OUR RIVERS.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XL, Issue 9086, 19 May 1891, Page 3

OUR RIVERS.

From the earliest times to the present, rivers, from the Ganges to the Missouri, Lave constituted the great high roads along which the lines of human intercourse have been conducted. From the pre-bistoric age of the cave dwellings on the cliffs of the Dordogue, from the brixk bab" Nations of Nineveh, down to the, in coir >arison, modern Capitals, Paris and Lc idon, and Albany, the races of mankind ha c, in the process of the natural selection of sheltered sites for houses, easy sources of food supply, and facility of intercourse, chosen the great rive. -courses of the world. Within the last half century only, subsequently to the invention of steam locomotion, population and, with it, industry and wealth, have begun to follow, for the first time, the track of railways rather than the course of rivers. A striking example of this in Europe is Berlin, a city, less than fifty years ago, scarcely larger than Melbourne now, and consisting principally of clusters of mean buildings crowded on the muddy little Biver Spree, grown at this day to be, nest to Paris, the finest in Europe, and soon to far outstrip Paris and Vienna, in population and opukace. In the British Islands, hardly less x^Jiarkable an illustration of this newaspect in the growth of civilisation, is the town of Birmingham, a town barely a century ago smaller an"d much more insignificant than Dunedin in 1891, but since expanded into one of the densest and most productive populations in theolcl World — a population far richer than, and quite as large as, that of London in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria's grandfather. In the New World stands Chicago, at the accession of Victoria a smaller and less important town than Waitara or Pates, and with probably even less Trade, but .since become the magnificent Capital of Western Ame ica, having more than a million inhabitarts, and connected by five and twenty railways with every quarter of the United States. As a result of the part played in history and even more so from their own innate qualities, rivers have, from the dawn of Literature and Art, attracted no small share of attention • But here, too, as with mountains, forests, and other natural objects, so with rivers, it has been left to the poets and painters of modern ages adequately to interpret — or even attempt to interpret — them in their .bidden and enduring meaning. In ancient Poetry and Art, indeed, the river hardly figures at all, "and when it does, then as quite a subordinate feature in the landscape. It is curious but none the less certain that the oldest historical river known to us, that river which to Ancient Egypt waa the sole artery of commerce, almost the sole means of subsistence to the people, a river which is far the most prominent feature in the scenery throughout the entire length of the land, should be hardly discovered at all, or when discovered, should be found with one exception, in an obscure corner of the frescoes depicted on the walls of temp'es and tombs. In the many thousands of lines, again, contained in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, very rarely is a river so much as alluded to, and even then alluded to not as an object beautiful and complete in itself, but as a mere accessory to the human figure or to serve as a similitude of human life. Horace, who of all the poets of antiquity, was perhaps the most keenly sensitive to the beauties of Nature, reserves, with scarce an exception, his finest lines to the praise of waterfalls and hills, and has few left for that "Flavus Tiberis" twelve times spoken of in passages read but to be forgotten. Tho Divine Coinmedia of Dante, cast throughout as it is in a distinctly catholic and mediajval mould, is similarly impregnated with the pagan spi/it of indifference to natural sublimity, sa c as a setting to the human drama. l-.ke, for example, Dante's lines, largely imitated from Vergil, as Vergil's in their turn are copied from Homer, descriptive of the dark river of the Dead, beginning: " I beheld '• A throng upon the shore of a great stream." . or again : "Then on the solitary shore arrived." That bright and genial Bunshine which, in refreshing contrast, warms the landscape painted by our own mediaeval poet, seldom, Btrange to say, lights up the richly wooded banks of the pellucid Thames beneath the mount of Windsor, where he for a while lived, or the green pastures of that Mcd way be must have crossed more than once on his pilgriuinge to Canterbury. In Chaucer, as in Dante, there was this much indeed ia unison that, in each poet, scenery — whether supernatural, Bombro, or sublime, as in the latter, simple, natural, and 303 ous, as in the former — takes the second rank only, is employed by each to serve as a framework to ihe matchless portraits of man himself. Still, it is strange that he who could indite the versos commencing — " Whan that Aprille with his schowres jcVviL swoote," &nd again these j **" " The besy larke, mesaager of day, f?a}ueth jn hire wpg tho worwS gray,"

should have littlo or no admiration for the beauties of rivera sung oftor^his day by poets immeasurably his inferior, e.g., Pope and Prior. Two poets there are in English literature who may bo fitly designated, each after his own fashion, as distinctively poets of those streams and rivers with which England and New Zealand alike "abound: William Cowper, in calm, mcV dious measure, celebrating tho placid beauties of the tranquil Ouse, slowly wandering on its winding way throj'jh peaceful Midland meadows, beneath the shade of waving willows: between " Banks clothed with flowers, grovos filled with sprightly sounds;" William Wordsworth, singing of that child of the clouds and nurseling of the mouutain, swift-flowing Duddon, whose Jow murmuring voice whispered to tho poet's heart of days long past, when ho roved by the side of its bright waters with friends and kindred since doparted, till prepared, himself : "In peace of heart, in calm of mind and soul, To mingle in the Ocean of Eternity." And have not we also in this beautiful Britain of the South, this Taranaki of ours, this " Acadian land," on the shores of the mighty Pacific, " Distant, Secluded, Still " — not only our majestic mountain, oiir far extended forest primroval, but streams and rivers almost too numerous to name, of a loveliness rare indeed to bo found in any country, out of the tropics, throughout the Earth ? Of such rivers as the Te Popo, Manganni, and Ngatoro, of once, alas ! the Waiangona and Waiwakaiho, are not the words of the poet true : " Woods that ever verdant wave, " Wildly here without control, Nature reigns and rules the whole, Dearest to the feeling soul ; Sho plants the forest, pours tho flood ; Waters flow and wild woods wave." Egmont.