'll read the whole thing, but
this snippet you provide was sure enjoyable. Thanks Bill.

I'll add my thanks as well.

BTW, thinking of you and Chuck as I read "A Reverence for Wood"

I'll resist the opportunity to get a cheap laugh here. ;-)

I have to admit that I haven't read that one. But I do have a
couple of his other works stashed away somewhere.


Chuck Vance (oh, there they are ... under that pile of plane
shavings)

Bill:
Another web site with online versions of two of the oldest fishing
books is Renascence Editions:

Dame Julia Berner's A treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle is generally
regarded as the first angling book written in English - (1496)
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear...s/berners.html


Barker's Delight, or The Art of Angling - was written around the same
time as Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1650s)
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/barker1.html

- Henry
www.fishingclassics.com