Excerpt from Great Rivers of the World, as Seen and Described by Famous Writers
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 debris; 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.
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