A RIVER VIEW 



A SMALL river or stream flowing by one's door 

 has many attractions over a large body of 

 water like the Hudson. One can make a compan- 

 ion of it; he can walk with it and sit with it, or 

 lounge on its banks, and feel that it is all his own. 

 It becomes something private and special to him. 

 You cannot have the same kind of attachment and 

 sympathy with a great river; it does not flow 

 through your affections like a lesser stream. The 

 Hudson is a long arm of the sea, and it has some- 

 thing of the sea's austerity and grandeur. I think 

 one might spend a lifetime upon its banks with- 

 out feeling any sense of ownership in it, or becoming 

 at all intimate with it: it keeps one at arm's length. 

 It is a great highway of travel and of commerce; 

 ships from all parts of our seaboard plow its waters. 



But there is one thing a large river does for 

 one that is beyond the scope of the companionable 

 streams, — it idealizes the landscape, it multiplies 

 and heightens the beauty of the day and of the sea- 

 son. A fair day it makes more fair, and a wild 

 and tempestuous day it makes more wild and tem- 

 pestuous. It takes on so quickly and completely 



