the waves to the fickle resolutions of the people; and the sea tossed by winds to an army agitated by conflicting passions. Addison says that the sixth book of Paradise Lost is like a troubled ocean, exhibiting greatness in confusion, while the seventh affects the imagination like the ocean in a calm. Young likens a man in the last moments of life to a ship driven out to sea; and Milton compares the hallelujahs chanted by a multitude of angels, to the murmuring of its waves. Sachsius says the ocean has a circular motion, like that of the blood; and that the sea is to rivers what the human heart is to the veins and arteries. The ancient writers peopled the sea with nymphs, whom they styled Nereids. Beautiful is the passage in Homer where he represents Thetis and the seagreen sisters sorrowing for the death of Patroclus, and the consequent grief of his friend: the mild Nesæa; the blue, languishing Alea; and Amatheia, with her amber-coloured hair; all beating their breasts, and weeping in the silence of their grottoes. Many are the paragraphs in the sacred writings descriptive of the ocean. In the Apocalypse, how sublime the passage where a mighty angel is represented as standing with one foot on the sea, the other on the land, and with his hand stretched towards heaven; or that other passage where St. John represents himself as beholding a new earth and a new heaven, with the sea fading away from his sight. RIVERS. WITHOUT rocks or mountains no country can be sublime; without water no landscape can be perfectly beautiful. Few countries are more mountainous, or exhibit better materials for the landscape painter, than Persia; yet it loses no inconsiderable portion of interest from its possessing but few springs, few rivulets, and fewer rivers. What can be more gratifying to a lofty and inquisitive spirit, than tracing rivers to their sources, through long tracts of country where sweep the Don, the Wolga, and the Vistula; the Ebro and the Douro; the Rhine, the Inn, the Rhone, and the Danube? or in travelling the banks of the Allier, so beautifully described by Madame de Sevigné; or of the Loire, sleeping, winding, and rolling by turns through some of the finest districts in all France; where the peasants' cottages, seated upon the sides of the hills, in the midst of their vineyards, resemble so many birds' nests; and where the peasant girls, with their baskets of grapes, invite the weary traveller to help himself to as many as he desires : Take them," say they," and as many as you please; they shall cost you nothing." 66 What traveller possessing an elegant taste but is charmed almost to rapture as he wanders along the banks of the Po, the Adige, and the Brenta; or in Greece, amid the fairy scenes of the Eurotas, now shaded by rose-laurels, and once peopled, like the Cayster, with innumerable swans. Delightful, too, were it to wander on the banks of the Jordan, where thousands of nightingales warble together; or on those of the Tay, the Clyde, and the Teith, where the culture of bees forms so considerable an object of rural economy. How is our fancy elevated when we traverse, even in imagination, those savage solitudes and luxuriant wilds, enlivened by the humming-bird, through which the Orinoco and the Amazon (rivers, to which the proudest streams of Europe are but as rivulets) pour their vast floods. The Mississippi-what grandeur in the very name! In its course along the continent it is fringed with immense trees, frequently adorned with a gray mossy mantle, descending in festoons from the summit to the root, and, flowing into the ocean, it preserves its freshness and its colour three leagues from shore. Sacredness of Rivers." Where a spring rises or a river flows," says Seneca, "there should we build altars and offer sacrifices!" In pursuance of this idea, most nations, whether barbarous or refined, mistaking the works of Deity for Deity itself, have, at one time or other of their history, personified their rivers, and addressed them as the gods of their idolatry. The Indus and the Nile, the latter watering regions that knew not its origin, and kingdoms which were ignorant whither it flowed, were both worshipped in the respective countries which they fertilized. The Abyssinians call the Nile by a name signifying giant; and Vespasian placed in the temple of Peace a large block of basaltes representing its figure, with sixteen children playing around it. Alexander, previous to sailing down the Hydaspes and the Sinde, invoked them as deities, and from the prow of his ship poured libations into their streams from golden goblets. The Jews held in the highest veneration Siloa's brook, that flowed "fast by the Oracle of God." Varro invokes water as a deity. The Adonis was esteemed sacred by a great portion of western Asia; the Peneus was adored for its beauty; the Danube for its magnitude; and the Achelous for its solemn traditions. The Phrygians worshipped the Marsyas and Meander; the Trojans the Scamander; the Druids the Dee; the Massagetæ paid divine honours to the Palus Mæotis and the Tanais; the Celts peopled their rivers with subordinate deities; and water is still worshipped by the natives of Multanistan. The ancients attributed many fictitious properties to rivers. Some were said to make thieves blind; others to injure the memory; and Josephus even mentions seriously a river in Palestine, which, in compliment to the Sabbath, rested every seventh day! Rivers are held sacred, too, in China; and we find the emperor, in one of the Peking gazettes, expressing his gratitude "to the God of the Yellow River" that no accident had occurred in consequence of its having overflowed its banks. The ancient Persians never polluted water, considering those who committed such indecorum guilty of sacrilege; and they enacted a law, that whoever conveyed the water of a spring to any spot which had not been watered before, besides other immunities, his descendants should enjoy the benefit of such water to the end of the fifth generation. The custom is still observed, and the day on which it is first introduced is a day of rejoicing among the peasantry a fortunate hour is appointed for its being let loose; shouts of joy are heard, and exclamations of "may prosperity attend it," echo from every side. In ancient times their kings were prevented by the laws from drinking any water but that of the Choaspes, which was carried in vessels of silver wheresoever they went. Elian relates that Xerxes was once nearly perishing with thirst for the want of it; and when the Persians conquered a city, or summoned one to surrender, they required the king or magistrates to send earth and water as tokens of submission. So general, indeed, is the reverence for rivers, that there is scarcely one in any part of Europe that is not regarded with more or less of this feeling by the natives of the districts through which it flows. Of the affection and veneration of the Indians for the Ganges, Stavorinus mentions several curious instances; and one not a little striking recently occurred. When Nuncomar, first minister to Mier Jaffiere, was executed during the administration of Warren Hastings, the multitude who were present at his death, looking upon it as an illegal and barbarous act, ran to the Ganges to wash away the pollution of having witnessed it. The Gentoos believe that, though the earth will be destroyed, this river will remain to eternity; and that the Supreme Power, in the days of perfect felicity, will recline upon the leaf of a pisang, rapt in ecstatic meditation, with two betel plants floating on the bosom of its waters. Anciently it was the custom to raise funeral monuments on the banks of rivers. Memnon offered up his hair to the Nile; the Assyrians cut off theirs, and threw it into the lake near Argyrium, as an offering to Hercules; and Peleus vowed that he would perform the same ceremony in the event of his son's returning from Troy covered with victory. Sperchius! whose waves, in mazy errors lost, To whom my father vowed at my return, Hoм.-Iliad, xxiii.—POPE. The Cingalese worship the Mahavillaganga; the Banians venerate the Tappi; and a character of so much sacredness is attached to the Tumrabunni, that innumerable devotees annually resort to the grand cataract of Puppanassum, among the mountains of Tinnivelly, and return to the most distant parts of India, laden with the waters of the holy stream. The Hurdwar, too, is esteemed sacred over a large portion of India; and more than 15,000 persons are annually employed to carry it in flasks, tied to the end of bamboos and slung over their shoulders, to princes and families of distinction, who use it at feasts, but chiefly on religious occasions. It was Brahma who first taught the Indians to worship rivers. Their affection for the Ganges is such, even at the present day, that many hundreds of them have been known to go down to it, at certain periods of the year, to devote themselves to the shark, the tiger, or the alligator, thinking themselves happy, and their friends fortunate, thus to be permitted to die in or near that sacred stream. |
