In the old days “before the war” (our war), luxurious passenger steamers plied from St. Louis to New Orleans; and I understand that, after the lapse of many years, we are to have similar vessels. This is as it should be; an immense amount of American literature and history, from De Soto to Edna Ferber, is associated with this river, and the opportunity of travelling on it should be given to all Americans. I have not yet abandoned my youthful dream of travelling on the Mississippi from St. Paul to St. Louis, and from St. Louis to New Orleans.
I never miss a good chance for a river voyage. One has the element of adventure as one rounds the next bend. I have been on the rivers of southern Florida, I have been on the Savannah river in Georgia, and the last time I was at Vanderbilt university, in Nashville, friends gave me a memorable excursion on the Cumberland. One of the most interesting of all inland voyages in the United States is to take the steamer from Norfolk to Richmond on the James. From seven in the morning to eight at night it is a panorama of American history.
The word river occurs many times in the Bible, and think of the part played in the story of mankind by the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Jordan! The Bible begins and ends with a river. In the second chapter of Genesis, we read “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden,” a lovely spectacle, for Paradise would never have been complete without a river. In the last chapter of Revelation, we read, “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.”
It is curious when the Bible speaks of the River of Life—“on either side of the river there was the tree of life”—that the idea should persist of the River of Death. This is a heathen and pagan idea and has no place in Jewish or Christian thought. Many people speak solemnly of crossing the river—they get the notion either from Greek mythology or from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, or metaphorically, from the Promised Land lying on the other side of the Jordan.
In reality the Bible tells us that both the earthly and the heavenly Paradise had a river to refresh and gladden the people.
Without sermonising too grossly, we may say that a river is like a human life. The source is often obscure and humble, then a tiny stream, then growing bigger and more important (the widening of influence), then flowing tranquilly (prosperous, happy days), then getting into sand flats, hardly moving (serious illness), then roaring tempestuously in rapids (times of excitement and adventure), yet going on, somehow and somewhere.
Furthermore, they always arrive ultimately at the same destination—the mysterious open sea, leaving narrow circumstances for a deeper and greater existence.
And even those streams that seem to perish without fulfilling their destiny, are in their subsequent influence like the lives of obscurely good men. Some travellers in a desert came to a bit of green meadow where a river once had been.
IX
ONE DAY AT A TIME
On a certain morning in the year 1900 I called on President Eliot at his office in Harvard University. He was in a gracious mood and we talked of many things. As I rose to leave I said I hoped I might always have the privilege of calling on him whenever I came to Cambridge. He remarked gravely (in every sense of that word): “The next time you come I may not be here.”