A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

with its depth and serenity, and I am assured that they will
have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test
them by.
Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand.
There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under
its words a kind of blood must circulate forever. It is wonderful
that this sound should have come down to us from so
far, when the voice of man can be heard so little way, and we
are not now within ear-shot of any contemporary. The woodcutters
have here felled an ancient pine forest, and brought
to light to these distant hills a fair lake in the southwest; and
now in an instant it is distinctly shown to these woods as if
its image had travelled hither from eternity. Perhaps these
old stumps upon the knoll remember when anciently this
lake gleamed in the horizon. One wonders if the bare earth
itself did not experience emotion at beholding again so fair a
prospect. That fair water lies there in the sun thus revealed,
so much the prouder and fairer because its beauty needed
not to be seen. It seems yet lonely, sufficient to itself, and
superior to observation.—So are these old sentences like serene
lakes in the southwest, at length revealed to us, which
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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have so long been reflecting our own sky in their bosom.
The great plain of India lies as in a cup between the
Himmaleh and the ocean on the north and south, and the
Brahmapootra and Indus, on the east and west, wherein the
primeval race was received. We will not dispute the story.
We are pleased to read in the natural history of the country,
of the “pine, larch, spruce, and silver fir,” which cover the
southern face of the Himmaleh range; of the “gooseberry,
raspberry, strawberry,” which from an imminent temperate
zone overlook the torrid plains. So did this active modern
life have even then a foothold and lurking-place in the midst
of the stateliness and contemplativeness of those Eastern
plains. In another era the “lily of the valley, cowslip, dandelion,”
were to work their way down into the plain, and bloom
in a level zone of their own reaching round the earth. Already
has the era of the temperate zone arrived, the era of the
pine and the oak, for the palm and the banian do not supply
the wants of this age. The lichens on the summits of the
rocks will perchance find their level erelong.
As for the tenets of the Brahmans, we are not so much
concerned to know what doctrines they held, as that they