Among the Greeks, and even in Homer, every tree, every fountain, all things inanimate, that either vegetated or moved, had their indwelling deity. Homer, however, represents the infancy of that system, and though he impersonates many other local agencies, he gives to none so active a personality as to Rivers. Ulysses in his distress addresses the god of the Scherian river[558]; and is answered by the staying of the current. Simois is addressed personally by Xanthus[559]; and Xanthus himself, by virtue of his local power, is promoted to the honour of contending with Vulcan, the god of fire, a member of the Olympian Court, and a son of Jupiter and Juno. So the Spercheus[560] is invoked, and, what is more, invoked so far off as in Troas, by Achilles.
The perpetual movement which inheres in the essence of a river, combined with the visibility which separates it from mere atmospherical currents, seems to connect it more closely than any other natural object with the idea of life. It is most interesting to observe how the sentiment here expressed seems to have worked in ages widely distant, upon great poets of differing nations, temperaments, and circumstances, after their differing manners. Homer does not impute feelings to a River; but he impersonates it with a treatment different to that which he applies to groves, fountain, or meadow. Now these personifications though not yet disused (especially in the English poetry of the last century), have become far less real and effective for the human mind, since the Gospel opened to us the unseen world with its crowd of ethereal inhabitants. Observe, accordingly, how a feeling identical with that of Homer, a tendency to invest outward nature with vitality and action, in these more recent times takes a different form. The great Dante, more than two thousand years later in the line of human descent, without personifying, yet ascribes feeling to a river; he imagines the Po, after its tumultuous headlong descent with all its feeders from the mountains, longing for peace, and seeking it by repairing to the sea. Francesca da Rimini thus describes her birth-place;
Siede la Terra, dove nata fui,
Sulla marina, dove ’l Po discende
Per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.
And one of lesser indeed, (for who is not less than such as these?) but yet of both high and honoured poetic name, our own Wordsworth, in his Sonnet[561] on the River Thames, seen from London Bridge at sunrise, has the well known line,
The river wanders at his own sweet will.
He may also be claimed as a witness to what has been said of the truth and power of these personifications to the ancients. For in another noble Sonnet, where he complains of the deadening power and weight of worldly life, and intends to show that a system of shadows, when men really appropriate and digest the truth it has, is better for them than to have a system of substances around them, and yet to remain unpenetrated by it, he describes that system of shadows by recalling two of its vivid personifications[562].
But while Homer brings into action no personifications of this class, except those of Rivers, he peoples each with its appropriate Genius, the fountains, the grassy meadows, and the groves. In the Great Parliament of the supernal world at the beginning of the Twentieth Iliad, all are represented. Even here, however, the distinction is preserved: the Rivers attend as it were in person; but the rest by deputy, that is, by their proper indwelling and presiding Spirits;
οὔτε τις οὖν Ποταμῶν ἀπέην νόσφ’ Ὠκεανοῖο,