gone into a sable suit in her sorrow. After the ocean, rivers, which
are interior highways, claim regard. The United States have on this
side the Rocky Mountains more than forty thousand miles of river-flow,
that is, eighty thousand miles of river-bank,--counting no stream of
less than one hundred miles in length. Europe, in a larger space, has
but seventeen thousand miles. The American rivers are nearly all
accessible from the ocean, and, owing to the gentle elevation of the
continent, flow at easy declivities, and accordingly are largely
navigable. The Mississippi descends at an average of only eight inches
_per_ mile from source to mouth; the Missouri is said to be navigable
to the very base of the Rocky Mountains; and these monarch streams
represent the rivers of the continent. Thus here do these highways of
God's own making run, as it were, past every man's door, and connect
each man with the world he lives in.

Rivers await their due celebration. We easily see that Nile, Ganges,
Euphrates, Jordan, Tiber, Thames, are rivers of influence in human
history, no less than water-currents on the earth's surface. They have
borne barks and barges that the eye never saw. They have brought on
their soft bosoms freight to the cities of the brain, as well as to
Memphis, Rome, London. Some experience of their spiritual influence
must have fallen to the lot of most men. The loved and lovely Merrimac
no longer accedes to the writer's eye, but, as of old, glides securely
seaward in his thought,--like a strain of masterly music long ago
heard, and, when heard, identical in its suggestions with the total
significance and vital progress of one's experience, that, intertwining
itself as a twin thread with the shuttled fibre of life, it was woven
into the same fabric, and became an inseparable part of the
consciousness; so, hearken when one will, after the changes and
accessions of many peopled years, and amid the thousand-footed trample