A river is the most human and companionable of all inanimate things. It
has a life, a character, a voice of its own, and is as full of good
fellowship as a sugar-maple is of sap. It can talk in various tones,
loud or low, and of many subjects, grave and gay. Under favourable
circumstances it will even make a shift to sing, not in a fashion that
can be reduced to notes and set down in black and white on a sheet of
paper, but in a vague, refreshing manner, and to a wandering air that
goes;
“_Over the hills and far away_.”
For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal
kingdom that is comparable to a river.
I will admit that a very good case can be made out in favour of some
other objects of natural affection. For example, a fair apology has been
offered by those ambitious persons who have fallen in love with the sea.
But, after all, that is a formless and disquieting passion. It lacks
solid comfort and mutual confidence. The sea is too big for loving, and
too uncertain. It will not fit into our thoughts. It has no personality
because it has so many. It is a salt abstraction. You might as well
think of loving a glittering generality like “the American woman.” One
would be more to the purpose.
Mountains are more satisfying because they are more individual. It is
possible to feel a very strong attachment for a certain range whose
outline has grown familiar to our eyes, or a clear peak that has looked
down, day after day, upon our joys and sorrows, moderating our passions
with its calm aspect. We come back from our travels, and the sight of
such a well-known mountain is like meeting an old friend unchanged. But
it is a one-sided affection. The mountain is voiceless and
imperturbable; and its very loftiness and serenity sometimes make us the
more lonely.
Trees seem to come closer to our life. They are often rooted in our
richest feelings, and our sweetest memories, like birds, build nests in
their branches. I remember, the last time that I saw James Russell
Lowell, (only a few weeks before his musical voice was hushed,) he
walked out with me into the quiet garden at Elmwood to say good-bye.
There was a great horse-chestnut tree beside the house, towering above
the gable, and covered with blossoms from base to summit,—a pyramid of
green supporting a thousand smaller pyramids of white. The poet looked
up at it with his gray, pain-furrowed face, and laid his trembling hand
upon the trunk. “I planted the nut,” said he, “from which this tree
grew. And my father was with me and showed me how to plant it.”
Yes, there is a good deal to be said in behalf of tree-worship; and when
I recline with my friend Tityrus beneath the shade of his favourite oak,
I consent in his devotions. But when I invite him with me to share my
orisons, or wander alone to indulge the luxury of grateful, unlaborious
thought, my feet turn not to a tree, but to the bank of a river, for
there the musings of solitude find a friendly accompaniment, and human
intercourse is purified and sweetened by the flowing, murmuring water.
It is by a river that I would choose to make love, and to revive old
friendships, and to play with the children, and to confess my faults,
and to escape from vain, selfish desires, and to cleanse my mind from
all the false and foolish things that mar the joy and peace of living.
Like David’s hart, I pant for the water-brooks. There is wisdom in the
advice of Seneca, who says, “Where a spring rises, or a river flows,
there should we build altars and offer sacrifices.”
The personality of a river is not to be found in its water, nor in its
bed, nor in its shore. Either of these elements, by itself, would be
nothing. Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream in a walled
channel of stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what Charles
Lamb calls “a mockery of a river—a liquid artifice—a wretched conduit.”
But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is
left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the
bosom of the earth.
The life of a river, like that of a human being, consists in the union
of soul and body, the water and the banks. They belong together. They
act and react upon each other. The stream moulds and makes the shore;
hollowing out a bay here, and building a long point there; alluring the
little bushes close to its side, and bending the tall slim trees over
its current; sweeping a rocky ledge clean of everything but moss, and
sending a still lagoon full of white arrow-heads and rosy knotweed far
back into the meadow. The shore guides and controls the stream; now
detaining and now advancing it; now bending it in a hundred sinuous
curves, and now speeding it straight as a wild-bee on its homeward
flight; here hiding the water in a deep cleft overhung with green
branches, and there spreading it out, like a mirror framed in daisies,
to reflect the sky and the clouds; sometimes breaking it with sudden
turns and unexpected falls into a foam of musical laughter, sometimes
soothing it into a sleepy motion like the flow of a dream.
Is it otherwise with the men and women whom we know and like? Does not
the spirit influence the form, and the form affect the spirit? Can we
divide and separate them in our affections?
I am no friend to purely psychological attachments. In some unknown
future they may be satisfying, but in the present I want your words and
your voice with your thoughts, your looks and your gestures to interpret
your feelings. The warm, strong grasp of Greatheart’s hand is as dear to
me as the steadfast fashion of his friendships; the lively, sparkling
eyes of the master of Rudder Grange charm me as much as the nimbleness
of his fancy; and the firm poise of the Hoosier Schoolmaster’s shaggy
head gives me new confidence in the solidity of his views of life. I
like the pure tranquillity of Isabel’s brow as well as her—
“_most silver flow
Of subtle-pacèd counsel in distress._”
The soft cadences and turns in my lady Katrina’s speech draw me into the
humour of her gentle judgments of men and things. The touches of
quaintness in Angelica’s dress, her folded kerchief and smooth-parted
hair, seem to partake of herself, and enhance my admiration for the
sweet order of her thoughts and her old-fashioned ideals of love and
duty. Even so the stream and its channel are one life, and I cannot
think of the swift, brown flood of the Batiscan without its shadowing
primeval forests, or the crystalline current of the Boquet without its
beds of pebbles and golden sand and grassy banks embroidered with
flowers.
Every country—or at least every country that is fit for habitation—has
its own rivers; and every river has its own quality; and it is the part
of wisdom to know and love as many as you can, seeing each in the
fairest possible light, and receiving from each the best that it has to
give. The torrents of Norway leap down from their mountain home with
plentiful cataracts, and run brief but glorious races to the sea. The
streams of England move smoothly through green fields and beside
ancient, sleepy towns. The Scotch rivers brawl through the open moorland
and flash along steep Highland glens. The rivers of the Alps are born in
icy caves, from which they issue forth with furious, turbid waters; but
when their anger has been forgotten in the slumber of some blue lake,
they flow down more softly to see the vineyards of France and Italy, the
gray castles of Germany, the verdant meadows of Holland. The mighty
rivers of the West roll their yellow floods through broad valleys, or
plunge down dark cañons. The rivers of the South creep under dim
arboreal archways hung with banners of waving moss. The Delaware and the
Hudson and the Connecticut are the children of the Catskills and the
Adirondacks and the White Mountains, cradled among the forests of spruce
and hemlock, playing through a wild woodland youth, gathering strength
from numberless tributaries to bear their great burdens of lumber and
turn the wheels of many mills, issuing from the hills to water a
thousand farms, and descending at last, beside new cities, to the
ancient sea.
Every river that flows is good, and has something worthy to be loved.
But those that we love most are always the ones that we have known
best,—the stream that ran before our father’s door, the current on which
we ventured our first boat or cast our first fly, the brook on whose
banks we first picked the twinflower of young love. However far we may
travel, we come back to Naaman’s state of mind: “Are not Abana and
Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?”
It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always the
most agreeable, nor the best to live with. Diogenes must have been an
uncomfortable bedfellow: Antinoüs was bored to death in the society of
the Emperor Hadrian: and you can imagine much better company for a
walking-trip than Napoleon Bonaparte. Semiramis was a lofty queen, but I
fancy that Ninus had more than one bad quarter-of-an-hour with her: and
in “the spacious times of great Elizabeth” there was many a milkmaid
whom the wise man would have chosen for his friend, before the royal
red-haired virgin. “I confess,” says the poet Cowley, “I love Littleness
almost in all things. A little convenient Estate, a little cheerful
House, a little Company, and a very little Feast, and if I were ever to
fall in Love again, (which is a great Passion, and therefore, I hope, I
have done with it,) it would be, I think, with Prettiness, rather than
with Majestical Beauty. I would neither wish that my Mistress, nor my
Fortune, should be a _Bona Roba_, as _Homer_ uses to describe his
Beauties, like a daughter of great _Jupiter_ for the stateliness and
largeness of her Person, but as _Lucretius_ says:
‘_Parvula, pumilio, Χαρίτων μία, tota merum sal._’”
Now in talking about women it is prudent to disguise a prejudice like
this, in the security of a dead language, and to intrench it behind a
fortress of reputable authority. But in lowlier and less dangerous
matters, such as we are now concerned with, one may dare to speak in
plain English. I am all for the little rivers. Let those who will, chant
in heroic verse the renown of Amazon and Mississippi and Niagara, but my
prose shall flow—or straggle along at such a pace as the prosaic muse
may grant me to attain—in praise of Beaverkill and Neversink and
Swiftwater, of Saranac and Raquette and Ausable, of Allegash and
Aroostook and Moose River. “Whene’er I take my walks abroad,” it shall
be to trace the clear Rauma from its rise on the _fjeld_ to its rest in
the _fjord_; or to follow the Ericht and the Halladale through the
heather. The Ziller and the Salzach shall be my guides through the
Tyrol; the Rotha and the Dove shall lead me into the heart of England.
My sacrificial flames shall be kindled with birch-bark along the wooded
stillwaters of the Penobscot and the Peribonca, and my libations drawn
from the pure current of the Ristigouche and the Ampersand, and my altar
of remembrance shall rise upon the rocks beside the falls of Seboomok.
I will set my affections upon rivers that are not too great for
intimacy. And if by chance any of these little ones have also become
famous, like the Tweed and the Thames and the Arno, I at least will
praise them, because they are still at heart little rivers.
If an open fire is, as Charles Dudley Warner says, the eye of a room;
then surely a little river may be called the mouth, the most expressive
feature, of a landscape. It animates and enlivens the whole scene. Even
a railway journey becomes tolerable when the track follows the course of
a running stream.
What charming glimpses you catch from the window as the train winds
along the valley of the French Broad from Asheville, or climbs the
southern Catskills beside the Æsopus, or slides down the Pusterthal with
the Rienz, or follows the Glommen and the Gula from Christiania to
Throndhjem. Here is a mill with its dripping, lazy wheel, the type of
somnolent industry; and there is a white cascade, foaming in silent
pantomime as the train clatters by; and here is a long, still pool with
the cows standing knee-deep in the water and swinging their tails in
calm indifference to the passing world; and there is a lone fisherman
sitting upon a rock, rapt in contemplation of the point of his rod. For
a moment you become a partner of his tranquil enterprise. You turn
around, you crane your neck to get the last sight of his motionless
angle. You do not know what kind of fish he expects to catch, nor what
species of bait he is using, but at least you pray that he may have a
bite before the train swings around the next curve. And if perchance
your wish is granted, and you see him gravely draw some unknown,
reluctant, shining reward of patience from the water, you feel like
swinging your hat from the window and crying out “Good luck!”
Little rivers seem to have the indefinable quality that belongs to
certain people in the world,—the power of drawing attention without
courting it, the faculty of exciting interest by their very presence and
way of doing things.
The most fascinating part of a city or town is that through which the
water flows. Idlers always choose a bridge for their place of meditation
when they can get it; and, failing that, you will find them sitting on
the edge of a quay or embankment, with their feet hanging over the
water. What a piquant mingling of indolence and vivacity you can enjoy
by the river-side! The best point of view in Rome, to my taste, is the
Ponte San Angelo; and in Florence or Pisa I never tire of loafing along
the Lung’ Arno. You do not know London until you have seen it from the
Thames. And you will miss the charm of Cambridge unless you take a
little boat and go drifting on the placid Cam, beneath the bending
trees, along the backs of the colleges.
But the real way to know a little river is not to glance at it here or
there in the course of a hasty journey, nor to become acquainted with it
after it has been partly civilised and spoiled by too close contact with
the works of man. You must go to its native haunts; you must see it in
youth and freedom; you must accommodate yourself to its pace, and give
yourself to its influence, and follow its meanderings whithersoever they
may lead you.
Now, of this pleasant pastime there are three principal forms. You may
go as a walker, taking the river-side path, or making a way for yourself
through the tangled thickets or across the open meadows. You may go as a
sailor, launching your light canoe on the swift current and committing
yourself for a day, or a week, or a month, to the delightful
uncertainties of a voyage through the forest. You may go as a wader,
stepping into the stream and going down with it, through rapids and
shallows and deeper pools, until you come to the end of your courage and
the daylight. Of these three ways I know not which is best. But in all
of them the essential thing is that you must be willing and glad to be
led; you must take the little river for your guide, philosopher, and
friend.
And what a good guidance it gives you. How cheerfully it lures you on
into the secrets of field and wood, and brings you acquainted with the
birds and the flowers. The stream can show you, better than any other
teacher, how nature works her enchantments with colour and music.