sensitive and
imaginative temperament, particularly the traveller exiled irrevocably
from his home and longing passionately to see it. Horatius, about to
plunge into the Tiber, addressed it as his father and god, charging it
to care well for his life and fortunes--fortunes in which those of all
Rome were involved for the time being. Ecce Tiber! was the glad cry of
the Romans on beholding the Tay--a cry which shows once again with what
ardent devotion they thought of the river which passed by their native
city; while Naaman the Syrian, told that his sickness would be cured
would he but lave his leprous limbs in the Jordan, exclaimed aghast
against a prescription which appeared to him nothing short of
sacrilegious and insulting, and declared that there were better and
nobler streams in his own land. Even the deadly complaint with which he
was smitten could not shake his fidelity to these, could not alter his
conviction that they were superior to alien streams; and the truth is
that nearly every great river--perhaps because its perpetual motion
makes it seem verily a living thing--has a way of establishing itself in
the hearts of those who dwell by its banks.

The Rhine is no exception to this rule; on the contrary, it is a notable
illustration thereof. From time immemorial the name of the mighty stream
has been sacred to the Germans, while gradually a halo of romantic
glamour has wound itself about the river, a halo which appeals potently
even to many who have never seen the Vaterland. Am Rhein!--is there not
magic in the words? And how they call up dreams of robber barons, each
with his strange castle built on the edge of a precipice overlooking
the rushing stream; fiends of glade and dell, sprites of the river and
whirlpool, weird huntsmen, and all the dramatis personae of legend and
tradition.

The Rhine has ever held a wide fame in the domain of literature. For
there is scarcely a place on the river's banks but has its legend which
has been enshrined in song, and some of these songs are so old that the
names of their makers have long since been forgotten. Yes, we have to go
very far back indeed would we study the poetry of the Rhine adequately;
we have to penetrate deeply into the Middle Ages, dim and mysterious.
And looking back thus, and pondering on these legendary and anonymous
writings, a poem which soon drifts into recollection is one whose scene
is laid near the little town of Lorch, or Lordch. Hard by this t