l of April, unto whom are born
The rose and jessamine, leaps wild in thee!"

How deep, once more, the note sounded by Brown in his lines
on "The Well":

"I am a spring--
Why square me with a kerb?
. . .
O cruel force,
That gives me not a chance
To fill my natural course;
With mathematic rod
Economising God;
Calling me to pre-ordered circumstance
Nor suffering me to dance
Over the pleasant gravel,
With music solacing my travel--
With music, and the baby buds that toss
In light, with roots and sippets of the moss!"

The longing for freedom to expand the dimly realised and
mystic elements in his soul-life was stirred within him by the
joyous bubbling of a spring. To kerb the artless, natural flow is
to "economise God"--so the limitations and restrictions of the
life that now is artificialise and deaden the divine within us.
There is more than metaphor in such a comparison; there is the
linkage of the immanent idea. His emotion culminates in the
concluding lines:

"One faith remains--
That through what ducts soe'er,
What metamorphic strains,
What chymic filt'rings, I shall pass
To where, O God,
Thou lov'st to mass
Thy rains upon the crags, and dim the sphere.
So, when night's heart with keenest silence thrills,
Take me, and weep me on the desolate hills."

There are indeed but few with any feeling for nature who have
not been moved to special trains of thought, the outcome of
characteristic moods, by the babblings and wayward wanderings
of brooks and rivulets. The appeal, therefore, is to a
wide experience. Can we be satisfied to join with Tylor in his
sense of disillusionment? Or shall we strive to get yet nearer to
the heart of things? If we cling to the deeper view, to us, as to
the men of old, the running stream will sing of the soul in
nature.

CHAPTER XX

RIVERS AND LIFE

A river is but a larger brook. And yet by virtue of its volume, it
manifests features which are peculiarly its own, and exerts
influences which have not alone affected individual moods and
imaginings, but often profoundly modified and moulded the
destinies of peoples and civilisations. The two outstanding
instances are the Nile and the Ganges.

The Nile has attracted to itself, from the dawn of history to the
present day, a peculiar share of wonder and renown. It is the
longest river of its continent--possibly of the world; an