Little Rivers | Page 4

our thoughts. It has no personality because
it has so many. It is a salt abstraction. You might as well think of
loving a glittering generality like "the American woman." One would
be more to the purpose.
Mountains are more satisfying because they are more individual. It is
possible to feel a very strong attachment for a certain range whose
outline has grown familiar to our eyes, or a clear peak that has looked
down, day after day, upon our joys and sorrows, moderating our
passions with its calm aspect. We come back from our travels, and the
sight of such a well-known mountain is like meeting an old friend
unchanged. But it is a one-sided affection. The mountain is voiceless
and imperturbable; and its very loftiness and serenity sometimes make
us the more lonely.

Trees seem to come closer to our life. They are often rooted in our
richest feelings, and our sweetest memories, like birds, build nests in
their branches. I remember, the last time that I saw James Russell
Lowell, (only a few weeks before his musical voice was hushed,) he
walked out with me into the quiet garden at Elmwood to say good-bye.
There was a great horse-chestnut tree beside the house, towering above
the gable, and covered with blossoms from base to summit,--a pyramid
of green supporting a thousand smaller pyramids of white. The poet
looked up at it with his gray, pain- furrowed face, and laid his
trembling hand upon the trunk. "I planted the nut," said he, "from
which this tree grew. And my father was with me and showed me how
to plant it."
Yes, there is a good deal to be said in behalf of tree-worship; and when
I recline with my friend Tityrus beneath the shade of his favourite oak,
I consent in his devotions. But when I invite him with me to share my
orisons, or wander alone to indulge the luxury of grateful, unlaborious
thought, my feet turn not to a tree, but to the bank of a river, for there
the musings of solitude find a friendly accompaniment, and human
intercourse is purified and sweetened by the flowing, murmuring water.
It is by a river that I would choose to make love, and to revive old
friendships, and to play with the children, and to confess my faults, and
to escape from vain, selfish desires, and to cleanse my mind from all
the false and foolish things that mar the joy and peace of living. Like
David's hart, I pant for the water-brooks. There is wisdom in the advice
of Seneca, who says, "Where a spring rises, or a river flows, there
should we build altars and offer sacrifices."
The personality of a river is not to be found in its water, nor in its bed,
nor in its shore. Either of these elements, by itself, would be nothing.
Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream in a walled channel of
stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what Charles Lamb calls
"a mockery of a river--a liquid artifice--a wretched conduit." But take
away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is left?
An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the bosom
of the earth.

The life of a river, like that of a human being, consists in the union of
soul and body, the water and the banks. They belong together. They act
and react upon each other. The stream moulds and makes the shore;
hollowing out a bay here, and building a long point there; alluring the
little bushes close to its side, and bending the tall slim trees over its
current; sweeping a rocky ledge clean of everything but moss, and
sending a still lagoon full of white arrow-heads and rosy knot-weed far
back into the meadow. The shore guides and controls the stream; now
detaining and now advancing it; now bending it in a hundred sinuous
curves, and now speeding it straight as a wild-bee on its homeward
flight; here hiding the water in a deep cleft overhung with green
branches, and there spreading it out, like a mirror framed in daisies, to
reflect the sky and the clouds; sometimes breaking it with sudden turns
and unexpected falls into a foam of musical laughter, sometimes
soothing it into a sleepy motion like the flow of a dream.
Is it otherwise with the men and women whom we know and like?
Does not the spirit influence the form, and the form affect the spirit?
Can we divide and separate them in our affections?
I am no friend to purely psychological attachments. In some unknown
future they may be satisfying, but in the present I want your words and
your voice with your thoughts, your