THE RIVER OF LIFE

A river with its streams shall make glad the city of God. PSALM xlvi. 4.

RIVERS have been the highways of civilization. Along the banks of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus did the earlier nations rise. Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Rome, Paris, and London were mighty marts first fertilized by rivers. Eleven States of our Union bear the names of rivers. The sanctities of life have gathered along the banks of running streams. The Jordan flows through the Bible, making green its pastures and filling its valleys with flowers. Although the Jew hung his harp on the willow trees by the rivers of Babylon, the natives erected their shrines along its banks. The devout Hindu soothes his soul and magnifies his life if he may but bathe his body in the Ganges. Poetry, like religion, indeed poetry is the blossom and fruit of religion, has delighted in the river. Shakespeare had his Avon, Wordsworth his Yarrow, Longfellow his Charles, and Emerson

his Musketaquid.

rivers,

Wordsworth well says of

"And never did genius slight them as they go."

The river has lost none of its potency, its sanctity is not a thing of the Orient or for ancient peoples alone. The indignant king of Syria was right when he resented the superior claim which Elisha made for the waters of Jordan, and said, “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? May I not wash in them and be clean?" What Naaman said of his Syrian streams I am inclined to say of the waters of the Wisconsin, from whose banks I come with my life renewed by its hillslopes and valleys. Trees, grasses, and birds have ministered unto me, but better than all these has been my communing with the river. Morning, noon, and night, for six weeks, from the porch of Westhope cottage on Tower Hill, have I watched the gliding stream in its broad two-mile sweep, edging the hills, girdling the islands, threading the bridge. I have never wearied in watching its silent flux out of mystery into mystery. When the parching sun blistered

the land, burnt the fields and dusted the roads,

on.

the river, undismayed, slaked the ever-rising thirst of its sands. When the storms came, the rains fell, and the trees swayed, moaned, and gave thanks, the river made no halt, it simply moved High up on the hillslope I was perched, and it seemed to me at times that there was no poetry so fine, no picture so serene, no romance so bewitching as that Wisconsin river, in whose waters I bathed as a child, in whose skirting woods I hunted the cows as a barefooted boy, along whose banks I dreamed and toiled as a youth, and with whose every feature I thought I had lived familiarly as a man, though in those weeks of rest I found what I never knew before. I reluctantly left it behind with its lessons but partly conned, its wisdom unexhausted, glad to work for ten months more if at the end of that time I may be rewarded by another season of courtship with my river. The waters of the Wisconsin are to me more than ever a part of that water of life which slakes the thirst of the soul as it cools the fevered pulse of the body. It, like its ancient companions, is a river of God, flowing for the "healing of the nations."

The Wisconsin bears no traffic now. Its

shores have been deserted by the tradesman. Its once busy villages and rural commercial centres have been lured away by the whistle of the steamengine; the railroad has released man from the troubles and anxieties of navigating its inadequate waters. He who is still made restless by the passion of a savage ancestry and seeks to amuse himself by taking life, vexes its waters to little purpose; his pole and line fret the sliding waters chiefly that he may catch new lessons of patience, and that he may, if indeed his life is wanting in such tutorship, be disciplined by disappointThose who know most of the habits of our river insist that it is the happy home of

ment.

plenty of fish," but the fish have been made wise by civilization, or what amounts to about the same thing, man in his haste and care for better things, has lost the secret and forgotten the art of catching them; and I do not regret this. Yet of this unused, unyielding, and unsung river of the West, I must borrow the poet's lines to speak my love and gratitude.

"Thy ever-youthful waters keep

A course of lively pleasure;

And gladsome notes my lips can breathe,
Accordant to the measure.

The vapours linger round the Heights,
They melt, and soon must vanish;
One hour is theirs, nor more is mine-
Sad thought, which I would banish,
But that I know, where'er I go,
Thy genuine image, Yarrow!

Will dwell with me, to heighten joy,

And cheer my mind in sorrow."

This river "with its streams makes glad the city of God" whenever it is known in its relations, for until then it is not known at all. That stretch of water bending its arm around the stolid bluff may seem the most commonplace of prosaic things, the same old river that it was over forty years ago when first I knew it, wrestling unsuccessfully with the shifting sands. However fields and homes and peoples change, it appears still the When we relate in thought the river to that exhaustless source of its being that comes from cloud-land, the benignant feedings of silent dews, the mystic springs born in snow-land and stored in rocky cisterns, the thousand rivulets that quietly replenish it as they creep through valley and ravine, under shady trees and through marshy glades, then the visible stream suggests to the mind invisible cycles that reach out laterally

same.