Beside the River
All day long the river has moved through my thought as it rolls through
the landscape spread out at my feet. There it lies, winding for many a
mile within the boundaries of this noble outlook; by day flecked with
sails approaching and receding, and at night shining under the full
moon like a girdle of silver, clasping mountains and broad meadow lands
in a varied but harmonious landscape. From the point at which I look
out upon its long course, the stream has a setting worthy of its volume
and its history. In the distant background a mountain range, of noble
altitude and outline, has today an ethereal strength and splendour; a
slight haze has obliterated all details, and left the great hills soft
and dream-like in the September sunshine; at first sight one waits to
see them vanish, but they remain, wrought upon by sunlight and
atmosphere, until the twilight touches them with purple and night turns
them into mighty shadows. On either hand, in the middle ground of the
picture, long lines of hills shut the river within a world of its own,
and shelter the green meadows, the fallow fields, and the stretches of
woodland that cover the broad sweep from the river's edge to their own
bases. Below me the quiet current enters the heart of another group of
mountains, flowing silently between the precipitous and rocky heights
that lift themselves on either hand, indifferent alike to the frowning
summits when the sun warms them with smiles, and to the black and
portentous shadows which they often cast across the channel at their
feet. The solitude and awe which belong to mountain passes through
which great rivers flow clothe this place with solemnity and majesty as
with a visible garment, and fill one with a sense of indescribable awe.
The river which lies before me moves through a mist of legend and
tradition as well as through a landscape of substantial history. It
has been called an epical river because of the varied and sustained
beauty through which it sweeps from its mountain sources to the sea;
but as I turn from it, and the visible loveliness of its banks fades
from sight, I recall that other landscape of history and legend through
which it rolls, and that, for the moment, is the reality, and the other
the shadow. A web of human associations spreads itself over this long
valley like a richer atmosphere; the fields are ripe with action and
achievement; every projecting point has its story, every gentle curve
and quiet inlet its memory; for many and many a decade of years life
has touched this silent stream and humanised its power and beauty until
it has become part of the vast human experience wrought out between
these mountain boundaries. As I think of these things and of the world
of dear past things which they recall, another great river sweeps into
the vision of memory, but how different! There comes with it no warmth
of human emotion, but only the breath of the unbroken woods, the awful
aspect of the great precipitous cliffs, the vast solitude out of which
it rolls, with troubled current, to mingle its mysterious waters with
the northern gulf. It is a stream which Nature still keeps for
herself, and suffers no division of ownership with men; a stream as
wild and solitary as the remote and unpeopled land through which it
moves. This river, on the other hand, bears every hour the wealth of a
great inland commerce upon its wide current; it flows past cities and
villages scattered thickly along its course, past countless homes whose
lights weave a shining net along its banks at night; on still Sabbath
mornings the bells answer each other in almost unbroken peal along its
course. Emerging from an unknown past in the earliest days of
discovery, human interests have steadily multiplied along its shores,
and spread over it the countless lines of human activity. To-day the
Argo, multiplied a thousand times, seeks the golden fleece of commerce
at every point along its shores; and of the countless Jasons who make
the voyage few return empty-handed. Hour after hour the white sails
fly in mysterious and changing lines, messengers of wealth and trade
and pleasure, whose voyages are no sooner ended than they begin again.
It is this wealth of action and achievement which make the names of
great rivers sonorous as the voices of the centuries; the Nile, the
Danube, the Rhine, the Hudson--how weighty are these words with
associations old as history and deep as the human heart!
The rivers are the great channels through which the ceaseless
interchange of the elements goes on; they unite the heart of the
continents and the solitary places of the mountains with the universal
sea which washes all shores and beats its melancholy refrain at either
pole. Into their currents the hills and uplands pour their streams; to
them the little rivulets come laughing and singing down from their
sources in the forest depths. A drop falling from a passing shower
into the lake of Delolo may be carried eastward, through the Zambesi,
to the Indian Ocean, or westward, along the transcontinental course of
the Congo, to the Atlantic. The mists that rise from great streams,
separated by vast stretches of territory, commingle in the upper air,
and are carried by vagrant winds to the wheat-fields of the far
Northwest or the rice-fields of the South. The ocean ceaselessly makes
the circuit of the globe, and summons its tributaries along all shores
to itself. But it gives even more lavishly than it receives; day and
night there rise over its vast expanse those invisible clouds of
moisture which diffuse themselves through the atmosphere, and descend
at last upon the earth to pour, sooner or later, into the rivers, and
be returned whence they came. This subtle commerce, universal
throughout the whole domain of nature, animate and inanimate, tells us
a common truth with the rose, and corrects the false report of the
senses that all things are fixed and isolated. It discloses a
communion of matter with matter, a fellowship of continent with
continent, an interchange of forces which throws a broad light on
things still deeper and more marvellous. It affirms the unity of all
created things and predicts the dawn of a new thought of the kinship of
races; there is in it the prophecy of new insights into the universal
life of men, of fellowships that shall rise to the recognition of new
duties, and of a well-being which shall bind the weakest to the
strongest, the poorest to the richest, the lowest to the highest, by
the golden bond of a diviner love.