When we returned to Hooksett, a week afterward, the melon man, in whose
corn-barn we had hung our tent and buffaloes and other things to dry,
was already picking his hops, with many women and children to help him.
We bought one watermelon, the largest in his patch, to carry with us
for ballast. It was Nathan’s, which he might sell if he wished, having
been conveyed to him in the green state, and owned daily by his eyes.
After due consultation with “Father,” the bargain was concluded,—we to
buy it at a venture on the vine, green or ripe, our risk, and pay “what
the gentlemen pleased.” It proved to be ripe; for we had had honest
experience in selecting this fruit.
Finding our boat safe in its harbor, under Uncannunuc Mountain, with a
fair wind and the current in our favor, we commenced our return voyage
at noon, sitting at our ease and conversing, or in silence watching for
the last trace of each reach in the river as a bend concealed it from
our view. As the season was further advanced, the wind now blew
steadily from the north, and with our sail set we could occasionally
lie on our oars without loss of time. The lumbermen throwing down wood
from the top of the high bank, thirty or forty feet above the water,
that it might be sent down stream, paused in their work to watch our
retreating sail. By this time, indeed, we were well known to the
boatmen, and were hailed as the Revenue Cutter of the stream. As we
sailed rapidly down the river, shut in between two mounds of earth, the
sounds of this timber rolled down the bank enhanced the silence and
vastness of the noon, and we fancied that only the primeval echoes were
awakened. The vision of a distant scow just heaving in sight round a
headland also increased by contrast the solitude.
Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental
city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which
Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are
light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and
eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the
immensity of Nature. The Ægean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the
Indian. Also there is all the refinement of civilized life in the woods
under a sylvan garb. The wildest scenes have an air of domesticity and
homeliness even to the citizen, and when the flicker’s cackle is heard
in the clearing, he is reminded that civilization has wrought but
little change there. Science is welcome to the deepest recesses of the
forest, for there too nature obeys the same old civil laws. The little
red bug on the stump of a pine,—for it the wind shifts and the sun
breaks through the clouds. In the wildest nature, there is not only the
material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the
last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by
man. There is papyrus by the river-side, and rushes for light, and the
goose only flies overhead, ages before the studious are born or letters
invented, and that literature which the former suggest, and even from
the first have rudely served, it may be man does not yet use them to
express. Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work
of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist
never appears in his work.
Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A
perfect work of man’s art would also be wild or natural in a good
sense. Man tames Nature only that he may at last make her more free
even than he found her, though he may never yet have succeeded.
With this propitious breeze, and the help of our oars, we soon reached
the Falls of Amoskeag, and the mouth of the Piscataquoag, and
recognized, as we swept rapidly by, many a fair bank and islet on which
our eyes had rested in the upward passage. Our boat was like that which
Chaucer describes in his Dream, in which the knight took his departure
from the island,
“To journey for his marriage,
And return with such an host,
That wedded might be least and most. . . . .
Which barge was as a man’s thought,
After his pleasure to him brought,
The queene herself accustomed aye
In the same barge to play,
It needed neither mast ne rother,
I have not heard of such another,
No master for the governance,
Hie sayled by thought and pleasaunce,
Without labor east and west,
All was one, calme or tempest.”
So we sailed this afternoon, thinking of the saying of Pythagoras,
though we had no peculiar right to remember it, “It is beautiful when
prosperity is present with intellect, and when sailing as it were with
a prosperous wind, actions are performed looking to virtue; just as a
pilot looks to the motions of the stars.” All the world reposes in
beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely
on his path without secret violence; as he who sails down a stream, he
has only to steer, keeping his bark in the middle, and carry it round
the falls. The ripples curled away in our wake, like ringlets from the
head of a child, while we steadily held on our course, and under the
bows we watched
“The swaying soft,
Made by the delicate wave parted in front,
As through the gentle element we move
Like shadows gliding through untroubled dreams.”
The forms of beauty fall naturally around the path of him who is in the
performance of his proper work; as the curled shavings drop from the
plane, and borings cluster round the auger. Undulation is the gentlest
and most ideal of motions, produced by one fluid falling on another.
Rippling is a more graceful flight. From a hill-top you may detect in
it the wings of birds endlessly repeated. The two _waving_ lines which
represent the flight of birds appear to have been copied from the
ripple.
The trees made an admirable fence to the landscape, skirting the
horizon on every side. The single trees and the groves left standing on
the interval appeared naturally disposed, though the farmer had
consulted only his convenience, for he too falls into the scheme of
Nature. Art can never match the luxury and superfluity of Nature. In
the former all is seen; it cannot afford concealed wealth, and is
niggardly in comparison; but Nature, even when she is scant and thin
outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity
at the roots. In swamps, where there is only here and there an
ever-green tree amid the quaking moss and cranberry beds, the bareness
does not suggest poverty. The single-spruce, which I had hardly noticed
in gardens, attracts me in such places, and now first I understand why
men try to make them grow about their houses. But though there may be
very perfect specimens in front-yard plots, their beauty is for the
most part ineffectual there, for there is no such assurance of kindred
wealth beneath and around them, to make them show to advantage. As we
have said, Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God;
though, referred to herself, she is genius; and there is a similarity
between her operations and man’s art even in the details and trifles.
When the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the sun and water,
and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn into
fantastic shapes, and white and smooth, as if turned in a lathe. Man’s
art has wisely imitated those forms into which all matter is most
inclined to run, as foliage and fruit. A hammock swung in a grove
assumes the exact form of a canoe, broader or narrower, and higher or
lower at the ends, as more or fewer persons are in it, and it rolls in
the air with the motion of the body, like a canoe in the water. Our art
leaves its shavings and its dust about; her art exhibits itself even in
the shavings and the dust which we make. She has perfected herself by
an eternity of practice. The world is well kept; no rubbish
accumulates; the morning air is clear even at this day, and no dust has
settled on the grass. Behold how the evening now steals over the
fields, the shadows of the trees creeping farther and farther into the
meadow, and erelong the stars will come to bathe in these retired
waters. Her undertakings are secure and never fail. If I were awakened
from a deep sleep, I should know which side of the meridian the sun
might be by the aspect of nature, and by the chirp of the crickets, and
yet no painter can paint this difference. The landscape contains a
thousand dials which indicate the natural divisions of time, the
shadows of a thousand styles point to the hour.
“Not only o’er the dial’s face,
This silent phantom day by day,
With slow, unseen, unceasing pace
Steals moments, months, and years away;
From hoary rock and aged tree,
From proud Palmyra’s mouldering walls,
From Teneriffe, towering o’er the sea,
From every blade of grass it falls.”
It is almost the only game which the trees play at, this tit-for-tat,
now this side in the sun, now that, the drama of the day. In deep
ravines under the eastern sides of cliffs, Night forwardly plants her
foot even at noonday, and as Day retreats she steps into his trenches,
skulking from tree to tree, from fence to fence, until at last she sits
in his citadel and draws out her forces into the plain. It may be that
the forenoon is brighter than the afternoon, not only because of the
greater transparency of its atmosphere, but because we naturally look
most into the west, as forward into the day, and so in the forenoon see
the sunny side of things, but in the afternoon the shadow of every
tree.
The afternoon is now far advanced, and a fresh and leisurely wind is
blowing over the river, making long reaches of bright ripples. The
river has done its stint, and appears not to flow, but lie at its
length reflecting the light, and the haze over the woods is like the
inaudible panting, or rather the gentle perspiration of resting nature,
rising from a myriad of pores into the attenuated atmosphere.
On the thirty-first day of March, one hundred and forty-two years
before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, there were
hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the pine woods
which then fringed these banks, two white women and a boy, who had left
an island at the mouth of the Contoocook before daybreak. They were
slightly clad for the season, in the English fashion, and handled their
paddles unskilfully, but with nervous energy and determination, and at
the bottom of their canoe lay the still bleeding scalps of ten of the
aborigines. They were Hannah Dustan, and her nurse, Mary Neff, both of
Haverhill, eighteen miles from the mouth of this river, and an English
boy, named Samuel Lennardson, escaping from captivity among the
Indians. On the 15th of March previous, Hannah Dustan had been
compelled to rise from child-bed, and half dressed, with one foot bare,
accompanied by her nurse, commence an uncertain march, in still
inclement weather, through the snow and the wilderness. She had seen
her seven elder children flee with their father, but knew not of their
fate. She had seen her infant’s brains dashed out against an
apple-tree, and had left her own and her neighbors’ dwellings in ashes.
When she reached the wigwam of her captor, situated on an island in the
Merrimack, more than twenty miles above where we now are, she had been
told that she and her nurse were soon to be taken to a distant Indian
settlement, and there made to run the gauntlet naked. The family of
this Indian consisted of two men, three women, and seven children,
beside an English boy, whom she found a prisoner among them. Having
determined to attempt her escape, she instructed the boy to inquire of
one of the men, how he should despatch an enemy in the quickest manner,
and take his scalp. “Strike ’em there,” said he, placing his finger on
his temple, and he also showed him how to take off the scalp. On the
morning of the 31st she arose before daybreak, and awoke her nurse and
the boy, and taking the Indians’ tomahawks, they killed them all in
their sleep, excepting one favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded
with him to the woods. The English boy struck the Indian who had given
him the information, on the temple, as he had been directed. They then
collected all the provision they could find, and took their master’s
tomahawk and gun, and scuttling all the canoes but one, commenced their
flight to Haverhill, distant about sixty miles by the river. But after
having proceeded a short distance, fearing that her story would not be
believed if she should escape to tell it, they returned to the silent
wigwam, and taking off the scalps of the dead, put them into a bag as
proofs of what they had done, and then retracing their steps to the
shore in the twilight, recommenced their voyage.
Early this morning this deed was performed, and now, perchance, these
tired women and this boy, their clothes stained with blood, and their
minds racked with alternate resolution and fear, are making a hasty
meal of parched corn and moose-meat, while their canoe glides under
these pine roots whose stumps are still standing on the bank. They are
thinking of the dead whom they have left behind on that solitary isle
far up the stream, and of the relentless living warriors who are in
pursuit. Every withered leaf which the winter has left seems to know
their story, and in its rustling to repeat it and betray them. An
Indian lurks behind every rock and pine, and their nerves cannot bear
the tapping of a woodpecker. Or they forget their own dangers and their
deeds in conjecturing the fate of their kindred, and whether, if they
escape the Indians, they shall find the former still alive. They do not
stop to cook their meals upon the bank, nor land, except to carry their
canoe about the falls. The stolen birch forgets its master and does
them good service, and the swollen current bears them swiftly along
with little need of the paddle, except to steer and keep them warm by
exercise. For ice is floating in the river; the spring is opening; the
muskrat and the beaver are driven out of their holes by the flood; deer
gaze at them from the bank; a few faint-singing forest birds,
perchance, fly across the river to the northernmost shore; the
fish-hawk sails and screams overhead, and geese fly over with a
startling clangor; but they do not observe these things, or they
speedily forget them. They do not smile or chat all day. Sometimes they
pass an Indian grave surrounded by its paling on the bank, or the frame
of a wigwam, with a few coals left behind, or the withered stalks still
rustling in the Indian’s solitary cornfield on the interval. The birch
stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned
down to be made into a canoe, these are the only traces of man,—a
fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches
away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the “South Sea”; to the white man a
drear and howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home, adapted to his
nature, and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.
While we loiter here this autumn evening, looking for a spot retired
enough, where we shall quietly rest to-night, they thus, in that chilly
March evening, one hundred and forty-two years before us, with wind and
current favoring, have already glided out of sight, not to camp, as we
shall, at night, but while two sleep one will manage the canoe, and the
swift stream bear them onward to the settlements, it may be, even to
old John Lovewell’s house on Salmon Brook to-night.
According to the historian, they escaped as by a miracle all roving
bands of Indians, and reached their homes in safety, with their
trophies, for which the General Court paid them fifty pounds. The
family of Hannah Dustan all assembled alive once more, except the
infant whose brains were dashed out against the apple-tree, and there
have been many who in later times have lived to say that they had eaten
of the fruit of that apple-tree.
This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his
Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we
do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did
the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek. “We must look a
long way back,” says Raleigh, “to find the Romans giving laws to
nations, and their consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains
to Rome in triumph; to see men go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for
gold; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their
former condition.” And yet, in one sense, not so far back as to find
the Penacooks and Pawtuckets using bows and arrows and hatchets of
stone, on the banks of the Merrimack. From this September afternoon,
and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more
remote than the dark ages. On beholding an old picture of Concord, as
it appeared but seventy-five years ago, with a fair open prospect and a
light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, I find that I had
not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad
daylight then. Still less do we imagine the sun shining on hill and
valley during Philip’s war, on the war-path of Church or Philip, or
later of Lovewell or Paugus, with serene summer weather, but they must
have lived and fought in a dim twilight or night.
The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even
according to the Mosaic account, without borrowing any years from the
geologist. From Adam and Eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and
then through the ancient monarchies, through Babylon and Thebes, Brahma
and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts; whence we might start again
with Orpheus and the Trojan war, the Pyramids and the Olympic games,
and Homer and Athens, for our stages; and after a breathing space at
the building of Rome, continue our journey down through Odin and Christ
to—America. It is a wearisome while. And yet the lives of but sixty old
women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung
together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking hold of
hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother. A
respectable tea-party merely,—whose gossip would be Universal History.
The fourth old woman from myself suckled Columbus,—the ninth was nurse
to the Norman Conqueror,—the nineteenth was the Virgin Mary,—the
twenty-fourth the Cumæan Sibyl,—the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and
Helen her name,—the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis,—the sixtieth was
Eve the mother of mankind. So much for the
“Old woman that lives under the hill,
And if she’s not gone she lives there still.”
It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at the
death of Time.
We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure
invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true
work of fiction even, is only to take leisure and liberty to describe
some things more exactly as they are. A true account of the actual is
the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and
superficial view. Though I am not much acquainted with the works of
Goethe, I should say that it was one of his chief excellences as a
writer, that he was satisfied with giving an exact description of
things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon him. Most
travellers have not self-respect enough to do this simply, and make
objects and events stand around them as the centre, but still imagine
more favorable positions and relations than the actual ones, and so we
get no valuable report from them at all. In his Italian Travels Goethe
jogs along at a snail’s pace, but always mindful that the earth is
beneath and the heavens are above him. His Italy is not merely the
fatherland of lazzaroni and virtuosi, and scene of splendid ruins, but
a solid turf-clad soil, daily shined on by the sun, and nightly by the
moon. Even the few showers are faithfully recorded. He speaks as an
unconcerned spectator, whose object is faithfully to describe what he
sees, and that, for the most part, in the order in which he sees it.
Even his reflections do not interfere with his descriptions. In one
place he speaks of himself as giving so glowing and truthful a
description of an old tower to the peasants who had gathered around
him, that they who had been born and brought up in the neighborhood
must needs look over their shoulders, “that,” to use his own words,
“they might behold with their eyes, what I had praised to their
ears,”—“and I added nothing, not even the ivy which for centuries had
decorated the walls.” It would thus be possible for inferior minds to
produce invaluable books, if this very moderation were not the evidence
of superiority; for the wise are not so much wiser than others as
respecters of their own wisdom. Some, poor in spirit, record
plaintively only what has happened to them; but others how they have
happened to the universe, and the judgment which they have awarded to
circumstances. Above all, he possessed a hearty good-will to all men,
and never wrote a cross or even careless word. On one occasion the
post-boy snivelling, “Signor perdonate, quésta è la mia patria,” he
confesses that “to me poor northerner came something tear-like into the
eyes.”
Goethe’s whole education and life were those of the artist. He lacks
the unconsciousness of the poet. In his autobiography he describes
accurately the life of the author of Wilhelm Meister. For as there is
in that book, mingled with a rare and serene wisdom, a certain
pettiness or exaggeration of trifles, wisdom applied to produce a
constrained and partial and merely well-bred man,—a magnifying of the
theatre till life itself is turned into a stage, for which it is our
duty to study our parts well, and conduct with propriety and
precision,—so in the autobiography, the fault of his education is, so
to speak, its merely artistic completeness. Nature is hindered, though
she prevails at last in making an unusually catholic impression on the
boy. It is the life of a city boy, whose toys are pictures and works of
art, whose wonders are the theatre and kingly processions and
crownings. As the youth studied minutely the order and the degrees in
the imperial procession, and suffered none of its effect to be lost on
him, so the man aimed to secure a rank in society which would satisfy
his notion of fitness and respectability. He was defrauded of much
which the savage boy enjoys. Indeed, he himself has occasion to say in
this very autobiography, when at last he escapes into the woods without
the gates: “Thus much is certain, that only the undefinable,
wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are
adapted to the sublime, which, whenever it may be excited in us through
external objects, since it is either formless, or else moulded into
forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us with a grandeur
which we find above our reach.” He further says of himself: “I had
lived among painters from my childhood, and had accustomed myself to
look at objects, as they did, with reference to art.” And this was his
practice to the last. He was even too _well-bred_ to be thoroughly
bred. He says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of
his towns-boys. The child should have the advantage of ignorance as
well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect
and exposure.
“The laws of Nature break the rules of Art.”
The Man of Genius may at the same time be, indeed is commonly, an
Artist, but the two are not to be confounded. The Man of Genius,
referred to mankind, is an originator, an inspired or demonic man, who
produces a perfect work in obedience to laws yet unexplored. The Artist
is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of
Genius, whether of man or nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies
the rules which others have detected. There has been no man of pure
Genius; as there has been none wholly destitute of Genius.
Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.
The expressions of the poet cannot be analyzed; his sentence is one
word, whose syllables are words. There are indeed no _words_ quite
worthy to be set to his music. But what matter if we do not hear the
words always, if we hear the music?
Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at
the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It
is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not
recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.
A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into
literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for
whom it was matured.
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you
will never read, you have done rare things.
The work we choose should be our own,
God lets alone.
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.
Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their
foundation below the frost.
What is produced by a free stroke charms us, like the forms of lichens
and leaves. There is a certain perfection in accident which we never
consciously attain. Draw a blunt quill filled with ink over a sheet of
paper, and fold the paper before the ink is dry, transversely to this
line, and a delicately shaded and regular figure will be produced, in
some respects more pleasing than an elaborate drawing.
The talent of composition is very dangerous,—the striking out the heart
of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp. I feel as if my
life had grown more outward when I can express it.
On his journey from Brenner to Verona, Goethe writes:
“The Tees flows now more gently, and makes in many places broad sands.
On the land, near to the water, upon the hillsides, everything is so
closely planted one to another, that you think they must choke one
another,—vineyards, maize, mulberry-trees, apples, pears, quinces, and
nuts. The dwarf elder throws itself vigorously over the walls. Ivy
grows with strong stems up the rocks, and spreads itself wide over
them, the lizard glides through the intervals, and everything that
wanders to and fro reminds one of the loveliest pictures of art. The
women’s tufts of hair bound up, the men’s bare breasts and light
jackets, the excellent oxen which they drive home from market, the
little asses with their loads,—everything forms a living, animated
Heinrich Roos. And now that it is evening, in the mild air a few clouds
rest upon the mountains, in the heavens more stand still than move, and
immediately after sunset the chirping of crickets begins to grow more
loud; then one feels for once at home in the world, and not as
concealed or in exile. I am contented as though I had been born and
brought up here, and were now returning from a Greenland or whaling
voyage. Even the dust of my Fatherland, which is often whirled about
the wagon, and which for so long a time I had not seen, is greeted. The
clock-and-bell jingling of the crickets is altogether lovely,
penetrating, and agreeable. It sounds bravely when roguish boys whistle
in emulation of a field of such songstresses. One fancies that they
really enhance one another. Also the evening is perfectly mild as the
day.”
“If one who dwelt in the south, and came hither from the south, should
hear of my rapture hereupon, he would deem me very childish. Alas! what
I here express I have long known while I suffered under an unpropitious
heaven, and now may I joyful feel this joy as an exception, which we
should enjoy everforth as an eternal necessity of our nature.”
Thus we “sayled by thought and pleasaunce,” as Chaucer says, and all
things seemed with us to flow; the shore itself, and the distant
cliffs, were dissolved by the undiluted air. The hardest material
seemed to obey the same law with the most fluid, and so indeed in the
long run it does. Trees were but rivers of sap and woody fibre, flowing
from the atmosphere, and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as
their roots flowed upward to the surface. And in the heavens there were
rivers of stars, and milky-ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple
over our heads. There were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth,
and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and
circulated, and this portion of time was but the current hour. Let us
wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are
central still. If we look into the heavens they are concave, and if we
were to look into a gulf as bottomless, it would be concave also. The
sky is curved downward to the earth in the horizon, because we stand on
the plain. I draw down its skirts. The stars so low there seem loath to
depart, but by a circuitous path to be remembering me, and returning on
their steps.
We had already passed by broad daylight the scene of our encampment at
Coos Falls, and at length we pitched our camp on the west bank, in the
northern part of Merrimack, nearly opposite to the large island on
which we had spent the noon in our way up the river.
There we went to bed that summer evening, on a sloping shelf in the
bank, a couple of rods from our boat, which was drawn up on the sand,
and just behind a thin fringe of oaks which bordered the river; without
having disturbed any inhabitants but the spiders in the grass, which
came out by the light of our lamp, and crawled over our buffaloes. When
we looked out from under the tent, the trees were seen dimly through
the mist, and a cool dew hung upon the grass, which seemed to rejoice
in the night, and with the damp air we inhaled a solid fragrance.
Having eaten our supper of hot cocoa and bread and watermelon, we soon
grew weary of conversing, and writing in our journals, and, putting out
the lantern which hung from the tent-pole, fell asleep.
Unfortunately, many things have been omitted which should have been
recorded in our journal; for though we made it a rule to set down all
our experiences therein, yet such a resolution is very hard to keep,
for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such
obligations, and so indifferent things get recorded, while that is
frequently neglected. It is not easy to write in a journal what
interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us.
Whenever we awoke in the night, still eking out our dreams with
half-awakened thoughts, it was not till after an interval, when the
wind breathed harder than usual, flapping the curtains of the tent, and
causing its cords to vibrate, that we remembered that we lay on the
bank of the Merrimack, and not in our chamber at home. With our heads
so low in the grass, we heard the river whirling and sucking, and
lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went, sometimes rippling
louder than usual, and again its mighty current making only a slight
limpid, trickling sound, as if our water-pail had sprung a leak, and
the water were flowing into the grass by our side. The wind, rustling
the oaks and hazels, impressed us like a wakeful and inconsiderate
person up at midnight, moving about, and putting things to rights,
occasionally stirring up whole drawers full of leaves at a puff. There
seemed to be a great haste and preparation throughout Nature, as for a
distinguished visitor; all her aisles had to be swept in the night, by
a thousand hand-maidens, and a thousand pots to be boiled for the next
day’s feasting;—such a whispering bustle, as if ten thousand fairies
made their fingers fly, silently sewing at the new carpet with which
the earth was to be clothed, and the new drapery which was to adorn the
trees. And then the wind would lull and die away, and we like it fell
asleep again.