And what is your whole human family but a parenthesis in a single page of my history?The raindrops stereotyped themselves on my beaches before a living creature left his footprints there.This horseshoe-crab I fling at your feet is of older lineage than your Adam,--perhaps,indeed,you count your Adam as one of his descendants.What feeling have I for you?Not scorn,not hatred,--not love,--not loathing.No!---indifference,--blank indifference to you and your affairs that is my feeling,say rather absence of feeling,as regards you.---Oh yes,I will lap your feet,I will cool you in the hot summer days,I will bear you up in my strong arms,Iwill rock you on my rolling undulations,like a babe in his cradle.
Am I not gentle?Am I not kind?Am I not harmless?But hark!The wind is rising,and the wind and I are rough playmates!What do you say to my voice now?Do you see my foaming lips?Do you feel the rocks tremble as my huge billows crash against them?Is not my anger terrible as I dash your argosy,your thunder-bearing frigate,into fragments,as you would crack an eggshell?--No,not anger;deaf,blind,unheeding indifference,--that is all.Out of me all things arose;sooner or later,into me all things subside.All changes around me;I change not.I look not at you,vain man,and your frail transitory concerns,save in momentary glimpses:I look on the white face of my dead mistress,whom I follow as the bridegroom follows the bier of her who has changed her nuptial raiment for the shroud.
"Ye whose thoughts are of eternity,come dwell at my side.
Continents and islands grow old,and waste and disappear.The hardest rock crumbles;vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being,wax great,decline,and perish,to give way to others,even as human dynasties and nations and races come and go.Look on me!"Time writes no wrinkle"on my forehead.Listen to me!All tongues are spoken on my shores,but I have only one language:the winds taught me their vowels the crags and the sands schooled me in my rough or smooth consonants.Few words are mine but I have whispered them and sung them and shouted them to men of all tribes from the time when the first wild wanderer strayed into my awful presence.Have you a grief that gnaws at your heart-strings?Come with it to my shore,as of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried his rage and anguish to the margin of the loud-roaring sea.There,if anywhere you will forget your private and short-lived woe,for my voice speaks to the infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.'
"To him who loves the pages of human history,who listens to the voices of the world about him,who frequents the market and the thoroughfare,who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather than in the deeper emotions,in abstract speculation and spiritual contemplation,the RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.
"Come live with me.I am active,cheerful,communicative,a natural talker and story-teller.I am not noisy,like the ocean,except occasionally when I am rudely interrupted,or when I stumble and get a fall.When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my changing features.My idlest babble,when I am toying with the trifles that fall in my way,if not very full of meaning,is at least musical.I am not a dangerous friend,like the ocean;no highway is absolutely safe,but my nature is harmless,and the storms that strew the beaches with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders.Abide with me,and you shall not die of thirst,like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of the pitiless salt waves.Trust yourself to me,and I will carry you far on your journey,if we are travelling to the same point of the compass.If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows,I leave fertility behind me when I withdraw to my natural channel.Walk by my side toward the place of my destination.
I will keep pace with you,and you shall feel my presence with you as that of a self-conscious being like yourself.You will find it hard to be miserable in my company;I drain you of ill-conditioned thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your dwelling and its grounds:
But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen indifference,and the river disturbs with its never-pausing and never-ending story,the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of rest for his soul.
"'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited faculties,'it says;'yield not yourself to the babble of the running stream.Leave the ocean,which cares nothing for you or any living thing that walks the solid earth;leave the river,too busy with its own errand,too talkative about its own affairs,and find peace with me,whose smile will cheer you,whose whisper will soothe you.Come to me when the morning sun blazes across my bosom like a golden baldric;come to me in the still midnight,when I hold the inverted firmament like a cup brimming with jewels,nor spill one star of all the constellations that float in my ebon goblet.Do you know the charm of melancholy?Where will you find a sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness?Does the ocean share your grief?Does the river listen to your sighs?The salt wave,that called to you from under last month's full moon,to-day is dashing on the rocks of Labrador;the stream,that ran by you pure and sparkling,has swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city,and is creeping to its grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of liquid crystal.It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed from one season to another;but are your features the same,absolutely the same,from year to year?We both change,but we know each other through all changes.Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours?And does not Nature plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is dressed in the glories of leaf and flower,and draw the icy lid over my shining surface when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of winter?'
