He Looks Up At The
Stranger, Half Pleased, Half Astonished, With A Mariner's Eye, As
If He Were A Dolphin Within Cast.
If men will believe it, _sua
si bona norint_, there are no more quiet Tempes, nor more poetic
and Arcadian lives, than may be lived in these New England
dwellings.
We thought that the employment of their inhabitants
by day would be to tend the flowers and herds, and at night, like
the shepherds of old, to cluster and give names to the stars from
the river banks.
We passed a large and densely wooded island this forenoon,
between Short's and Griffith's Falls, the fairest which we had
met with, with a handsome grove of elms at its head. If it had
been evening we should have been glad to camp there. Not long
after, one or two more were passed. The boatmen told us that the
current had recently made important changes here. An island
always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small
continent and integral portion of the globe. I have a fancy for
building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can
see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious
charm for me. There is commonly such a one at the junction of
two rivers, whose currents bring down and deposit their
respective sands in the eddy at their confluence, as it were the
womb of a continent. By what a delicate and far-stretched
contribution every island is made!
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