ide. Continents
and islands grow old, and waste and disappear. The hardest rock
crumbles; vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being, wax great,
decline, and perish, to give way to others, even as human dynasties and
nations and races come and go. Look on me! 'Time writes no wrinkle' on
my forehead. Listen to me! All tongues are spoken on my shores, but I
have only one language: the winds taught me their vowels the crags and
the sands schooled me in my rough or smooth consonants. Few words are
mine but I have whispered them and sung them and shouted them to men of
all tribes from the time when the first wild wanderer strayed into my
awful presence. Have you a grief that gnaws at your heart-strings? Come
with it to my shore, as of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried
his rage and anguish to the margin of the loud-roaring sea. There, if
anywhere you will forget your private and short-lived woe, for my voice
speaks to the infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.

"To him who loves the pages of human history, who listens to the voices
of the world about him, who frequents the market and the thoroughfare,
who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather than in the
deeper emotions, in abstract speculation and spiritual contemplation,
the RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.

"Come live with me. I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural
talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except
occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get
a fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my
changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles
that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical.
I am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely
safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches
with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and
you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the
mercies of the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will
carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of
the compass. If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave
fertility behind me when I withdraw to my natural channel. Walk by my
side toward the place of my destination. I will keep pace with you, and
you shall feel my presence with you as that of a self-conscious being
like yourself. You