Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/118

 tremity. The Church from its Churchyard looks down into the very River, which is fenced from it by a brick wall. The Ouse flows here, you cannot without study tell in which direction, fringed with gross reedy herbage and bushes; and is of the blackness of Acheron, streaked with foul metallic glitterings and plays of colour. For a short space downwards here, the banks of it are fully visible; the western row of houses being somewhat the shorter, as already hinted: instead of houses here, you have a rough wooden balustrade, and the black Acheron of an Ouse River used as a washing-place or watering-place for cattle. The old Church, suitable for such a population, stands yet as it did in Cromwell’s time, except perhaps the steeple and pews; the flagstones in the interior are worn deep with the pacing of many generations. The steeple is visible from several miles distance; a sharp high spire, piercing far up from amid the willow-trees. The country hereabouts has all a clammy look, clayey and boggy; the produce of it, whether bushes and trees, or grass and crops, gives you the notion of something lazy, dropsical, gross.—This is St. Ives, a most ancient Cattle-market by the shores of the sable Ouse, on the edge of the Fen-country; where, among other things that happened, Oliver Cromwell passed five years of his existence as a Farmer and Grazier. Who the primitive Ives himself was, remains problematic; Camden says he was ‘Ivo a Persian’;—surely far out of his road here! From him however, Phantasm as he is (being indeed nothing,—except an ancient ‘stone-coffin,’ with bones, and tatters of ‘bright cloth’ in it, accidentally ploughed up in this spot, and acted on by opaque human wonder, miraculous ‘dreams,’ and the ‘Abbot of Ramsey’), Church and Village indisputably took rise and name; about the Year 1000 or later;—and have stood ever since; being founded on Cattle-dealing and the firm Earth withal. Ives or Yves, the worthy Frenchman, Bishop of Chartres in the time of our