shelter. The southern and eastern English seldom possess the vivid
imagination of the Briton, the Northumbrian, and the Scot; while the
rich lowlands of central, southern, and eastern England, well
peopled and well tilled, offered few spots lonely enough for the
hermit's cell.

One district only was desolate enough to attract those who wished to
be free from the world,--namely, the great fens north of Cambridge;
and there, accordingly, as early as the seventh century, hermits
settled in morasses now so utterly transformed that it is difficult
to restore in one's imagination the original scenery.

The fens in the seventh century were probably very like the forests
at the mouth of the Mississippi, or the swampy shores of the
Carolinas. Their vast plain is now, in summer, one sea of golden
corn; in winter, a black dreary fallow, cut into squares by stagnant
dykes, and broken only by unsightly pumping mills and doleful lines
of poplar-trees. Of old it was a labyrinth of black wandering
streams; broad lagoons; morasses submerged every spring-tide; vast
beds of reed and sedge and fern; vast copses of willow, alder, and
grey poplar, rooted in the floating peat, which was swallowing up
slowly, all-devouring, yet all-preserving, the forests of fir and
oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had once grown on that
low, rank soil, sinking slowly (so geologists assure us) beneath the
sea from age to age. Trees, torn down by flood and storm, floated
and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back upon the land.
Streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling
silt and sand with the peat moss. Nature, left to herself, ran into
wild riot and chaos more and more, till the whole fen became one
"Dismal Swamp," in which, at the time of the Norman Conquest, the