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

thin volumes like mist and smoke, till at length, some warm
morning, perchance, I see a sheet of mist blown down the
brook to the swamp, and I float as high above the fields with
it. I can recall to mind the stillest summer hours, in which
the grasshopper sings over the mulleins, and there is a valor
in that time the bare memory of which is armor that can
laugh at any blow of fortune. For our lifetime the strains of a
harp are heard to swell and die alternately, and death is but
“the pause when the blast is recollecting itself.”
We lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of the
brook, in the angle formed by whose bank with the river our
tent was pitched, and there was a sort of human interest in
its story, which ceases not in freshet or in drought the livelong
summer, and the profounder lapse of the river was quite
drowned by its din. But the rill, whose
“Silver sands and pebbles sing
Eternal ditties with the spring,”
is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier streams,
Henry David Thoreau
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on whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with sunken
rocks and the ruins of forests, from whose surface comes up
no murmur, are strangers to the icy fetters which bind fast a
thousand contributary rills.
I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long
before. It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased
to give me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But
in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions,
and I received that compensation which I had never
obtained in my waking hours. I was unspeakably soothed
and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams we never
deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have
the authority of a final judgment.
We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as
well as some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one
“Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray.”
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely
less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our
conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the in-