But A Good Book Will Never Have Been Forestalled, But The
Topic Itself Will In One Sense Be New, And Its Author, By
Consulting With Nature, Will Consult Not Only With Those Who Have
Gone Before, But With Those Who May Come After.
There is always
room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there
is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not
interfere with the first.
We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our
thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new
nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increasing
confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and
propitious to us; not following any beaten path, but the windings
of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. Fortunately we had
no business in this country. The Concord had rarely been a
river, or _rivus_, but barely _fluvius_, or between _fluvius_ and
_lacus_. This Merrimack was neither _rivus_ nor _fluvius_ nor
_lacus_, but rather _amnis_ here, a gently swelling and stately
rolling flood approaching the sea. We could even sympathize with
its buoyant tide, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and,
anticipating the time when "being received within the plain of
its freer water," it should "beat the shores for banks," -
"campoque recepta
Liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant."
At length we doubled a low shrubby islet, called Rabbit Island,
subjected alternately to the sun and to the waves, as desolate as
if it lay some leagues within the icy sea, and found ourselves in
a narrower part of the river, near the sheds and yards for
picking the stone known as the Chelmsford granite, which is
quarried in Westford and the neighboring towns.
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