ht, I recall that other landscape of history and legend through
which it rolls, and that, for the moment, is the reality, and the other
the shadow. A web of human associations spreads itself over this long
valley like a richer atmosphere; the fields are ripe with action and
achievement; every projecting point has its story, every gentle curve
and quiet inlet its memory; for many and many a decade of years life
has touched this silent stream and humanised its power and beauty until
it has become part of the vast human experience wrought out between
these mountain boundaries. As I think of these things and of the world
of dear past things which they recall, another great river sweeps into
the vision of memory, but how different! There comes with it no warmth
of human emotion, but only the breath of the unbroken woods, the awful
aspect of the great precipitous cliffs, the vast solitude out of which
it rolls, with troubled current, to mingle its mysterious waters with
the northern gulf. It is a stream which Nature still keeps for
herself, and suffers no division of ownership with men; a stream as
wild and solitary as the remote and unpeopled land through which it
moves. This river, on the other hand, bears every hour the wealth of a
great inland commerce upon its wide current; it flows past cities and
villages scattered thickly along its course, past countless homes whose
lights weave a shining net along its banks at night; on still Sabbath
mornings the bells answer each other in almost unbroken peal along its
course. Emerging from an unknown past in the earliest days of
discovery, human interests have steadily multiplied along its shores,
and spread over it the countless lines of human activity. To-day the
Argo, multiplied a thousand times, seeks the golden fleece of commerce
at every point along its shores; and of the countless Jasons who make
the voyage few return empty-handed. Hour after hour the white sails
fly in mysterious and changing lines, messengers of 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
associations 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 he