It is a stream which Nature still keeps for herself, and suffers no division of ownership with men; a stream as wild and solitary as the remote and unpeopled land through which it moves.

This river, on the other hand, bears every hour the wealth of a great inland commerce upon its wide current; it flows past cities and villages scattered thickly along its course, past countless homes whose lights weave a shining net along its banks at night; on still Sabbath mornings the bells answer each other in almost unbroken peal along its course.

Emerging from an unknown past in the earliest days of discovery, human interests have steadily multiplied along its shores, and spread over it the countless lines of human activity.

To-day the Argo, multiplied a thousand times, seeks the golden fleece of commerce at every point along its shores; and of the countless Jasons who make the voyage few return empty-handed.

Hour after hour the white sails fly in mysterious and changing lines, messengers of wealth and trade and pleasure, whose voyages are no sooner ended than they begin again.
It is this wealth of action and achievement which make the names of great rivers sonorous as the voices of the centuries; the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, the Hudson--how weighty are these words with associations old as history and deep as the human heart! The rivers are the great channels through which the ceaseless interchange of the elements goes on; they unite the heart of the continents and the solitary places of the mountains with the universal sea which washes all shores and beats its melancholy refrain at either pole.