Who comest to give life to Egypt!
Thou givest the earth to drink, inexhaustible one!
Thou descendest from the sky.”[[123]]
In Greek mythology, we find the river ocean flowing around the earth, with its calm current unbroken by storm, and unswerved by the angry tempest. The sea, with her sun-kissed billows, received her waters from this unfailing fountain, and far beyond the northern mountains, where the “golden gardens” gleamed in the sunlight and the winds were rocked to sleep, there lived a happy people, where sorrow could not enter and death would never come.
Among the Hindūs, the sacred Ganges flowed at first only through the blue fields of heaven, and fell to the earth from the divine feet of Vishnū:
“And white foam clouds and silver spray
Were wildly tossed on high,
Like swans that urge their homeward way
Across the autumn sky.”
The Norseman also sings of heavenly rivers, as well as the Ifing, which flows in a never-freezing current between the world of men and the world of gods; he sings, too, of the river Gyöll, which flows nearest to the gates of Hel,[[124]] and over whose golden bridge the countless bands of the dead are passing.