INTRODUCTION.
The River is the Soul of the land to which it belongs. Fringing its banks, floating upon its waters, are the interests, the history, and the romance of the people. Our ideas of every nation are intimately associated with our ideas of its rivers. To mention the name of one, is to suggest the characteristics of the other.
How the word Euphrates recalls the earliest ages of man's history on this globe! The Nile reminds us of a civilization on which the whole of Europe depended for whatever was enlightened or refined anterior to the Christian Era. The Tiber is rich in historic associations of the proudest empire the world ever knew. What romances of Moorish power and splendor are conjured up by the mention of the Guadalquivir! The Rhine is so enwreathed with flowers of song, that the actual history of its battlemented towers is lost from view; and yet the mention of its name gives us a satisfying conception of the ideal Germany, past and present.
So the Thames, the Rhone, the Danube, are so many words for the English, the French, and the Austrian peoples. In our own country, what different ideas attach to Connecticut, Hudson, Savannah, and Mississippi! How quickly the pictures are shifted in the stereoscope of imagination by changing Orinoco for San Joaquin, Amazon for Sacramento, or Rio de la Plata for Columbia, upon our tongues. It is not that one is
