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 Aegean 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.
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