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

So we sailed this afternoon, thinking of the saying of
Pythagoras, though we had no peculiar right to remember
it, “It is beautiful when prosperity is present with intellect,
and when sailing as it were with a prosperous wind, actions
are performed looking to virtue; just as a pilot looks to the
motions of the stars.” All the world reposes in beauty to him
who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on
his path without secret violence; as he who sails down a
stream, he has only to steer, keeping his bark in the middle,
and carry it round the falls. The ripples curled away in our
wake, like ringlets from the head of a child, while we steadily
held on our course, and under the bows we watched
“The swaying soft,
Made by the delicate wave parted in front,
As through the gentle element we move
Like shadows gliding through untroubled dreams.”
The forms of beauty fall naturally around the path of him
who is in the performance of his proper work; as the curled
shavings drop from the plane, and borings cluster round the
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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auger. Undulation is the gentlest and most ideal of motions,
produced by one fluid falling on another. Rippling is a more
graceful flight. From a hill-top you may detect in it the wings
of birds endlessly repeated. The two waving lines which represent
the flight of birds appear to have been copied from
the ripple.
The trees made an admirable fence to the landscape, skirting
the horizon on every side. The single trees and the groves
left standing on the interval appeared naturally disposed,
though the farmer had consulted only his convenience, for
he too falls into the scheme of Nature. Art can never match
the luxury and superfluity of Nature. In the former all is
seen; it cannot afford concealed wealth, and is niggardly in
comparison; but Nature, even when she is scant and thin
outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity
at the roots. In swamps, where there is only here and
there an ever-green tree amid the quaking moss and cranberry
beds, the bareness does not suggest poverty. The singlespruce,
which I had hardly noticed in gardens, attracts me in
such places, and now first I understand why men try to make
them grow about their houses. But though there may be very