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An Early Unconverted Saint,
Free From Noontide Or Evening Taint,
Heathen Without Reproach,
That Did Upon The Civil Day Encroach,
And Ever Since Its Birth
Had Trod The Outskirts Of The Earth.
But the impressions which the morning makes vanish with its dews,
and not even the most "persevering mortal" can preserve the
memory of its freshness to mid-day.
As we passed the various
islands, or what were islands in the spring, rowing with our
backs down stream, we gave names to them. The one on which we had
camped we called Fox Island, and one fine densely wooded island
surrounded by deep water and overrun by grape-vines, which looked
like a mass of verdure and of flowers cast upon the waves, we
named Grape Island. From Ball's Hill to Billerica meeting-house,
the river was still twice as broad as in Concord, a deep, dark,
and dead stream, flowing between gentle hills and sometimes
cliffs, and well wooded all the way. It was a long woodland lake
bordered with willows. For long reaches we could see neither
house nor cultivated field, nor any sign of the vicinity of
man. Now we coasted along some shallow shore by the edge of a
dense palisade of bulrushes, which straightly bounded the water
as if clipt by art, reminding us of the reed forts of the
East-Indians, of which we had read; and now the bank slightly
raised was overhung with graceful grasses and various species of
brake, whose downy stems stood closely grouped and naked as in a
vase, while their heads spread several feet on either side.
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