How like Thoreau the following passage reads:
"O, for a huckleberry pasture to wander in, with labyrinths of taller bushes, with bayberry leaves at hand to pluck and press and smell of, and sweet fern, its fragrant rival, growing near!... I wonder if others have noticed what an imitative fruit the blackberry is. I have tasted the strawberry, the pine-apple, and I do not know how many other flavors in it—if you think a little, and have read Darwin, and Huxley, perhaps you will believe that it, and all the fruits it tastes of, may have come from a common progenitor."
And there is the poet's beautiful picture of Indian summer.
"It is the time to be in the woods or on the seashore,—a sweet season that should be given to lonely walks, to stumbling about in old churchyards, plucking on the way the aromatic silvery herb everlasting, and smelling at its dry flower until it etherizes the soul into aimless reveries outside of space and time. There is little need of painting the still, warm, misty, dreamy Indian summer in words; there are many states that have no articulate vocabulary, and are only to be reproduced by music, and the mood this season produces is of that nature. By and by, when the white man is thoroughly Indianized (if he can bear the process), some native Hayden will perhaps turn the Indian summer into the loveliest andante of the new 'Creation.'"
And again: "To those who know the Indian summer of our Northern States, it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the soul. The stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if the planet were sleeping like a top, before it begins to rock with the storms of autumn. All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its light; love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verse by his winter fireside."
At another time, when revisiting the scenes of his old schooldays at Andover, he gives us the following vivid description of mountain scenery:
"Far to the north and west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their summits in a long encircling ridge of pale-blue waves. The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline with perfect definition against the sky.
I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to what the winds have to say, and getting angry with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to those who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging mountains,—Monadnock, Kearsarge,—what memories that name recalls! and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her bravest and hardiest children, I can never look at them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. How delightful all those reminiscences, as he wanders, "the ghost of a boy" by his side, now by the old elm that held, buried in it by growth, iron rings to keep the Indians from destroying it with their tomahawks; and now through the old playground sown with memories of the time when he was young.
"A kind of romance gilds for me," he says, "the sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came a slight, immature boy, in contact with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with facilis descensus on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating sed revocare gradum. I wandered in the autumnal woods that crown the 'Indian Ridge,' much wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers believed with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies. The little Shawsheen was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimac, the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning stroll."
Nor does he forget to recall a visit to Haverhill with his room-mate, when he saw the mighty bridge over the Merrimac that defied the ice-rafts of the river, and the old meeting-house door with the bullet-hole in it, through which the minister, Benjamin Rolfe, was shot by the Indians. "What a vision it was," he exclaims, "when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great city! for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth, or a fantastic natural effect, I hate to inquire too nicely."