Our life should feed the springs of fame
With a perennial wave.
As ocean feeds the babbling founts
Which find in it their grave.
Ye skies drop gently round my breast,
And be my corselet blue,
Ye earth receive my lance in rest,
My faithful charger you;
Ye stars my spear-heads in the sky,
My arrow-tips ye are;
I see the routed foemen fly,
My bright spears fixed are.
Give me an angel for a foe,
Fix now the place and time,
And straight to meet him I will go
Above the starry chime.
And with our clashing bucklers' clang
The heavenly spheres shall ring,
While bright the northern lights shall hang
Beside our tourneying.
And if she lose her champion true,
Tell Heaven not despair,
For I will be her champion new,
Her fame I will repair.
There was a high wind this night, which we afterwards learned had
been still more violent elsewhere, and had done much injury to
the cornfields far and near; but we only heard it sigh from time
to time, as if it had no license to shake the foundations of our
tent; the pines murmured, the water rippled, and the tent rocked
a little, but we only laid our ears closer to the ground, while
the blast swept on to alarm other men, and long before sunrise we
were ready to pursue our voyage as usual.
-
TUESDAY.
"On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the fields the road runs by
To many-towered Camelot."
^Tennyson.^
-
TUESDAY.
- * -
Long before daylight we ranged abroad, hatchet in hand, in search
of fuel, and made the yet slumbering and dreaming wood resound
with our blows. Then with our fire we burned up a portion of the
loitering night, while the kettle sang its homely strain to the
morning star. We tramped about the shore, waked all the
muskrats, and scared up the bittern and birds that were asleep
upon their roosts; we hauled up and upset our boat and washed it
and rinsed out the clay, talking aloud as if it were broad day,
until at length, by three o'clock, we had completed our
preparations and were ready to pursue our voyage as usual; so,
shaking the clay from our feet, we pushed into the fog.
Though we were enveloped in mist as usual, we trusted that there
was a bright day behind it.
Ply the oars! away! away!
In each dew-drop of the morning
Lies the promise of a day.
Rivers from the sunrise flow,
Springing with the dewy morn;
Voyageurs 'gainst time do row,
Idle noon nor sunset know,
Ever even with the dawn.
Belknap, the historian of this State, says that, "In the
neighborhood of fresh rivers and ponds, a whitish fog in the
morning lying over the water is a sure indication of fair weather
for that day; and when no fog is seen, rain is expected before
night." That which seemed to us to invest the world was only a
narrow and shallow wreath of vapor stretched over the channel of
the Merrimack from the seaboard to the mountains. More extensive
fogs, however, have their own limits. I once saw the day break
from the top of Saddle-back Mountain in Massachusetts, above the
clouds. As we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog,
let me tell this story more at length.
I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer
days, plucking the raspberries by the wayside, and occasionally
buying a loaf of bread at a farmer's house, with a knapsack on my
back which held a few traveller's books and a change of clothing,
and a staff in my hand. I had that morning looked down from the
Hoosack Mountain, where the road crosses it, on the village of
North Adams in the valley three miles away under my feet, showing
how uneven the earth may sometimes be, and making it seem an
accident that it should ever be level and convenient for the feet
of man. Putting a little rice and sugar and a tin cup into my
knapsack at this village, I began in the afternoon to ascend the
mountain, whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above
the level of the sea, and was seven or eight miles distant by the
path. My route lay up a long and spacious valley called the
Bellows, because the winds rush up or down it with violence in
storms, sloping up to the very clouds between the principal range
and a lower mountain. There were a few farms scattered along at
different elevations, each commanding a fine prospect of the
mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the
valley on which near the head there was a mill. It seemed a road
for the pilgrim to enter upon who would climb to the gates of
heaven. Now I crossed a hay-field, and now over the brook on a
slight bridge, still gradually ascending all the while with a
sort of awe, and filled with indefinite expectations as to what
kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at
last. It now seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven,
for one could not imagine a more noble position for a farm-house
than this vale afforded, farther from or nearer to its head, from
a glen-like seclusion overlooking the country at a great
elevation between these two mountain walls.
It reminded me of the homesteads of the Huguenots, on Staten
Island, off the coast of New Jersey. The hills in the interior
of this island, though comparatively low, are penetrated in
various directions by similar sloping valleys on a humble scale,
gradually narrowing and rising to the centre, and at the head of
these the Huguenots, who were the first settlers, placed their
houses quite within the land, in rural and sheltered places, in
leafy recesses where the breeze played with the poplar and the
gum-tree, from which, with equal security in calm and storm, they
looked out through a widening vista, over miles of forest and
stretching salt marsh, to the Huguenot's Tree, an old elm on the
shore at whose root they had landed, and across the spacious
outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of
Neversink, and thence over leagues of the Atlantic, perchance to
some faint vessel in the horizon, almost a day's sail on her
voyage to that Europe whence they had come.
