River of Life

“ Rare trees grow upon its banks, and grace-fruits make every season beautiful. “Everything shall live whither the river cometh.”
But without the river my soul shall be “as an unwatered garden.” My life shall be a realm of perpetual drought. Things may begin to grow, but they shall speedily droop and die. The heavenly Husbandman shall find no fruit when He walks amid the garden in the cool of the day. And therefore, my soul, look to the river which flows from the throne! “There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God,” and that river is for thee! ”

“ The life of man is a gleam Of light, that comes and goes Like the course of the Holy Stream. The cityless river, that flows From fountains no one knows, Through the Lake of Galilee, Through forests and level lands, Over rocks, and shallows, and sands Of a wilderness wild and vast, Till it findeth its rest at last In the desolate Dead Sea! ”

“ The river of life that flows through streets, tumultuous, bearing along so many gallant hearts, so many wrecks of humanity;—the many homes and households, each a little world in itself, revolving round its fireside, as a central sun ”

“ I could not get out of my mind the thought of a friend, who said that the rainbows over the Falls were like the arts and beauty and goodness, with regard to the stream of life—caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise in the heart, the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single current, likens itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a community. A man's life is of many flashing moments, and yet one stream; a nation's flows through all its citizens, and yet is more than they. ”

“ Every river has a fascination for me, because it is alive. In a green landscape, or in a rocky gorge, or in the midst of a forest, or dividing a city, it gives to every scene the element of life. Living waters flowing through meadows, over sands, between mountains are always moving, progressing, going somewhere. If one climbs a hill, and looks off on a vast expanse of fresh woods and pastures new, and suddenly sees a river, the heart leaps up with recognition. ”

“ Moving water, it has been shown, is suggestive of life. But over against it we find a suggestion of death. Indeed there has been a widely diffused belief in a river of death—a striking foil to the inspiring mysticism of the river of life. The old-world mythology taught, in varying forms, but with underlying unity of concept, that there is a river, or gulf, which must be crossed by the departing soul on its way to the land of the departed. Evidently the extension of the original thought to cover its seeming opposite has a basis in the nature of things. ”

“ The river, grey with the knowledge of the meanness and tragedy of life, untroubled in its strength and in its constancy; a philosopher to whom men confide all secrets, the recoil of the{205} fainting spirit, the stirring of great endeavours; an image of human life, unceasing in the ebbing and flowing tides of surface emotion, whereon the traffic of living shifts to and fro, resistless in its unseen stream which is ever compelled to that mysterious sea where truth lies hidden, where life ends and life begins. ”

“ For the purpose of elucidation we may call our river the river of life, and we as individuals are the ships sailing upon it; the lower river is the temporal world, and when we have sailed its length and breadth for many lives, we inevitably come to the lock of upliftment which is placed at the end. ”

“ And changelessly the river sends his sigh
Down leagues of hope and fear, and pride and shame,
And life and death; dim-journeying passionless
To where broad estuary and beaconing ness
Look toward the outlands whence our fathers came. ”

“ She remembered how she had spoken to Brian Kent of the river and of life. She saw, now, that the river symbolized not only life as a whole, with its many ever-changing conditions and currents, amid which the individual must live;—the river symbolized, as truly, the individual life, with its ever-changing moods and motives,—its ever-varying and often-conflicting currents of instinct and training,—its infinite variety of intellectual deeps and shallows,—its gentle places of spiritual calm,—and its wild and turbulent rapids of dangerous passion. ”

“ In the midst of the city is a river of water of life clear as sparkling crystal, flowing out from the throne of God and of the Lamb. On each side of the river is the tree of life yielding continual fruitage. And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. ”

“ But much as we may admire the majestic grandeur of a mighty river, either in its eager rush or its calmer moments, there is something which fascinates even more in the free life, the young energy, the sparkling transparence, and merry music of smaller streams. ”

“ Here the river, crazy with delight, seems to lose its head and goes meandering about, poking its nose up back waters, creeping across meadows, flooding limpid shallows, mirroring oaks and willows upside down, surging up as if to sweep away a velvetshorn lawn, only to pour itself—its united self—into an open-mouthed lock, and so on to a saner life in a level stretch beyond. ”

“ And the influence of a lake, in calming and clearing the turbid water, may be compared to the effect of reason in more mature life, when the tranquil, deep, cool, and unimpassioned mind is freed from its fever, its troubles, bubbles, noise, and foam. And, above all, the sources of a river—which may be considered as belonging to the atmosphere—and its termination in the ocean, may be regarded as imaging the divine origin of the human mind, and its being ultimately returned to, and lost in, the infinite and eternal Intelligence from which it originally sprang. ”

“ Watch the stream coming down the hill with a flash and a laugh in the sunlight, look into the dark [Pg 279] brown pools in the deep shadows beneath the rocks, or voyage a whole night upon the breast of the great river, drifting past ghostly monasteries and silent villages, and then say if there be no life in the waters, if they, too, are dead things. There is no consolation like the consolation of Nature, no sympathy like the sympathy of the hills and streams; and sympathy comes from life. ”

“ When we look on a river with a poet’s eyes we see in it the reflection of an invisible river, the river of Time, the river of man’s life, the river of Eternity. “Man may come and man may go, but I go on for ever.” ”

“ It is wonderful how, after awhile, the winding river seems to weave itself into the very texture and fabric of one’s life. You stroll by it, bathe in it, row on it, fish in it, until every rock and every bank, every crag and every cliff, every twist and every bay, every deep and every shallow, takes its place among the intimacies and fond familiarities of life. ”

“ There is always life in a stream, of which a lake is frequently deprived, when sleeping beneath a windless sky. A river pursues for ever its course, accomplishing the task its Creator has imposed, and its waters are for ever changing while they seem the same. ”

“ Come, let us cross the river, those that have gone before,
Crush'd in the strife for freedom, await on yonder shore;
So bright the sunshine sparkles, so merry hums the breeze,
Come, let us cross the river, and rest beneath the trees.
III.
Come, let us cross the river, the stream that runs so dark:
'Tis none but cowards quiver, so let us all embark.
Come, men with hearts undaunted, we'll stem the tide with ease,
We'll cross the flowing river, and rest beneath the trees.
IV.
Come, let us cross the river, the dying hero cried,
And God, of life the giver, then bore him o'er the tide. ”

“ The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. ”

“ How pleasant is the course along a new river, the sight of new shores; like a life, would but life flow as fast, and upbear us with as full a stream. I hoped we should come in sight of the rapids by daylight; but the beautiful sunset was quite gone, and only a young moon trembling over the scene, when we came within hearing of them. ”

“ Yes, the Nile, the Ganges, the Rhine, the Thames, and a thousand other rivers of renown have had, and still have, their part to play in the cosmic drama and in the development of man's spiritual nature. Generation after generation has found them to be capable of stirring peculiar emotions, and of stimulating profound thoughts on the mystery of life. And all these powers are concentrated and sublimated in this glorious vision of "the river of water of life that flows from the throne of God." ”

“ The river of my wilderness, which is more impetuous than any other that I know of, breaks against the jutting rock, and throws itself foaming into the abyss below—an object of admiration to the mountain wanderer, and a source of profit to the natives from the numerous fishes that are found in its waters. Shall I describe to thee the fructifying vapors that rise from the moist earth, or the cool breezes wafted over the rippled face of the waters? Shall I speak of the sweet song of the birds, or of the rich luxuriance of the flowering plants? ”

“ The river of His pleasures is a tributary of divine Love, whose living waters have their source in God, and flow into everlasting Life. We drink of this river when all human desires are quenched, satisfied with what is pleasing to the divine Mind. ”

“ But the journey which lies before one’s thoughts when once they embark upon this river we call “Life,” is indeed too big for them even imaginatively to attempt. Our boats are so small, and the river so wide, that one soon loses sight of shore. ”

“ Some great writer has said that we ought to begin life as at the source of a river, growing deeper every league to the sea, whereas, in fact, thousands enter the river at its mouth, and sail inland, finding less and less water every day, until in old age they lie shrunk and gasping upon dry ground. ”

“ The 'unreasonable' use to make of the river is to preserve it intact for tired, weary souls to flee to through all the future, so that their bodies may breathe God and life into their being again, and go forth strong. ”

“ Suppose you slept in rough blankets, on the ground or in bunks, ate rough food, never saw a woman or a book, undertook work to scare your city men up a tree and into a hole too easy, risked your life a dozen times a week in a tangle of logs, with the big river roaring behind just waiting to swallow you ”

“ The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,—flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time. ”

“ Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! ”

“ The man of mark and of adventure, on the contrary, resembles, in the course of his life, the river whose mid-current and discharge into the ocean are widely removed from each other, as well as from the rocks and wild flowers which its fountains first reflected ”

“ A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it. ”

“ A river, by choice, to live by in middle age.
“In hours of melancholy reflection, in those last years of life which have little left but tender memories, the still companionship of the lake, embosomed in woods, sheltered, fed by sweet mountain brooks and hidden springs, commends itself to the wearied and saddened spirit. I am not thinking of those great inland seas, which have many of the features and much of the danger that belong to the ocean, but of those 'ponds,' as our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by summer visitors ”

“ And the promise is, that men that take up their dwellings by this river of water of life, shall be fruitful as such trees.
If thou be a Christian, thou hast more than an ordinary call and occasion to abide by these waters; thy things will not grow but by these waters. Weeds, and the excellences of most men, we may find in the barren wilderness; they grow under every hedge, Jer. 31: 12; but thine are garden, and so choice, things, and will not thrive without much water; no, not without the water of God's river. Isa. 21: 1-3. Dwell therefore here, that thy soul may be as a watered garden. ”

“ In the music of the rushing stream sounds the joyful assurance, "I shall become the sea." It is not a vain assumption; it is true humility, for it is the truth. The river has no other alternative. On both sides of its banks it has numerous fields and forests, villages and towns; it can serve them in various ways, cleanse them and feed them, carry their produce from place to place. But it can have only partial relations with these, and however long it may linger among them it remains separate; it never can become a town or a forest.
But it can and does become the sea. ”

“ The mobility of masses of water, seeming to be a sign of life, naturally procured them a definite place among sacred things. Any spring, pond, lake, or river with which a tribe was brought into intimate relations was regarded as a source of life or of healing, and of divination. ”