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