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rivers. The primeval names of many rivers have thus been transmitted, little changed, from age to age, and they often preserve the remains of ancient language. In caves by many a river-side the Celtic colonists of Britain made their dwellings, and at the present day we find many of our native rivers that retain their old British names— -e.g. Thames and Tamar, Avon and Severn, Cam and Isis, Ouse and Derwent, Aire and Calder, Wye and Lune, Yare or Gar, Ure and Irwell (Ir-gwili, as in Abergwili). This Cymric word aber, found in so many local names in Wales, denotes the mouth of a river, and where found on the eastern coast of Scotland indicates the former presence there of the Cymric race. In their language and in Celtic the word abhain, and in Persia and Sanscrit the word ab, denotes a river; the same word in Hebrew, and aba, or abhar, in Irish, is "father," or "cause ;"* thus the Nile is said by Bruce to be called in its higher regions abay, or father. It is worthy of remark, that au is a most ancient appellation of water in Gaulish and British speech: it seems to have been conveyed to us in many ancient compound words relating to water, as Avernus, Avignon, Aar, Awe, and Avren (in Scotland), and in the river Alaunus, in Northumberland, mentioned by Ptolemy; and the b and u being promiscuously sounded in some ancient languages, aber is probably related to it. It has been traced by an ingenious philologist even in America, in the names of Niagara, Powtowmac, and Kanawha (said to be Sanscrit), so that traces of a lost speech seem to survive in rivers just as those natural fountains which still freshen the flowers of Helicon, and are so celebrated in classic legend, point (as the Sanscrit Helikonda does) to a forgotten worship of the sun upon that Heliconian mount. The names of most of the rivers of North Germany are Gothic, and related to the Scythian and Indian dialects: thus, Elbe is (by contraction) Hwealbei, the roller; Oder is Wadera, the runner, the water; Vistula is Wihstela, the bender; Rhine is Rhin, the runner; Danube is Danawa, or Tanais, the broad water, from the Sanscrit Dana, to spread.‡

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But we must not lead the reader among the " mazy waters" etymology. Whatever traces of the descriptive language of our forefathers may survive in the names of rivers, we find that from a river many a name "familiar as household words" has been derived. Even in the arid page of those old laws of the Franks, which have an historical existence from the time of Clovis (the Salic laws), we seem to behold the river Sala flowing by the old Palatium Sala, where Saltzburg stands. If we sometimes find a sort of fossil history in the name of a river, much more exciting associations are often connected with its shores. Some of the most memorable battles of the world have been fought upon the banks of rivers; some of the richest monuments of the arts of peace are reflected in their waters. Their boundaries are enduring landmarks of history; and as regards most of the rivers that fall into the Mediterranean, the classical associations which seem inseparable from them, render those

Davies: Celt. Res., 475.

† Rowland's Mona Antiqua.

We can often recognise the ancient names as fitting and descriptive of the particular river, just as it was with some rivers of Palestine that are mentioned in Scripture: thus the Kedron, "the black," is a stream which Western nations might call the Black-water; the Kishon is winding, the Arnon noisy, the Pharphar rapid.

streams familiar to us at the present day, and people them with the forms and memories of their old renown. And this brings us to consider rivers

POETICALLY and PICTORIALLY. Ancient nations were accustomed to personify rivers, and recognise in them a mysterious presence. To the Greeks, a river was in some measure a local seat of deity: by its waters the productive spirit diffused its influence, and attributes of the universal divinity were ascribed to the river; hence rivers became personified as of the immortal progeny of Jupiter, the guardians to mortal man, and objects of his reverence and invocation. In the Homeric times, the nymphs seem to have been considered as guardian spirits or local deities of the springs and rivers, the companions of the river-gods who were accounted the male progeny of the Ocean, though the mystic system gave them a more exalted genealogy. Next to the host of Heaven, rivers seem from ancient times to have attracted a sort of grateful worship in the adjacent lands. Even in northern climates the gushing of a fresh stream seems like the presence of a living power, and the water is, as it were, the very soul of the landscape; but in Syria and the East, the life-giving power of running water is yet more strongly felt. To the Hebrews, springs were "the eyes"-the bright glistening eyes-of the thirsty land; a sort of personality was given to the stream: it had its "right hand," the estuary its "lip," the bay its "tongue." On many a river in a sterile, mountainous region of Palestine, the spectator (as Canon Stanley remarks of the Barada on its course towards Damascus) literally stands between the living and the dead; for, bursting forth from a cleft in the rocky hills between two precipitous cliffs, the river, as if in a moment, scatters life and foliage over the plain, and the rushing flood of crystal water, overhung by willow, poplars, hawthorn, and walnut, sets an island of verdure in a framework of barren and desert hills.

Noble the mountain stream

Bursting in grandeur from its vantage ground;
Glory is in its gleam

Of brightness-thunder in its deafening sound.

Yet lovelier in my view

The streamlet flowing silently serene,

Traced by the brighter hue

And livelier growth it gives, itself unseen.

It flows through flowery meads,

Gladdening the herds which on its margin browse;
Its quiet beauty feeds

The alders that o'ershade it with their boughs.

The old Greeks, in their fertile climate, had not the same reason that the inhabitants of Syria had for (as it were) personifying a river, and treating it as a living power entitled to their grateful worship; but in giving to each river a semi-human personality, a river-god of its own, they showed, as has been truly said, their deep, insight into Nature. It is hardly necessary to refer to Homer's mention of

-Scamander's worshipped stream,
His earthly honours and immortal name;

or to Achilles, offering his hair to

-Sperchius' honoured flood.*

*

İliad, v. 140.

Among the Greeks, rivers were commonly honoured with offerings of hair. Their deities were thought to have a title to this respect, perhaps (as Archbishop Potter suggests), because some philosophers taught that all things had been produced out of water.

Such great rivers of the earth as the Nile, the Ganges, and the Indus, preserve to this time the adoration of the inhabitants of the fruitful countries through which they flow, and their waters are still held sacred. On some East Indian rivers an offering to the deity of the stream takes at this day the picturesque form of tiny rafts, bearing lights, which maidens launch in the still night, and many a dark-fringed eye is said to watch the trembling flame as it floats onward, and to regard its long burning as a token of good luck. The Chinese have sacrifices to the spirit of the river; and Hornemann, in his "Travels in the Interior of Africa," mentions the custom to have been not long before observed at Bornou, of throwing a girl richly-dressed into the Niger, as an offering to the river-a custom which certainly cannot be said to be honoured in the observance. It reminded that traveller of the similar sacrifice to the Nile, which is stated to have been annually made at Cairo. Whatever the form of sacrifice was, the Egyptians undoubtedly paid divine honours to the Nile." So did the ancient Persians to their rivers and fountains; but, in fact, the sentiment seems to have been almost universal in the ancient world.

The point of the junction or union of streams and rivers seems to have been emphatically selected for ancient rites. Such junctions are still mysterious or poetical amongst the Hindus, the junction of three rivers pre-eminently so. Thus, where the Ganges, the sacred river Yamuna ("Daughter of the Sun"),† and the Sarasvati unite, is Allahabad ("Residence of the Most High"); and where the three sister-streams of Ireland unite, is Kilkenny. These conjoined river-goddesses of Ireland number Spenser among their tuneful admirers:

The first, the gentle Shure, that making way
By sweet Clonmell, adorns rich Waterford;
The next, the stubborn Newre, whose waters gray
By fair Kilkenny and Roseponte board;
The third, the goodly Barrow, which doth hoard
Great heaps of salmon in her deep bosome;

All which, long sundred, do at last accord

To join in one, ere to the sea they roam :
So flowing all from one, all one at last become.

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A propos of the disposition of some ancient nations and of the Greek poets to attribute a semi-human personality to rivers, the following reasons are fancifully given by the Rev. Charles Kingsley for regarding a river as a living power. It may be," he says, "but a collection of everchanging atoms of water-what is the human body but a collection of atoms decaying and renewing every moment? And is not the river, too, a person―a live thing? It has an individual countenance which you love,

Osiris being with the Egyptians "god of the waters," in the same sense that Bacchus was among the Greeks, all rivers when personified were represented under the form or symbol of the Bull. On the coins of some Greek cities of Sicily and Italy, rivers appear thus personified.

Sir W. Jones: Asiatic Researches, 29.

Moor's Oriental Fragments, 412.

which you would recognise again anywhere; it marks the whole landscape; it determines, probably, the geography and the society of a whole district. It draws you to itself, moreover, by an indefinable mesmeric attraction. If you stop in a strange place, the first instinct of the idle half-hour is to lounge by the river. It is a person to you;-how do you know that the river has not a spirit as well as yourself?"

Thus, at the present day, the great rivers of Scotland, as Sir Walter Scott has remarked, are often spoken of with a certain respect, and an almost personal character is attributed to them. So, too, in Devonshire, the rivers that have their sources on Dartmoor still retain something of the reverence with which they were anciently regarded. Dart, especially, has been said to bear traces of his former distinction. The cry of "Dart" -as the moor men call that louder sound which rises from all mountainstreams towards nightfall-is ominous, and a sure warning of approaching evil when heard at an unusual distance.*

"Blessed things," says Bulwer, "are those remote and unchanging streams-they fill us with the same love as if they were living creatures." The sanctity of old attributed to rivers, and the association with each river and fountain of a tutelary god of its own, was, doubtless, the origin of many of the strange old superstitions connected with rivers; and it was probably for this reason, too, that to step over any of the tributary streams of Clitumnus was accounted an indignity, which rendered the offender infamous.+ Thus, nearer home and to this day, it is in many places an article of popular faith that a running stream destroys a spell or enchantment; if you can interpose a brook between you and witches, spectres, or even fiends, you are safe-a superstition of which, as the reader will remember, Burns has availed himself in "Tam o' Shanter."

Its unchanging character and perpetuity is one of the most poetical attributes of a river:

No check, no stay, the streamlet fears;

How merrily it goes!

"Twill murmur on a thousand years,

And flow as now it flows.

So likewise the brook, which is the miniature of the river in its natural characters and aspects, partakes of its poetry of life and ceaseless motion; the little streamlet knows no sleep, no pause; the great frame of Nature may repose, but the spirit of the waters rests not for a moment.

"No haunting tone of music," says Bulwer, "ever recalled so rushing a host of memories and associations as that simple, restless, everlasting sound-the murmur of the sunny rivulet fretting over each little obstacle in its current, the happy child of Nature. Everlasting! all else may have changed, yet with the same exulting bound and happy voice the streamlet leaps along its way." But alas!

Unlike the tide of human time,

Which, though it change in ceaseless flow,
Retains each grief, retains each crime,

Its earliest course was doomed to know;

And darker as it downward bears,

Is stained with past and present tears.‡

Article, "Devonshire," in Quarterly Rev., April, 1859.

† Pliny, b. viii. 8.

Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto iv. st. 1.

"Rivers," says the Rev. John Eagles, in one of the pleasant papers published under the title of "The Sketcher," "are always poetical; they move, or glide, or break into fall and rapid through their courses, as if they were full of life, and were on Nature's mysterious errands. The sunbeams gleam upon them with messages from the heavens; trees bend to them, and receiving freshness and fragrance grow beside their waters, flowers kiss them, love haunts them, silence keeps awake in their caverns and sequestered nooks, and there the nightingale sings to her; the bright and many-coloured bow arches their falls, and the blessed and blessing moon shines upon them and gifts them with magic. Let the lover of landscape follow some of our sweet rivers from their sources in mountain or moor, through dell, dingle, ravine, and more open valley over which the clouds loiter; and if the mind of the sketcher do not drink poetry through his eye, and convey it to his portfolio, he may be sure neither Nature nor Art intended him to be painter or sketcher."

But, to multiply the testimony of writers to the poetical and picturesque charms of rivers would be a work of supererogation, like that of the worthy divine mentioned by Washington Irving in the "Sketch Book," who astonished his rural congregation at Christmas by a learned array of quotations from old Fathers of the Church in favour of a joyful observance of the season, the worthy preacher having, as afterwards appeared, entangled himself in his reading amongst the Puritan controversies of the seventeenth century, and having conjured up a host of ideal adversaries to contend with in the pulpit. Where is the lover of Nature who does not acknowledge with Southey the "endless interest which rivers excite"? Where is the artist or the poet whose soul has not drawn inspiration from their picturesque beauty? Where is the Christian who does not regard them with something of the religious honour given to them by the heathen from the earliest times, but with the purer love and reverence due to the revealed Creator, and recognise the sublimest of their associations in the scenes which hallowed the banks of Jordan, and in the fact that rivers form part of the scenery of Paradise in the Revelations of St. John the Divine?

And now, in conclusion, let us briefly glance at rivers considered

MORALLY. Southey's remark, that rivers enforce the maxims of the moralist, is aptly illustrated by the old moralising of Pliny, who has pointed out the resemblances that rivers bear to the life of man. The river (he says) springs from the earth, but its origin is in Heaven. Its beginnings are small and its infancy frivolous; it plays among the flowers of a meadow, waters a garden, or turns a little mill. Gathering strength in its youth, it becomes wild, impetuous, and impatient of restraints; it is restless and fretful, quick in its turnings, and unsteady in its course; sometimes turbulent and headlong in progress, and sometimes sullen in repose, it leaves behind what it has swept along, and, quitting its retirement for cultivated fields, yields to circumstances, and winds round the obstacles that oppose its current. It passes through the populous cities and the busy haunts of men, tendering its services on every side, and becoming the support of the country. Now increased by alliances and advanced in its career, it becomes grave and stately, loves peace and quiet; and flowing on, at length, in silence, mingles with the ocean depth.

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