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.
