252 THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA. 



and example. From that furthest extremity of this great 

 inland Sea, where 



Mseotis sleeps, and hardly flows 

 The freezing Tanais through a waste of snows, 



to its egress in the Atlantic Ocean, we have a succession of 

 streams all more or less known to classical fame. We cannot 

 stop to enumerate them in full. But in naming the Don, 

 the Dnieper, the Danube, the Nile, the Po, the Rhone, and the 

 Ebro, as those of greatest length and volume, we leave to 

 the recollection of our readers those numerous lesser rivers 

 of Asia, Greece, and Italy the Mseander, Hebrus, Peneus, 

 Alpheus, Eurotas, Tiber, &c. which have become almost 

 as household words to our literature and speech. English 

 poetry, perhaps more than any other of modern time, has 

 drawn plenteously from these names and records of ancient 

 streams ; thereby satisfying at once those classical feelings 

 and that love of natural beauty, which we believe to be more 

 deeply cherished in England than in any other country. 



Of all the rivers which enter the Mediterranean, the Nile 

 is beyond doubt the most wonderful. Scarcely should we 

 err in calling it the most wonderful in the world. The 

 St. Lawrence, from the volume of water which it pours through 

 inland seas and forests, and over cataracts and rapids unri- 

 valled in grandeur, comes closest to it in the comparison. 

 But the latter river is utterly wanting in those marvellous 

 monuments of ancient empire which have hallowed the Nile 

 to all succeeding ages, and which we are still disinterring 

 and deciphering for those who come after us. Its waters, 

 while reflecting these great monuments as they flow through 

 Egypt, give exuberant fertility to a country which would 

 else have been a portion of the adjoining desert. The line 

 to which they reach in their annual flood, abruptly divides a 

 sterile sand from the most profuse and vigorous vegetation ; 



