BESIDE THE RIVER. 69 



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 asso 

 ciations 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 soli 

 tary 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 transcon 

 tinental 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 ex 

 panse those invisible clouds of moisture which dif- 



