I cross, each morning, a bridge that spans a river of running water. It is not a wide river, but one populous with boats and teeming with all the mercantile life of a great city. Its current is swift, its bottom deep; it carries on its glassy bosom the freight of a thousand—of ten thousand merchants. Only the conception of something supernally wonderful haunts me as I cross it, and I gaze at the picture of its boats and barges, its spars and sails, spellbound by their beauty. The boats on this little river—the Harlem—traverse the seven seas. You may stand and see them go by: vessels loaded with brick and stone, with lumber and cement, with coal, iron, lime, oil—a great gamut of serviceable things which the world needs and which is here forever being delivered or carried away. These boats come from the Hudson and the Chesapeake, from Maine, Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, Europe, Asia, Africa and the rest of the world. They tie up to these small docks in friendly rows and nose the banks in silence, while human beings, honored only by being allowed to guide and direct their stately proportions, clamber over them.
 
The Wonder of the Water
It is not so much these boats, however, as it is the water which curls under them, which sips and eddies about the docks and posts, and circles away in spinning rings, which takes my fancy. This water, which flows217 here so swiftly, comes from so far. It has been washing about the world, lo, these many centuries—for how long the imagination of man cannot conceive. And here it is running pleasantly at my feet, the light of the morning sun warming it with amethystine beams and giving it a luster which the deeps of the sea cannot have.
This water, as it comes before me now, gives me the impression of having been a hundred and a thousand things, maybe—the torrent from the height, bounding ecstatically downward into the depths of some cavern, ............