Little Rivers | Page 5

looks and your gestures to interpret
your feelings. The warm, strong grasp of Greatheart's hand is as dear to
me as the steadfast fashion of his friendships; the lively, sparkling eyes
of the master of Rudder Grange charm me as much as the nimbleness
of his fancy; and the firm poise of the Hoosier Schoolmaster's shaggy
head gives me new confidence in the solidity of his views of life. I like
the pure tranquillity of Isabel's brow as well as her
"most silver flow Of subtle-paced counsel in distress."
The soft cadences and turns in my lady Katrina's speech draw me into
the humour of her gentle judgments of men and things. The touches of
quaintness in Angelica's dress, her folded kerchief and smooth-parted
hair, seem to partake of herself, and enhance my admiration for the
sweet order of her thoughts and her old- fashioned ideals of love and
duty. Even so the stream and its channel are one life, and I cannot think

of the swift, brown flood of the Batiscan without its shadowing
primeval forests, or the crystalline current of the Boquet without its
beds of pebbles and golden sand and grassy banks embroidered with
flowers.
Every country--or at least every country that is fit for habitation--has its
own rivers; and every river has its own quality; and it is the part of
wisdom to know and love as many as you can, seeing each in the fairest
possible light, and receiving from each the best that it has to give. The
torrents of Norway leap down from their mountain home with plentiful
cataracts, and run brief but glorious races to the sea. The streams of
England move smoothly through green fields and beside ancient, sleepy
towns. The Scotch rivers brawl through the open moorland and flash
along steep Highland glens. The rivers of the Alps are born in icy caves,
from which they issue forth with furious, turbid waters; but when their
anger has been forgotten in the slumber of some blue lake, they flow
down more softly to see the vineyards of France and Italy, the gray
castles of Germany, the verdant meadows of Holland. The mighty
rivers of the West roll their yellow floods through broad valleys, or
plunge down dark canyons. The rivers of the South creep under dim
arboreal archways hung with banners of waving moss. The Delaware
and the Hudson and the Connecticut are the children of the Catskills
and the Adirondacks and the White Mountains, cradled among the
forests of spruce and hemlock, playing through a wild woodland youth,
gathering strength from numberless tributaries to bear their great
burdens of lumber and turn the wheels of many mills, issuing from the
hills to water a thousand farms, and descending at last, beside new
cities, to the ancient sea.
Every river that flows is good, and has something worthy to be loved.
But those that we love most are always the ones that we have known
best,--the stream that ran before our father's door, the current on which
we ventured our first boat or cast our first fly, the brook on whose
banks we first picked the twinflower of young love. However far we
may travel, we come back to Naaman's state of mind: "Are not Abana
and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?"

It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always the most
agreeable, nor the best to live with. Diogenes must have been an
uncomfortable bedfellow: Antinous was bored to death in the society of
the Emperor Hadrian: and you can imagine much better company for a
walking trip than Napoleon Bonaparte. Semiramis was a lofty queen,
but I fancy that Ninus had more than one bad quarter-of-an-hour with
her: and in "the spacious times of great Elizabeth" there was many a
milkmaid whom the wise man would have chosen for his friend, before
the royal red-haired virgin. "I confess," says the poet Cowley, "I love
littleness almost in all things. A little convenient Estate, a little chearful
House, a little Company, and a very little Feast, and if I were ever to
fall in Love again, (which is a great Passion, and therefore, I hope, I
have done with it,) it would be, I think, with Prettiness, rather than with
Majestical Beauty. I would neither wish that my Mistress, nor my
Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer uses to describe his
Beauties, like a daughter of great Jupiter for the stateliness and
largeness of her Person, but as Lucretius says:
'Parvula, pumilio, [Greek text omitted], tota merum sal.'"
Now in talking about women it is prudent to disguise a prejudice like
this, in the security of a dead language, and to intrench it behind a
fortress of reputable