WATER WORSHIP IN DERBYSHIRE

ANY who cast their thoughts back to the condition of mankind when the world

MAN

was young must often sigh for a temporary draught of the waters of Lethe. To be able to confront nature after the manner of primitive man would be an intensely interesting experiment; to erase from recollection the rich spoils of time;" to have a mind blank of all the multifarious knowledge industriously compiled through the long ages of civilization.

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What would be the result of such an experience? Perhaps here and there among the readers of these lines there may be an occasional one able to frame a half-answer to the question: one who, early in life, when the brain was not so fully stored as in after years, has had moments of absolute aloneness with nature, and been startled with the realization of an objective presence which oppressed the spirit. Such an event happened in the mental history of Wordsworth. As F. W. H. Myers has pointed out

in his illuminating study of that poet, there is a passage in the "Prelude " in which "the boy's mind is represented as passing through precisely the train of emotion which we may imagine to be at the root of the theology of many barbarous people. He is rowing at night alone on Esthwaite Lake, his eyes fixed upon a ridge of crags, above which nothing is visible:

'I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And as I rose upon the stroke my boat

Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct

Upreared its head. I struck and struck again;
And growing still in stature, the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own,
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow-tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood. But after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness - call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.'

Perhaps in all modern poetry there is no other passage quite comparable to this for the illustration it affords of the manner in which the

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objects of nature can impress the mind with that awe which is the foundation of savage creeds, while yet they are not identified with any human intelligence."

But, inasmuch as primitive man has not yet disappeared from the earth, the process can also be illustrated from the records of travel among untutored races. One observer tells us that on the river Niger, canoemen may often be seen bending over the water in converse with its spirit, and another states that the native boatmen continually bawl through trumpets to the river fetich, and that the echo to the call is interpreted as the spirit's reply. Among all the races who still represent the dawn in the history of civilization the various aspects of nature have their special deities. And conspicuous among these are the gods who preside over ocean, or river, or spring. "What ethnography has to teach," writes E. B. Tylor, " of that great

element of the religion of mankind, the worship of well and lake, brook and river, is simply this that what is poetry to us was philosophy to early man; that to his mind water acted not by laws of force, but by life and will; that the water-spirits of primæval mythology are as souls which cause the water's rush and rest, its kindness and its cruelty; that, lastly, man finds in the beings which, with such power, can work him weal and woe, deities to be feared and loved, to be prayed to and praised, and propitiated with sacrificial gifts."

Such mingled feelings of fear and affection persisted in the high civilization attained by the Greeks and Romans. They, it will be recalled, always entered the bath with uncovered heads, and indulged universally in votive offerings by the side of springs and fountains. Horace

declared it was because he was a friend to the springs and fountains that the Muses had protected his life at Philippi and rescued him on many other occasions; and the spirit of worship breaths through every line of his immortal ode to the fountain of Bandusia:

"O babbling Spring, than glass more clear,
Worthy of wreath and cup sincere,

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To-morrow shall a kid be thine

With swelled and sprouting brows for sign,
Sure sign! - of loves and battles near.

I Child of the race that butt and rear!

Not less, alas! his life blood dear
Must tinge thy cold wave crystalline,
O babbling Spring!

"Thee Sirius knows not. Thou dost cheer
With pleasant cool the plough-worn steer,-
The wandering flock. This verse of mine
Will rank thee one with founts divine;
Men shall thy rock and tree revere,
O babbling Spring!"

To the modern mind, as Mr. Tylor remarks, all this is poetry rather than philosophy. The reason is obvious. Reservoirs and water-rates are ruthless destroyers of sentiment. It is difficult to appreciate in the twentieth century that state of mind which created the waterworship of the long-ago. While the modern man is called upon to compound for his supply of water in hard cash, it is improbable that he will be caught again in that attitude of adoration which primitive man assumed in the presence of fountain or well.

Yet the cult is not dead, even among civilized people. There are two or three villages in England where, once a year, the water-spirits are