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

“Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly wrack on his celestial face,”—
for before the god had reached the zenith the heavenly pavement
rose and embraced my wavering virtue, or rather I sank
down again into that “forlorn world,” from which the celestial
sun had hid his visage,—
“How may a worm that crawls along the dust,
Clamber the azure mountains, thrown so high,
And fetch from thence thy fair idea just,
That in those sunny courts doth hidden lie,
Clothed with such light as blinds the angel’s eye?
How may weak mortal ever hope to file
His unsmooth tongue, and his deprostrate style?
O, raise thou from his corse thy now entombed exile!”
In the preceding evening I had seen the summits of new
and yet higher mountains, the Catskills, by which I might
hope to climb to heaven again, and had set my compass for
a fair lake in the southwest, which lay in my way, for which
Henry David Thoreau
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I now steered, descending the mountain by my own route,
on the side opposite to that by which I had ascended, and
soon found myself in the region of cloud and drizzling rain,
and the inhabitants affirmed that it had been a cloudy and
drizzling day wholly.
But now we must make haste back before the fog disperses
to the blithe Merrimack water.
Since that first “Away! away!”
Many a lengthy reach we’ve rowed,
Still the sparrow on the spray
Hastes to usher in the day
With her simple stanza’d ode.
We passed a canal-boat before sunrise, groping its way to
the seaboard, and, though we could not see it on account of
the fog, the few dull, thumping, stertorous sounds which we
heard, impressed us with a sense of weight and irresistible
motion. One little rill of commerce already awake on this
distant New Hampshire river. The fog, as it required more
skill in the steering, enhanced the interest of our early voy-