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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: the brook on whose banks we first picked the twinflower of young
love. However far we may travel, we come back to Naaman's state of
mind: "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than
all the waters of Israel?"
It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always
the most agreeable, nor the best to live with. Diogenes must have
been an uncomfortable bedfellow: Antinous was bored to death in the
society of the Emperor Hadrian: and you can imagine much better
company for a walking trip than Napoleon Bonaparte. Semiramis was
a lofty queen, but I fancy that Ninus had more than one bad
quarter-of-an-hour with her: and in "the spacious times of great
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