vertake one sedge in its pilgrimage;
and how seldom do we enough consider, as we walk beside the margins of
our pleasant brooks, how beautiful and wonderful is that ordinance, of
which every blade of grass that waves in their clear water is a
perpetual sign--that the dew and rain fallen on the face of the earth
shall find no resting-place; shall find, on the contrary, fixed
channels traced for them from the ravines of the central crests down
which they roar, in sudden ranks of foam, to the dark hollows beneath
the banks of lowland pasture, round which they must circle slowly
among the stems and beneath the leaves of the lilies; paths prepared
for them by which, at some appointed rate of journey, they must
evermore descend, sometimes slow, and sometimes swift, but never
pausing; the daily portion of the earth they have to glide over marked
for them at each successive sunrise, the place which has known them
knowing them no more, and the gateways of guarding mountains opened
for them in cleft and chasm, none letting them in their pilgrimage;
and, from afar off, the great heart of the sea calling them to itself!
"Deep calleth unto deep." I know not which of the two is the more
wonderful,--that calm, gradated, invisible slope of the champaign
land, which gives motion to the stream; or that passage cloven for it
through the ranks of hill, which, necessary for the health of the land
immediately around them, would yet, unless so supernaturally divided,
have fatally intercepted the flow of the waters from far-off
countries. When did the great spirit of the river first knock at these
adamantine gates? When did the porter open to it, and cast his keys
away for ever, lapped in whirling sand? I am not satisfied--no one
should be satisfied--with that vague answer, The river cut its way.
Not so. The river _found_ its way. [22]I do not see that rivers in
their own strength can do much in cutting their way; they are nearly
as apt to choke their channels up as to carve them out. Only give a
river some little sudden power in a valley, and see how it will use
it. Cut itself a bed? Not so, by any means, but fill up its bed; and
look for another in a wild, dissatisfied, inconsistent manner,--any
way rather than the old one will better please it; and even if it is
banked up and forced to keep to the old one, it will not deepen, but
do all it can to raise it, and leap out of it. And although wherever
water has a steep fall it will swiftly cut i