does not sound perhaps very poetical, in our sense of the
word; yet if you will try to realize the thoughts of the poet who
composed it, you will perceive that it is not without some bold and
powerful conceptions.

Take the modern peasants, living in their villages by the side of the
Thames, and you must admit that he would be a remarkable man who could
bring himself to look on the Thames as a kind of a general, riding at
the head of many English rivers, and leading them on to a race or a
battle. Yet it is easier to travel in England, and to gain a
commanding view of the river-system of the country, than it was three
thousand years ago to travel over India, even over that part of India
which the poet of our hymn commands. He takes in at one swoop three
great river-systems, or, as he calls them, three great armies of
rivers--those flowing from the north-west into the Indus, those
joining it from the north-east, and, in the distance, the Ganges and
the Jumnah with their tributaries. Look on the map and you will see
how well these three armies are determined; but our poet had no
map--he had nothing but high mountains and sharp eyes to carry out his
trigonometrical survey. Now I call a man, who for the first time
could _see_ those three marching armies of rivers, a poet.

The next thing that strikes one in that hymn--if hymn we must call
it--is the fact that all these rivers, large and small, have their own
proper names. That shows a considerable advance in civilized life, and
it proves no small degree of coherence, or what the French call
_solidarity_, between the tribes who had taken possession of Northern
India. Most settlers call the river on whose banks they settle "_the
river_." Of course there are many names for river. It may be called
the runner,[210] the fertilizer, the roarer--or, with a little
poetical metaphor, the arrow, the horse, the cow, the father, the
mother, the watchman, the child of the mountains. Many rivers had many
names in different parts of their course, and it was only when
communication between different settlements became more frequent, and
a fixed terminology was felt to be a matter of necessity, that the
rivers of a country were properly baptized and registered. All this
had been gone through in India before our hymn became possible.

And now we have to consider another, to my mind most startling fact.
We here have a number of names of the rivers of India, as they were
known to one single p