Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/70

 in a few minutes all is over, and the streets even more quiet and solitary than before. There is an air of much magnificence about the public buildings devoted to trade; and the larger shops wear the solid aspect of long-established business. But nothing seems more characteristic of the great manufacturing city, though disagreeably so, than the river Irwell, which runs through the place, dividing it into a lesser and larger town, that, though they bear different names, are essentially one. The hapless river—a pretty enough stream a few miles higher up, with trees overhanging its banks, and fringes of green sedge set thick along its edges—loses caste as it gets among the mills and the print-works. There are myriads of dirty things given it to wash, and whole wagonloads of poisons from dye-houses and bleach-yards thrown into it to carry away; steam-boilers discharge into it their seething contents, and drains and sewers their fetid impurities; till at length it rolls on,—here between tall dingy walls, there under precipices of red sandstone,—considerably less a river than a flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies, whether animal or vegetable, and which resembles nothing in nature, except perhaps the stream thrown out in eruption by some mud volcano. In passing along where the river sweeps by the old Collegiate Church, I met a party of town-police dragging a female culprit—delirious, dirty, and in drink—to the police-office; and I bethought me of the well-known comparison of Cowper, beginning,

Sweet stream, that winds through yonder glade, Apt emblem of a virtuous maid,"—

of the maudlin woman not virtuous,—and of the Irwell. According to one of the poets contemporary with him of Olney, slightly altered,