I should like to have met Izaak Walton. He is one of the few authors whom I know I should like to have met. For he was a wise man, and he had understanding. I should like to have gone angling with him, for I doubt not that like myself he was more of an angler theoretically than practically. My bookseller is a famous fisherman, as, indeed, booksellers generally are, since the methods employed by fishermen to deceive and to catch their finny prey are very similar to those employed by booksellers to attract and to entrap buyers.
As for myself, I regard angling as one of the best of avocations, and although I have pursued it but little, I concede that doubtless had I practised it oftener I should have been a better man. How truly has Dame Juliana Berners said that ``at the least the angler hath his wholesome walk and merry at his ease, and a sweet air of the sweet savour of the mead flowers that maketh him hungry; he heareth the melodious harmony of fowls; he seeth the young swans, herons, ducks, cotes, and many other fowls with their broods, which meseemeth better than all the noise of hounds, the blasts of horns, and the cry of fowls that hunters, falconers, and fowlers can make. And IF the angler take fish--surely then is there no man merrier than he is in his spirit!''
My bookseller cannot understand how it is that, being so enthusiastic a fisherman theoretically, I should at the same time indulge so seldom in the practice of fishing, as if, forsooth, a man should be expected to engage continually and actively in every art and practice of which he may happen to approve. My young friend Edward Ayer has a noble collection of books relating to the history of American aboriginals and to the wars waged between those Indians and the settlers in this country; my other young friend Luther Mills has gathered together a multitude of books treating of the Napoleonic wars; yet neither Ayer nor Mills hath ever slain a man or fought a battle, albeit both find delectation in recitals of warlike prowess and personal valor. Ilove the night and all the poetic influences of that quiet time, but I do not sit up all night in order to hear the nightingale or to contemplate the astounding glories of the heavens.
For similar reasons, much as I appreciate and marvel at the beauties of early morning, I do not make a practice of early rising, and sensible as I am to the charms of the babbling brook and of the crystal lake, I am not addicted to the practice of wading about in either to the danger either to my own health or to the health of the finny denizens in those places.
The best anglers in the world are those who do not catch fish;the mere slaughter of fish is simply brutal, and it was with a view to keeping her excellent treatise out of the hands of the idle and the inappreciative that Dame Berners incorporated that treatise in a compendious book whose cost was so large that only ``gentyll and noble men'' could possess it. What mind has he who loveth fishing merely for the killing it involves--what mind has such a one to the beauty of the ever-changing panorama which nature unfolds to the appreciative eye, or what communion has he with those sweet and uplifting influences in which the meadows, the hillsides, the glades, the dells, the forests, and the marshes abound?
Out upon these vandals, I say--out upon the barbarians who would rob angling of its poesy, and reduce it to the level of the butcher's trade! It becomes a base and vicious avocation, does angling, when it ceases to be what Sir Henry Wotton loved to call it-- ``an employment for his idle time, which was then not idly spent; a rest to his mind, a cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness, and a begetter of habits of peace and patience in those that professed and practised it!''
There was another man I should like to have met--Sir Henry Wotton; for he was an ideal angler. Christopher North, too (``an excellent angler and now with God''!) --how I should love to have explored the Yarrow with him, for he was a man of vast soul, vast learning, and vast wit.
``Would you believe it, my dear Shepherd,'' said he, ``that my piscatory passions are almost dead within me, and I like now to saunter along the banks and braes, eying the younkers angling, or to lay me down on some sunny spot, and with my face up to heaven, watch the slow-changing clouds!''
THERE was the angling genius with whom I would fain go angling!
``Angling,'' says our revered St. Izaak, ``angling is somewhat like poetry--men are to be born so.''
Doubtless there are poets who are not anglers, but doubtless there never was an angler who was not also a poet. Christopher North was a famous fisherman; he began his career as such when he was a child of three years. With his thread line and bent-pin hook the wee tot set out to make his first cast in ``a wee burnie'' he had discovered near his home. He caught his fish, too, and for the rest of the day he carried the miserable little specimen about on a plate, exhibiting it triumphantly. With that first experience began a life which I am fain to regard as one glorious song in praise of the beauty and the beneficence of nature.
