The Rhine has always been more than a river. It is a spine of myth, a highway of ghosts, a boundary between the known and the uncanny. In this vanished 1875 study, X.-B. Saintine traces the spiritual geography of Europe's most storied waterway back to its pre-Christian roots, recovering a world where every oak grove hummed with presence and the river itself was a god in constant conversation with the people along its banks. This is not mere antiquarian cataloguing: it is an act of imaginative reconstruction, piecing together what Druids believed, what Celtic tribes sacrifice to, how Germanic and Celtic cosmologies tangled and transformed along these misty waters. Saintine writes with the romantic urgency of a man who senses these old faiths are not merely dead but merely sleeping, waiting in the stones and the current. For readers drawn to the Underhill aspects of European history, to the weird persistence of pagan feeling beneath Christian veneer, this slim volume offers a doorway into a world where nature was alive with intention and every tree by the water was a temple.
