On Flooding
I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been flooded in my absence, while I am in the mere country. My own Battersea has been, I understand, particularly favoured as a meeting of the waters. ' Battersea was already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of human localities. Now that it has the additional splendour of great sheets of water, there must he something quite incomparable in the landscape (or waterscape) of my romantic town.
Battersea must be a vision of Venice. The boat that brought the meat from the butcher's must have shot along these lanes of rippling silver- with the strange smoothness of the gondola($£jx/h In). The greengrocer who brought cabbages to the corner of the Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with the unearthly grace of the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly poetical as an island; and when a district is flooded it becomes an archipelago.
Some consider such romantic' views of flood or fire slightly lacking in reality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite as practical as the other. '! The true optimist who sees in such things an opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible than the ordinary "Indignant Ratepayer" who sees in them an opportunity for grumbling.4
Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield0 or having a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be supported, but scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception, and as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the very longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences—things altogether of the mind.
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