Part 1

Great Rivers of the World

FAMOUS MARVELS AND MASTERPIECES OF THE WORLD

As Seen and Described by Great Writers

Collected and Edited by ESTHER SINGLETON

Famous Paintings Great Pictures Modern Paintings Great Portraits Wonders of the World Wonders of Nature Famous Women Romantic Castles and Palaces Turrets, Towers and Temples Historic Buildings of America Historic Landmarks of America Great Rivers of the World Famous Sculpture Famous Cathedrals

Fourteen volumes in all. Profusely illustrated. Each sold separately.

You can get any of the series where you bought this book and at the same price.

Great Rivers of the World

As Seen and Described By Famous Writers

COLLECTED AND EDITED BY ESTHER SINGLETON

_With Numerous Illustrations_

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

Copyright, 1908, by DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

_Published, November, 1908_

Preface

Rivers possess so many varied attractions and have so many claims on the attention of the student of science and history, the pleasure-seeker, the traveller, the poet and the painter, that no apology need be offered for gathering into one volume selections from the works of those who have described some of the most famous streams of the world. Lyell says: “Rivers are the irrigators of the earth’s surface, adding alike to the beauty of the landscape and the fertility of the soil: they carry off impurities and every sort of waste _débris_; and when of sufficient volume, they form the most available of all channels of communication with the interior of continents. They have ever been things of vitality and beauty to the poet, silent monitors to the moralist, and agents of comfort and civilization to all mankind.”

Thoreau says: “The Mississippi, the Ganges and the Nile, those journeying atoms from the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world--the heavens are not yet drained over their sources, but the Mountains of the Moon still send their annual tribute to the Pasha without fail, as they did to the Pharaohs, though he must collect the rest of his revenue at the point of the sword. Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travellers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. They are the natural highways of all nations, not only levelling the ground and removing obstacles from the path of the traveller, quenching his thirst, and bearing him on their bosoms, but conducting him through the most interesting scenery, the most populous portions of the globe, and where the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest perfection.”

In the following pages little will be found dealing with the material blessings bestowed on mankind by the agency of rivers. The average reader is more interested in the antiquarian and legendary lore of the sources, rapids, banks and islands of a famous stream. Length of course and volume of water are matters of no importance to lovers of the picturesque, the venerable, or the romantic. Therefore the literature of the Shannon is more fascinating than that of the Amazon, and the Jordan attracts more pilgrims than the Volga. Small streams like the Wye, the Yarrow, and the Oise consequently find a place among these celebrated rivers.

E. S.

_New York, October, 1908._

Contents

THE RHINE _Victor Hugo_ 1

THE SEINE _A. Bowman Blake_ 8

THE GANGES _Sir William Hunter_ 19

MORNING ON THE GANGES _Pierre Loti_ 24

THE COLORADO _Henry Gannett_ 28

THE AVON _John Wilson Croker_ 34

DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE _Charles Dickens_ 46

THE TIGRIS _George Rawlinson_ 52

THE OISE _Robert Louis Stevenson_ 55

THE HUDSON _Esther Singleton_ 65

THE TIBER _Strother A. Smith_ 76

THE SHANNON _Arthur Shadwell Martin_ 87

THE DANUBE _I. Bowes_ 94

THE NIGER _J. Hampden Jackson_ 101

THE AMAZON _Joseph Jones_ 107

THE YANGTSE CHIANG _W. R. Carles_ 113

THE THAMES _Charles Dickens, Jr._ 122

THE CONNECTICUT _Timothy Dwight_ 131

MOSEL _F. Warre Cornish_ 138

THE IRRAWADDY _Emily A. Richings_ 144

THE CLYDE _Robert Walker_ 155

THE VOLGA _Elisée Reclus_ 162

THE CONGO _J. Howard Reed_ 169

THE MACKENZIE RIVER _William Ogilvie_ 177

THE LOIRE _I. Victor Hugo_ 185 _II. Honoré de Balzac_ 189

THE POTOMAC _Esther Singleton_ 191

THE EUPHRATES _George Rawlinson_ 197

THE WYE _A. R. Quinton_ 201

THE INDIAN RIVER _L. C. Bryan_ 208

THE NILE _I. J. Howard Reed_ 213 _II. Isaac Taylor_ 219

THE DON _Elisée Reclus_ 223

THE COLUMBIA _J. Boddam-Whetham_ 228

THE PO _George G. Chisholm_ 235

THE MENAM _Mrs. Unsworth_ 241

THE MERRIMACK _Henry D. Thoreau_ 249

THE YEN-E-SAY _Henry Seebohm_ 254

THE YARROW _John MacWhirter_ 263

THE MISSISSIPPI _Alexander D. Anderson_ 272

THE ZAMBESI _Henry Drummond_ 280

THE URUGUAY _Ernest William White_ 286

THE TWEED _Sir Thomas Dick Lauder_ 293

NIAGARA _John Tyndall_ 304

THE NIAGARA RIVER _G. K. Gilbert_ 312

THE MEUSE _Esther Singleton_ 316

THE RHONE _Angus B. Reach_ 321

THE YUKON _William Ogilvie_ 328

THE JORDAN _Andrew Robert Fausset_ 338

THE CONCORD _Henry D. Thoreau_ 343

THE TAGUS _Arthur Shadwell Martin_ 350

THE INDUS _Edward Balfour_ 354

Illustrations

THE RHINE _Frontispiece_

THE SEINE 8

THE GANGES 20

THE COLORADO 28

THE AVON 34

THE ST. LAWRENCE 46

THE HUDSON 66

THE TIBER 76

THE SHANNON 88

THE DANUBE 94

THE THAMES 122

THE CONNECTICUT 132

THE IRRAWADDY 144

THE CLYDE 156

THE VOLGA 162

THE CONGO 170

THE LOIRE 186

THE POTOMAC 192

THE WYE 202

THE INDIAN 208

THE NILE 214

THE DON 224

THE COLUMBIA 228

THE PO 236

THE MENAM 242

THE MERRIMACK 250

THE YARROW 264

THE MISSISSIPPI 272

THE ZAMBESI 280

THE TWEED 294

THE NIAGARA 304

THE MEUSE 316

THE RHONE 322

THE JORDAN 338

THE CONCORD 344

THE TAGUS 350

THE RHINE

VICTOR HUGO

I love rivers; they do more than bear merchandise--ideas float along their surface. Rivers, like clarions, sing to the ocean of the beauty of the earth, the fertility of plains, and the splendour of cities.

Of all rivers, I prefer the Rhine. It is now a year, when passing the bridge of boats at Kehl, since I first saw it. I remember that I felt a certain respect, a sort of admiration, for this old, this classic stream. I never think of rivers--those great works of Nature, which are also great in history,--without emotion.

I remember the Rhone at Valserine; I saw it in 1825, in a pleasant excursion to Switzerland, which is one of the sweet, happy recollections of my early life. I remember with what noise, with what ferocious bellowing, the Rhone precipitated itself into the gulf whilst the frail bridge upon which I was standing was shaking beneath my feet. Ah! well! since that time, the Rhone brings to my mind the idea of a tiger,--the Rhine, that of a lion.

The evening on which I saw the Rhine for the first time, I was impressed with the same idea. For several minutes I stood contemplating this proud and noble river--violent, but not furious; wild, but still majestic. It was swollen, and was magnificent in appearance, and was washing its yellow mane, or, as Boileau says, its “slimy beard,” the bridge of boats. Its two banks were lost in the twilight, and though its roaring was loud, still there was tranquillity.

Yes, the Rhine is a noble river--feudal, republican, imperial--worthy, at the same time, of France and Germany. The whole history of Europe is combined within its two great aspects--in this flood of the warrior and of the philosopher--in this proud stream, which causes France to bound with joy, and by whose profound murmurings Germany is bewildered in dreams.

The Rhine is unique; it combines the qualities of every river. Like the Rhone, it is rapid; broad, like the Loire; encased, like the Meuse; serpentine, like the Seine; limpid and green, like the Somme; historical, like the Tiber; royal, like the Danube; mysterious, like the Nile; spangled with gold, like an American river; and, like a river of Asia, abounding with phantoms and fables.

Before the commencement of History, perhaps before the existence of man, where the Rhine now is there was a double chain of volcanos, which on their extinction left heaps of lava and basalt lying parallel, like two long walls. At the same epoch the gigantic crystallizations formed the primitive mountains; the enormous alluvions of which the secondary mountains consist were dried up; the frightful heap, which is now cold, and snow accumulated on them, from which two great streams issued, the one--flowing towards the north, crossed the plains, encountered the sides of the extinguished volcanos, and emptied itself into the ocean; the other, taking its course westward, fell from mountain to mountain, flowed along the side of the block of extinguished volcanos, which is now Ardâche, and was finally lost in the Mediterranean. The first of those inundations is the Rhine, and the second the Rhone.

From historical records we find that the first people who took possession of the banks of the Rhine were the half-savage Celts, who were afterwards named Gauls by the Romans. When Rome was in its glory, Cæsar crossed the Rhine, and shortly afterwards the whole of the river was under the jurisdiction of his empire. When the Twenty-second Legion returned from the siege of Jerusalem, Titus sent it to the banks of the Rhine, where it continued the work of _Martius Agrippa_. The conquerors required a town to join Melibocus to Taunus; and Moguntiacum, begun by Martius, was founded by the Legion, built by Trajan, and embellished by Adrian. Singular coincidence! and which we must note in passing. This Twenty-second Legion brought with it Crescentius, who was first that carried the Word of God into the Rhingau, and founded the new religion. God ordained that these ignorant men, who had pulled down the last stone of His temple upon the Jordan, should lay the first of another upon the banks of the Rhine. After Trajan and Adrian came Julian, who erected a fortress upon the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle; then Valentinian, who built a number of castles. Thus in a few centuries, Roman colonies, like an immense chain, linked the whole of the Rhine.

At length the time arrived when Rome was to assume another aspect. The incursions of the Northern hordes were eventually too frequent and too powerful for Rome; so, about the Sixth Century, the banks of the Rhine were strewed with Roman ruins, as at present with feudal ones.

Charlemagne cleared away the rubbish, built fortresses, and opposed the German hordes; but notwithstanding his desire to do more, Rome died, and the physiognomy of the Rhine was changed.

Already, as I before mentioned, an unperceived germ was sprouting in the Rhingau. Religion, that divine eagle, began to spread its wings, and deposited among the rocks an egg that contained the germ of a world. St. Apollinaire, following the example of Crescentius, who, in the year 70 preached the Word of God at Taunus, visited Rigomagum. St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, catechized Confluentia; St. Materne, before visiting Tongres, resided at Cologne. At Trèves, Christians began to suffer the death of martyrdom, and their ashes were swept away by the wind; but these were not lost, for they became seeds, which were germinating in the fields during the passage of the barbarians, although nothing at that time was seen of them.

After an historical period the Rhine became linked with the marvellous. Where the noise of man is hushed, Nature lends a tongue to the nest of birds, causes the caves to whisper, and the thousand voices of solitude to murmur; where historical facts cease, imagination gives life to shadows and realities to dreams. Fables took root, grew, and blossomed in the voids of History, like weeds and brambles in the crevices of a ruined palace.

Civilization, like the sun, has its nights and its days, its plenitudes and its eclipses; now it disappears, but soon returns.

As soon as civilization again dawned upon Taunus, there were upon the borders of the Rhine a whole host of legends and fabulous stories. Populations of mysterious beings, who inhabited the now dismantled castles, had held communion with the _belles filles_ and _beaux chevaliers_ of the place. Spirits of the rocks; black hunters, crossing the thickets upon stags with six horns; the maid of the black fen; the six maidens of the red marshes; Wodan, the god with ten hands; the twelve black men; the raven that croaked its song; the devil who placed his stone at Teufelstein and his ladder Teufelsleiter, and who had the effrontery to preach publicly at Gernsbach, near the Black Forest, but, happily, the Word of God was heard at the other side of the stream; the demon, Urian, who crossed the Rhine at Dusseldorf, having upon his back the banks that he had taken from the sea-shore, with which he intended to destroy Aix-la-Chapelle, but being fatigued with his burden, and deceived by an old woman, he stupidly dropped his load at the imperial city, where that bank is at present pointed out, and bears the name of Loosberg. At that epoch, which for us was plunged into a penumbra, when magic lights were sparkling here and there, when the rocks, the woods, the valleys, were tenanted by apparitions; mysterious encounters, infernal castles, melodious songs sung by invisible songstresses; the frightful bursts of laughter emanating from mysterious beings,--these, with a host of other adventures, shrouded in impossibility, and holding on by the heel of reality, are detailed in the legends.

At last these phantoms disappear as dawn bursts in upon them. Civilization again resumed its sway, and fiction gave place to fact. The Rhine assumed another aspect: abbeys and convents increased; churches were built along the banks of the river. The ecclesiastic princes multiplied the edifices in the Rhingau, as the prefects of Rome had done before them.

The Sixteenth Century approached; in the Fourteenth the Rhine witnessed the invention of artillery; and on its bank, at Strasbourg, a printing-office was first established. In 1400 the famous cannon, fourteen feet in length, was cast at Cologne; and in 1472 Vindelin de Spire printed his Bible. A new world was making its appearance; and, strange to say, it was upon the banks of the Rhine that those two mysterious tools with which God unceasingly works out the civilization of man,--the catapult and the book--war and thought,--took a new form.

The Rhine, in the destinies of Europe, has a sort of providential signification. It is the great moat which divides the north from the south. The Rhine for thirty ages, has seen the forms and reflected the shadows of almost all the warriors who tilled the old continent with that share which they call sword. Cæsar crossed the Rhine in going to the south; Attila crossed it when descending to the north. It was here that Clovis gained the battle of Tolbiac; and that Charlemagne and Napoleon figured. Frederick Barbarossa, Rudolph of Hapsbourg, and Frederick the First, were great, victorious, and formidable when here. For the thinker, who is conversant with History, two great eagles are perpetually hovering over the Rhine--that of the Roman legions, and that of the French regiments. The Rhine--that noble flood, which the Romans named _Rhenus superbus_, bore at one time upon its surface bridges of boats, over which the armies of Italy, Spain, and France poured into Germany, and which, at a later date, were made use of by the hordes of barbarians when rushing into the ancient Roman world: at another, on its surface it floated peaceably the fir-trees of Murg and St. Gall, the porphyry and the marble of Bale, the salt of Karlshall, the leather of Stromberg, the quicksilver of Lansberg, the wine of Johannisberg, the slates of Coab, the cloth and earthenware of Wallendar, the silks and linens of Cologne. It majestically performs its double function of flood of war and flood of peace, having, without interruption, upon the ranges of hills which embank the most notable portion of its course, oak-trees on the one side and vine-trees on the other--signifying strength and joy.

For Homer the Rhine existed not; for Virgil it was only a frozen stream--_Frigiora Rheni_; for Shakespeare it was the “beautiful Rhine”; for us it is, and will be to the day when it shall become the grand question of Europe, a picturesque river, the resort of the unemployed of Ems, of Baden, and of Spa.

THE SEINE

A. BOWMAN BLAKE

Few persons outside of France have any acquaintance with, or knowledge of, the rare beauties of Seine scenery. The river has thus far escaped the vulgarity of becoming a common tourist’s high-road. The general impression is current that the Seine, being destitute of the legendary romance of the vine-clad Rhine, the vivid and somewhat spectacular scenic effects of the Italian lakes, or even the lawn-like finish of the Thames, offers no attractions to either amateur or tourist. This opinion only proves the falsity of opinion based upon superficial knowledge. From the artistic point of view, perhaps, no other one river in Europe possesses a character of scenery so preëminently beautiful, or so replete with the charm of contrast, or rich in variety; for the picturesque portions of the noble river are by no means confined to the grandeur and wildness of the Fontainebleau forests, or of the animated quays and crumbling Mediæval houses of the ancient city of Rouen. To one in search of scenes which shall unite the charms of beautiful river scenery with the added note of pastoral and village rusticity, almost every turning of the river will reveal a mine of wealth. It is a characteristic of the scenery of the Seine that it is eminently sketchable at almost every point. For it is more than a purely picturesque, it is an essentially poetic river. A conclusive proof of its superiority in point of artistic resources and suggestivement is, perhaps, that no other European river scenery has had so overwhelming an influence upon modern Art. During the past forty years, in which the Seine and its tributaries have been the principal camping-ground of the best French landscape-painters, the peculiarities of its scenery, and the features of its rustic life, have formed the taste, and developed a wholly original mode of treatment of _genre_ and landscape in the modern French school. The two principal characteristics of the scenery of the Seine are its naturalness, and its possessing in the highest degree that individuality which marks its landscapes as distinctively French. The Seine could never be mistaken at any point for other than a French river. The Parisian masters, in transferring to their canvasses the peculiarities of the river and shore aspects, have produced a school of landscape as essentially national in character as that which marks the Dutch and Flemish masterpieces of two hundred years ago. The low wide meadows, the stately poplars, the reedy shores, and the delicate atmosphere which veils the jumble of roofs, and the quaint towers and turrets that are lanced from the Seine shores, have already become as familiar features of modern French landscape, as the cone-shaped hills of Flanders and the flat windmill-dotted fields of Holland, which makes the character of the landscape in Dutch and Flemish canvasses.

I have spoken of the naturalness of the Seine landscape. It is this which makes its lasting charm. Along these banks Nature neither rises to the sublime nor does she appear in too wild or dishevelled a state. There is a happy blending of the cultivated and the uncultivated, of course tamed and yet enjoying the wilder _abandon_ of freedom. Nowhere are the scenes too grand or too wide for the pencil; the hills suggest, but do not attain, the majestic; the wide, flat fields and the long stretches of meadows are broken into possible distances by a gently sloping ground, or an avenue of tall poplars. The villages and farm-houses dotted along its banks wear a thoroughly rustic air; the villas and _châteaux_ crowning its low hills become naturally a part of the landscape by their happy adaptation, architecturally, to the character of their surroundings; while the not infrequent ruins of monastery or ancient castle group charmingly with the fluffy foliage and dense shrubbery.

Perhaps the impressionist’s most ideal landscape would be found among the villages of the upper Seine, that part of the Seine which flows between Fontainebleau and Rouen, as beyond Rouen the river takes on a stronger and bolder character both in its breadth and in the quality of its scenery.