f Venice went annually
forth to wed the Adriatic in behalf of its queen, and to cast into its
bosom the symbolic ring; but Nature alone can really join the hands of
ocean and main. By bays, estuaries, ports, spaces of sea lovingly
inclosed by arms of sheltering shore, are conversation and union
established between them.

"The sea doth wash out all the ills of life," sings Euripides; and it
is, indeed, with some penetration of wonder that one observes how deep
and productive a relation to man the ocean has sustained. Some share in
the greatest enterprises, in the finest results, it seldom fails to
have. Not capriciously did the subtile Greek imagination derive the
birth of Venus from the foam of the sea; for social love,--that vast
reticulation of wedlock which society is--has commonly arisen not far
from the ocean-shore. The Persian is the only superior civilization,
now occurring to our recollection, which has no intimate relation
either with river or sea; and that pushed inevitably toward the Tigris
and Euphrates. Now to Europe must be conceded the supremacy in this
single respect, that of representing the most intimate coast relation
with the sea; North America follows next in order. Africa, washed, but
not wedded, by the wave, represents the greatest seclusion,--and has
gone into a sable suit in her sorrow. After the ocean, rivers, which
are interior highways, claim regard. The United States have on this
side the Rocky Mountains more than forty thousand miles of river-flow,
that is, eighty thousand miles of river-bank,--counting no stream of
less than one hundred miles in length. Europe, in a larger space, has
but seventeen thousand miles. The American rivers are nearly all
accessible from the ocean, and, owing to the gentle elevation of the
continent, flow at easy declivities, and accordingly are largely
navigable. The Mississippi descends at an average of only eight inches
_per_ mile from source to mouth; the Missouri is said to be navigable
to the very base of the Rocky Mountains; and these monarch streams
represent the rivers of the continent. Thus here do these highways of
God's own making run, as it were, past every man's door, and connect
each man with the world he lives in.

Rivers await their due celebration. We easily see that Nile, Ganges,
Euphrates, Jordan, Tiber, Thames, are rivers of influence in human
history, no less than water-currents on the earth's surface. They have
borne barks and barges that