Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/163

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ALONG THE GREEN NESHAMINY
147


ALONG THE GREEN NESHAMINY

There are scenes so rich in color, so flooded with sunlight, that the hand hardly knows how to set them down. They seem to yearn for expression in what is called poetry, yet one fears to submit them to the bending and twisting of rhyme. For when one embarks on the ecstatic search for words in tune with one another he may find bright and jovial cadences, but rarely does he say just what was in his heart. How, then, may one order the mysterious mechanism that gears brain with forefinger so that the least possible color and contour be lost in transmission?

The other day I rowed up Neshaminy Creek. It is a bright little river seventeen miles or so from Philadelphia, a stripling of the great-hearted Delaware. Its wooded and meaded banks are a favored pleasuring ground for pavement-keeping souls, who set up a tent there in the summertime and cruise those innocent waters in canoes. It is a happy stream, beloved of picnic parties. Millions of hard-boiled eggs and ice cream cones have perished in the grove above the dam, and a long avenue of stately poplar trees has grown up to commemorate them. The picnicking point is known as Neshaminy Falls, though the falling is done mostly by high-spirited flappers on the entertaining toboggan chute, down which they launch themselves in a cheering line. The river falls