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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: would be nothing. Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream
in a walled channel of stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it
becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river--a liquid
artifice--a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the
most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with
none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the bosom of the earth.
The life of a river, like that of a human being, consists in the
union of soul and body, the water and the banks. They belong
together. They act and react upon each other. The stream moulds
and makes the shore; hollowing out a bay here, and building a long
point there; alluring the little bushes close to its side, and
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