his vision: In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool.'

To the careless eye the river seems to run its course through ready-made channels. This is not the case. On the contrary, the river, having made its bed, must lie in it. Some streams take longer than others in arriving at their journey's end. These twist, turn, and double on their track for miles where the lowlands stretch to far horizons. The others, which arrive sooner, are either stronger, or have fewer obstacles to surmount. The river sings most loudly near its sources. I have known the Merced rush out of the Yosemite valley after two days of rains with a clamour which made conversation in the little train impossible, and the voice of the Fraser, where for miles it accompanies the Canadian Pacific Railroad to the gates of Vancouver, is nothing short of deafening. The majority of rivers lose heart and voice as they near the sea. Of the few exceptions, the merry Lyn, in North Devon, deserves mention; but the normal mood of a river in sight of its goal is sadness. It seems to realise that it is running to the sea because it cannot help itself, not, as Meredith preferred to think, because, like a strong man, it knows its own desire. It stands rather for discipline, enjoying only in flood-time an occasional frolic over the banks that keep it in the narrow way. Child of the mountains, which it is for ever destroying, it ends its days in low haunts, but always it carries the stamp of the high places in which it had its birth.

There are some, it is true, who read only merriment in the babble of Tennyson's brook :

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.'

Yet is this wholly the triumph of immortality, or is there not beneath the glad surface an undercurrent of sadness, a longing to linger amid the haunts of coot and hern, a sigh of regret for the futility of such eternal movement? Do not all great rivers moderate their pace and spread themselves lovingly over the land, even, as a last protest, throwing up sand-bars ere they creep reluc

tantly down many paths to the sea which lies in wait for them? Do they not carry muddy memories far out into the ocean? Does not their delta mark the hesitation of their doubts in a hundred oozy islands worn and fretted by every spate? Festina lente is the river's motto as it nears the end; here, also, a curiously human touch in its character.

The poets do not uniformly interpret the feelings with which it greets its goal. Coleridge sees the Thames 'toiling to the main,' weighed down, no doubt, by the burden of its traffic below bridges. On the other side, however, see Tasso :

'Su la marina dove 'l Po discende
Per aver pace,'

though why the river should find more peace in the turbulent Adriatic than among the mountain pastures of the Cottian Alps is a mystery. Something of the same inspiration may have prompted Swinburne when he gave thanks that

" even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.'

For all that, it is the headwaters that show their joy. The middle reaches betray reluctance, the tidal portions hesitation, standstill, even reaction.

Rivers have here and there 'played Ercles rarely' before their original sin was tamed and their strength harnessed by modern engineering to the service of man. Fortunately, rebellious rivers like the Colorado are few and far between on the map. Since all three spring from the same hills, it is kinsman to the Columbia and Missouri, but its record is one of uninterrupted fury, and the appalling canyons which, in its headlong course to the Gulf of California, it has sculptured out of the rock are evidence of its fierce character. By such works shall a river be judged. As a rule the engineer is able to triumph over its frowardness. Time was when, in turn, idolaters, Jews, Copts, and Mohammedans hung on the smiles and frowns of the Nile. Even to-day, though dam and barrage have in great measure curtailed its power for evil, a 'bad Nile' may ruin millions. In other days it was Egypt's tyrant. It figured in two of the Plagues, first turning

red* and then furnishing abundance of frogs, though what damage, even if not immediately cancelled, the frogs were to have done naturalists ask in vain. So grave a calamity was the failure of the Nile that Isaiah could foretell no punishment more severe for the Egyptians. There breathes over this mysterious river a spirit of fatalism which infects only those who have drifted on its bosom, a witchery which whispers of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra, a personality which inspired Hackländer with that thought of his :

'Er ist wie gemacht zu den leidenschaftlichen Träumen der Orientalen.'

The Nile is, and ever will be, a river of mystery. Its secrets have been ravished by geographers. The long and painful process of exploring its hidden sources, which began in the reign of Nero and continued to that of Victoria, is ended, and to-day there are many who, having seen no river greater than the Thames, know that the Nile flows from somewhere south of the equator, possibly from Ptolemy's elusive Mountains of the Moon. But not the most exact appreciation of the river's indebtedness to the great lakes of equatorial Africa, not the most accurate measurement of its volume, speed, and basin can dispel the strange and baffling sensation of the unknowable which invades those who drift between its banks. Near the foaming falls below Lake Victoria, it must present a very different spectacle, but at Cairo its movements, like. those of some great python winding through the reeds, suggest nothing more than oriental languor. It is the river of Time; and, murmuring low among its papyrus beds, it laughs at maps and figures as the puny guesswork of mortals, a thousand generations of whom it has seen go out into the eternity of which itself is the symbol.

Small streams can be hostile as well as great, and the Nile is perhaps the greatest in the world, yet at no stage of its being does it give more trouble than the wicked little Chagres, which runs its whole course within the

*This chameleon change has been noticed in other rivers of Africa. In his 'Great Rift Valley,' Gregory alludes to a similar phenomenon in the Tana river, which, like the Nile, turned red in a night, probably, he thought, from a wash-out of iron oxide.

isthmus of Panama. I once saw the Chagres rise ten feet in as many hours! For months together it slumbers in a ditch. Then, in a single night, drunken with rains, swollen with pride, it races over its banks and undoes the work of weeks.

For its size it is harder

to control than Niagara itself. One day it will coo like a dove; the next it roars like a lion. For weeks it is the willing ally of the canal-builders; for months a more implacable foe to them than fever or bed-rock.

The economic interest of a river is many-sided. It is at once the frontier and the playground, the artery of commerce, and the highway of civilisation. It sends fish to our tables, it works our machinery, it collects the rains of heaven-this with the help of its parents the mountains-and carries waste water to the regions which thirst for it. It is man's friend, where the sea is too often his enemy, grinding the shores it guards, and taking fearful toll of all who trust it. The river, save in the rare relapse of a seasonable flood, befriends those who dwell upon its banks. Therefore it has held its place in poetry and in song, in picture, in sacred lore, and in mythology. Rivers meander through the Bible, source of so many founts of later poetry. The Psalmist, whoever he was, loved them well, and they filter softly through those wondrous songs of his. In their whisper he read the promise of infinite mercy, and for the righteous he could find no better place than that of a tree planted by the rivers of water. In the mythologies of many lands rivers roll sonorously, and none with more grandeur than, in Hindu legend, the Ganges, the Nile of India, yet, unlike the Nile, never destructive or capricious, but, always helped by its ally the Jumna, covering the land with fertilising silt and providing a highway from the sea to within 200 miles of its birthplace in the ice caverns of the 'House of Frost' which men call Himalaya. We read of this mighty stream in the 'Mahabharata' as springing from the tangled hair of Siva, and flowing beneficently over the earth; and it is to-day the proudest humiliation of orthodox Hindus to prostrate themselves before their benefactor. There is something singularly sympathetic about this river-worship. There are moments in which it invades minds attuned to the higher ideals of other faiths.

Poets, medieval and modern, have used the river freely in their music. Burns held that a poet's best inspiration lay

'Adown some trotting burn's meander.'

Spenser weaves the rhythm of it into his Prothalamium':

'Sweete Thames! runne softly till I end my Song.'

And the eternal river croons low through all his 'Spousall Verse,' while nymphs gather flowers, and swans come swimming along the lee, and brave knights win fair ladies for their own. Ruskin makes all the magic of his poetic prose with his Golden River,' which can shimmer like a shower of gold or roll in black waves like thunder-clouds. Dreamily the yellow Oxus goes curdling on its sinuous way through Matthew Arnold's legend of 'Sohrab and Rustum,' and surely the concluding lines are the noblest picture of an estuary in print:

'But the majestic river floated on,

Out of the mist and hum of that low land,

Into the frosty starlight. . . .

Right for the polar star, past Orgunjé,

Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin

To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents.

... till at last

The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright

And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.'

These are magnificent lines; but there is more homely music in the voice of the river which glides past manytowered Camelot :

'Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver

Through the wave that runs for ever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.'

And, at the end, it is still flowing when it bears the barge with her who died in music, like the swan: