She has unrolled on it a carpet of
various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents
sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen
into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower
barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and shaggy
with bristling reeds. It is a wilderness, but not unrelieved with
here and there an oasis, where, like islands left high and dry in a
deserted ocean bed, one and another rocky knoll lift up above the
waste flats around them some acres of sweet grass, or a broad field of
flowering mustard, shining with a splendour as of cloth of gold, and
fringed with a loop or two of silver braid by the river winding at the
base. There is animate life, too, sprinkled not stintedly over its
surface, not only of visitant sea-fowl from the shore, or solitude-
loving creatures native to the place--plover and duck and long-winged
herons, but also of cattle and horses grazing on the cultivated edges
of the marsh, which make us look for the homes of their human masters
at no great distance.
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