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

to his stock. We had come away up here among the hills to
learn the impartial and unbribable beneficence of Nature.
Strawberries and melons grow as well in one man’s garden as
another’s, and the sun lodges as kindly under his hillside,—
when we had imagined that she inclined rather to some few
earnest and faithful souls whom we know.
We found a convenient harbor for our boat on the opposite
or east shore, still in Hooksett, at the mouth of a small
brook which emptied into the Merrimack, where it would
be out of the way of any passing boat in the night,—for they
commonly hug the shore if bound up stream, either to avoid
the current, or touch the bottom with their poles,—and where
it would be accessible without stepping on the clayey shore.
We set one of our largest melons to cool in the still water
among the alders at the mouth of this creek, but when our
tent was pitched and ready, and we went to get it, it had
floated out into the stream, and was nowhere to be seen. So
taking the boat in the twilight, we went in pursuit of this
property, and at length, after long straining of the eyes, its
green disk was discovered far down the river, gently floating
seaward with many twigs and leaves from the mountains that
Henry David Thoreau
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evening, and so perfectly balanced that it had not keeled at
all, and no water had run in at the tap which had been taken
out to hasten its cooling.
As we sat on the bank eating our supper, the clear light of
the western sky fell on the eastern trees, and was reflected in
the water, and we enjoyed so serene an evening as left nothing
to describe. For the most part we think that there are few
degrees of sublimity, and that the highest is but little higher
than that which we now behold; but we are always deceived.
Sublimer visions appear, and the former pale and fade away.
We are grateful when we are reminded by interior evidence
of the permanence of universal laws; for our faith is but faintly
remembered, indeed, is not a remembered assurance, but a
use and enjoyment of knowledge. It is when we do not have
to believe, but come into actual contact with Truth, and are
related to her in the most direct and intimate way. Waves of
serener life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight
over the fields in cloudy weather. In some happier moment,
when more sap flows in the withered stalk of our life,
Syria and India stretch away from our present as they do in
history. All the events which make the annals of the nations