Their Floating
There Was A Beautiful And Successful Experiment In Natural
Philosophy, And It Served To Ennoble In Our Eyes The Art Of
Navigation; For As Birds Fly And Fishes Swim, So These Men
Sailed.
It reminded us how much fairer and nobler all the actions
of man might be, and that our life in its whole economy might be
as beautiful as the fairest works of art or nature.
The sun lodged on the old gray cliffs, and glanced from every
pad; the bulrushes and flags seemed to rejoice in the delicious
light and air; the meadows were a-drinking at their leisure; the
frogs sat meditating, all sabbath thoughts, summing up their
week, with one eye out on the golden sun, and one toe upon a
reed, eying the wondrous universe in which they act their part;
the fishes swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church;
shoals of golden and silver minnows rose to the surface to behold
the heavens, and then sheered off into more sombre aisles; they
swept by as if moved by one mind, continually gliding past each
other, and yet preserving the form of their battalion unchanged,
as if they were still embraced by the transparent membrane which
held the spawn; a young band of brethren and sisters trying their
new fins; now they wheeled, now shot ahead, and when we drove
them to the shore and cut them off, they dexterously tacked and
passed underneath the boat. Over the old wooden bridges no
traveller crossed, and neither the river nor the fishes avoided
to glide between the abutments.
Here was a village not far off behind the woods, Billerica,
settled not long ago, and the children still bear the names of
the first settlers in this late "howling wilderness"; yet to all
intents and purposes it is as old as Fernay or as Mantua, an old
gray town where men grow old and sleep already under moss-grown
monuments, - outgrow their usefulness. This is ancient Billerica,
(Villarica?) now in its dotage, named from the English
Billericay, and whose Indian name was Shawshine. I never heard
that it was young. See, is not nature here gone to decay, farms
all run out, meeting-house grown gray and racked with age? If
you would know of its early youth, ask those old gray rocks in
the pasture. It has a bell that sounds sometimes as far as
Concord woods; I have heard that, - ay, hear it now. No wonder
that such a sound startled the dreaming Indian, and frightened
his game, when the first bells were swung on trees, and sounded
through the forest beyond the plantations of the white man. But
to-day I like best the echo amid these cliffs and woods. It is
no feeble imitation, but rather its original, or as if some rural
Orpheus played over the strain again to show how it should sound.
Dong, sounds the brass in the east,
As if to a funeral feast,
But I like that sound the best
Out of the fluttering west.
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