Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, in that valuable but over-capitalized
book, MY NOVEL, makes use of Fishing for Allegorical Purposes. The
episode of John Burley and the One-eyed Perch not only points a
Moral but adorns the Tale.
In the works of R. D. Blackmore, angling plays a less instructive
but a pleasanter part. It is closely interwoven with love. There
is a magical description of trout-fishing on a meadow-brook in ALICE
LORRAINE. And who that has read LORNA DOONE, (pity for the man or
woman that knows not the delight of that book!) can ever forget how
young John Ridd dared his way up the gliddery water-slide, after
loaches, and found Lorna in a fair green meadow adorned with
flowers, at the top of the brook?
I made a little journey into the Doone Country once, just to see
that brook and to fish in it. The stream looked smaller, and the
water-slide less terrible, than they seemed in the book. But it was
a mighty pretty place after all; and I suppose that even John Ridd,
when he came back to it in after years, found it shrunken a little.
All the streams were larger in our boyhood than they are now,
except, perhaps, that which flows from the sweetest spring of all,
the fountain of love, which John Ridd discovered beside the
Bagworthy River,--and I, on the willow-shaded banks of the Patapsco,
where the Baltimore girls fish for gudgeons,--and you? Come, gentle
reader, is there no stream whose name is musical to you, because of
a hidden spring of love that you once found on its shore? The
waters of that fountain never fail, and in them alone we taste the
undiminished fulness of immortal youth.
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