ast our first fly, the brook on
whose banks we first picked the twinflower of young love. However far we
may travel, we come back to Naaman's state of mind: "Are not Abana and
Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?"

It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always the
most agreeable, nor the best to live with. Diogenes must have been an
uncomfortable bedfellow: Antinous was bored to death in the society
of the Emperor Hadrian: and you can imagine much better company for a
walking trip than Napoleon Bonaparte. Semiramis was a lofty queen, but I
fancy that Ninus had more than one bad quarter-of-an-hour with her: and
in "the spacious times of great Elizabeth" there was many a milkmaid
whom the wise man would have chosen for his friend, before the royal
red-haired virgin. "I confess," says the poet Cowley, "I love littleness
almost in all things. A little convenient Estate, a little chearful
House, a little Company, and a very little Feast, and if I were ever to
fall in Love again, (which is a great Passion, and therefore, I hope, I
have done with it,) it would be, I think, with Prettiness, rather than
with Majestical Beauty. I would neither wish that my Mistress, nor my
Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer uses to describe his Beauties,
like a daughter of great Jupiter for the stateliness and largeness of
her Person, but as Lucretius says:

'Parvula, pumilio, [Greek text omitted], tota merum sal.'"

Now in talking about women it is prudent to disguise a prejudice like
this, in the security of a dead language, and to intrench it behind
a fortress of reputable authority. But in lowlier and less dangerous
matters, such as we are now concerned with, one may dare to speak in
plain English. I am all for the little rivers. Let those who will, chant
in heroic verse the renown of Amazon and Mississippi and Niagara, but my
prose shall flow--or straggle along at such a pace as the prosaic
muse may grant me to attain--in praise of Beaverkill and Neversink
and Swiftwater, of Saranac and Raquette and Ausable, of Allegash and
Aroostook and Moose River. "Whene'er I take my walks abroad," it shall
be to trace the clear Rauma from its rise on the fjeld to its rest
in the fjord; or to follow the Ericht and the Halladale through the
heather. The Ziller and the Salzach shall be my guides through the
Tyrol; the Rotha and the Dove shall lead me into the heart of England.
My sacrificial f