Introductory material

I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry down, Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorps, a little town, And half a hundred bridges.

I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles. With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow, And many a fairy foreland set With willow-weed and mallow.

And here and there a foamy lake Upon me, as I travel With many a silvery waterbreak Above the golden gravel, And draw them all along, and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.