If There Is Nothing New On The Earth, Still The Traveller Always
Has A Resource In The Skies.
They are constantly turning a new
page to view.
The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and
the inquiring may always read a new truth there. There are
things there written with such fine and subtile tinctures, paler
than the juice of limes, that to the diurnal eye they leave no
trace, and only the chemistry of night reveals them. Every man's
daylight firmament answers in his mind to the brightness of the
vision in his starriest hour.
These continents and hemispheres are soon run over, but an always
unexplored and infinite region makes off on every side from the
mind, further than to sunset, and we can make no highway or
beaten track into it, but the grass immediately springs up in the
path, for we travel there chiefly with our wings.
Sometimes we see objects as through a thin haze, in their eternal
relations, and they stand like Palenque and the Pyramids, and we
wonder who set them up, and for what purpose. If we see the
reality in things, of what moment is the superficial and apparent
longer? What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep
surmise which pierces and scatters them? While I sit here
listening to the waves which ripple and break on this shore, I am
absolved from all obligation to the past, and the council of
nations may reconsider its votes. The grating of a pebble annuls
them. Still occasionally in my dreams I remember that rippling
water.
Oft, as I turn me on my pillow o'er,
I hear the lapse of waves upon the shore,
Distinct as if it were at broad noonday,
And I were drifting down from Nashua.
With a bending sail we glided rapidly by Tyngsborough and
Chelmsford, each holding in one hand half of a tart country
apple-pie which we had purchased to celebrate our return, and in
the other a fragment of the newspaper in which it was wrapped,
devouring these with divided relish, and learning the news which
had transpired since we sailed. The river here opened into a
broad and straight reach of great length, which we bounded
merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care look
in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed
which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. The wind
in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and
every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains like school-boys
turned their cheeks to it. They were great and current motions,
the flowing sail, the running stream, the waving tree, the roving
wind. The north-wind stepped readily into the harness which we
had provided, and pulled us along with good will. Sometimes we
sailed as gently and steadily as the clouds overhead, watching
the receding shores and the motions of our sail; the play of its
pulse so like our own lives, so thin and yet so full of life, so
noiseless when it labored hardest, so noisy and impatient when
least effective; now bending to some generous impulse of the
breeze, and then fluttering and flapping with a kind of human
suspense.
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