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 SELECTED FROM THE WRITINGS OF 
 
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 " Presently our hunter came back."
 
 Journal. 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 EllustraUU. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 
 
 Late Ticknor and Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
 l8 77 .
 
 Copyright, 1864, by 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 University Press : Welch. Bigelow, & Co. 
 Cambridge.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 
 AT SEA . 
 
 986228
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Presently our hunters came back " 
 "< Wahl, 't ain't usliil,' said he " . 
 " We sat round and ate thankfully " . 
 " He had begun upon a second bottle " . 
 
 Page 
 . 33 
 
 49 
 
 . 55
 
 A
 
 A MOOSBHBAD JOURNAL. 
 
 Addressed to the Edelmann Storg at the Bagni di 
 Lucca. 
 
 [HURSDAY, \lth August. I knew 
 as little yesterday of the interior of 
 Maine as the least penetrating person 
 knows of the inside of that great social mill- 
 stone which, driven by the river Time, sets 
 imperatively agoing the several wheels of our 
 individual activities. Born while Maine was 
 still a province of native Massachusetts, I was 
 as much a foreigner to it as yourself, my dear 
 Storg. I had seen many lakes, ranging from 
 that of Virgil's Cumsean to that of Scott's 
 Caledonian Lady ; but Moosehead, within two 
 days of me, had never enjoyed the profit of 
 being mirrored in my retina. At the sound of 
 the name, no reminiscential atoms (according
 
 12 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 to Kenelm Digby's Theory of Association, 
 as good as any) stirred and marshalled them- 
 selves in my brain. The truth is, we think 
 lightly of Nature's penny shows, and estimate 
 what we see by the cost of the ticket. Em- 
 pedocles gave his life for a pit-entrance to 
 ^Itna, and no doubt found his account in it. 
 Accordingly, the clean face of Cousin Bull is 
 imaged patronizingly in Lake George, and 
 Loch Lomond glasses the hurried countenance 
 of Jonathan, diving deeper in the streams of 
 European association (and coming up drier) 
 than any other man. Or is the cause of our 
 not caring to see what is equally within the 
 reach of all our neighbors to be sought in that 
 aristocratic principle so deeply implanted in 
 human nature ? I knew a pauper graduate 
 who always borrowed a black coat, and came 
 to eat the Commencement dinner, not that 
 it was better than the one which daily graced 
 the board of the public institution in which he 
 hibernated (so to speak) during the other three 
 hundred and sixty-four days of the year, save 
 in this one particular, that none of his elee- 
 mosynary fellow-commoners could eat it. If
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 13 
 
 there are unhappy men who wish that they 
 were as the Babe Unborn, there are more who 
 would aspire to the lonely distinction of being 
 that other figurative personage, the Oldest 
 Inhabitant. You remember the charming ir- 
 resolution of our dear Esthwaite, (like Mac- 
 heath between his two doxies,) divided between 
 his theory that he is under thirty, and his pride 
 at being the only one of us who witnessed the 
 September gale and the rejoicings at the Peace ? 
 Nineteen years ago I was walking through the 
 Franconia Notch, and stopped to chat with a 
 hermit, who fed with gradual logs the un- 
 wearied teeth of a saw-mill. As the panting 
 steel slit off the slabs of the log, so did the less 
 willing machine of talk, acquiring a steadier 
 up-and-down motion, pare away that outward 
 bark of conversation which protects the core, 
 and which, like other bark, has naturally most 
 to do with the weather, the season, and the 
 heat of the day. At length I asked him the 
 best point of view for the Old Man of the 
 Mountain. 
 
 " Dunno, never see it." 
 
 Too young and too happy either to feel or
 
 14 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 \ 
 
 affect the Juvenalian indifference, I was sin- 
 cerely astonished, and I expressed it. 
 
 The log-compelling man attempted no justi- 
 fication, but after a little asked, " Come from 
 Bawsn?" 
 
 "Yes" (with peninsular pride). 
 
 " Goodie to see in the vycinity o' Bawsn." 
 
 " yes ! " I said, and I thought, see 
 Boston and die ! see the State Houses, old 
 and new, the caterpillar wooden bridges crawl- 
 ing with innumerable legs across the flats of 
 Charles ; see the Common, largest park, 
 doubtless, in the world, with its files of trees 
 planted as if by a drill-sergeant, and then for 
 your nunc dimittis ! 
 
 " I should like, 'awl, I should like to stan, 
 on Bunker Hill. You've ben there offen, 
 likely ? " 
 
 "N o o," unwillingly, seeing the little 
 end of the horn in clear vision at the terminus 
 of this Socratic perspective. 
 
 " 'Awl, my young frien', you 've larned 
 neow thet wut a man kin see any day for 
 nawthin', childern half price, he never doos 
 see. Nawthin' pay, nawthin' vally."
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 15 
 
 With this modern instance of a wise saw, I 
 departed, deeply revolving these things with 
 myself, and convinced that, whatever the ratio 
 of population, the average amount of human 
 nature to the square mile is the same the world 
 over. I thought of it when I saw people upon 
 the Fincian wondering at the Alchemist sun, 
 as if he never burned the leaden clouds to 
 gold in sight of Charles Street. I thought of 
 it when I found eyes first discovering at Mont 
 Blanc how beautiful snow was. As I walked 
 on, I said to myself, There is one exception, 
 wise hermit, it is just these gratis pictures 
 which the poet puts in his show-box, and which 
 we all gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest for 
 a peep at. The divine faculty is to see what 
 everybody can look at. 
 
 While every well-informed man in Europe, 
 from the barber down to the diplomatist, has 
 his view of the Eastern Question, why should 
 I not go personally down East and see for my- 
 self? Why not, like Tancred, attempt my 
 own solution of the Mystery of the Orient, 
 doubly mysterious when you begin the two 
 words with capitals ? You know my way of
 
 16 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 doing things, to let them simmer in my mind 
 gently for months, and at last do them im- 
 promptu in a kind of desperation, driven by the 
 .Eumeuides of unfulfilled purpose. So, after 
 talking about Moosehead till nobody believed 
 me capable of going thither, I found myself at 
 the Eastern Railway station. The only event 
 of the journey hither (I am now at Waterville) 
 was a boy hawking exhilaratingly the last great 
 railroad smash, thirteen lives lost, and no 
 doubt devoutly wishing there had been fifty. 
 This having a mercantile interest in horrors, 
 holding stock, as it were, in murder, misfortune, 
 and pestilence, must have an odd effect on the 
 human mind. The birds of ill-omen, at whose 
 sombre flight the rest of the world turn pale, 
 are the ravens which bring food to this little 
 outcast in the wilderness. If this lad give 
 thanks for daily bread, it would be curious to 
 inquire what that phrase represents to his un- 
 derstanding. If there ever be a plum in it, it 
 is Sin or Death that puts it in. Other details 
 of my dreadful ride I will spare you. Suffice 
 it that I arrived here in safety, in complexion 
 like an Ethiopian serenader half got-up, and so
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 17 
 
 broiled and peppered that I was more like a dev- 
 illed kidney than anything else I can think of. 
 10 P. M. The civil landlord and neat cham- 
 ber at the " Elm wood House" were very grate- 
 ful, and after tea I set forth to explore the 
 town. It has a good chance of being pretty ; 
 but, like most American towns, it is in a hob- 
 bledehoy age, growing yet, and one cannot tell 
 what may happen. A child with great promise 
 of beauty is often spoiled by its second teeth. 
 There is something agreeable in the sense of 
 completeness which a walled town gives one. 
 It is entire, like a crystal, a work which 
 man has succeeded in finishing. I think the 
 human mind pines more or less where every- 
 thing is new, and is better for a diet of stale 
 bread. The number of Americans who visit 
 the Old World is beginning to afford matter of 
 speculation to observant Europeans, and the 
 deep inspirations with which they breathe the 
 air of antiquity, as if their mental lungs had 
 been starved with too thin an atmosphere. 
 JFor my own part, I never saw a house which 
 I thought old enough to be torn down. It is 
 too like that Scythian fashion of knocking old
 
 18 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 people 011 the head. I cannot help thinking 
 that the indefinable something which we call 
 character is cumulative, that the influence 
 of the same climate, scenery, and associations 
 for several generations is necessary to its gath- 
 ering head, and that the process is disturbed 
 by continual change of place. The American 
 is nomadic in religion, in ideas, in morals, and 
 leaves his faith and opinions with as much in- 
 difference as the house in which he was born. 
 However, we need not bother : Nature takes 
 care not to leave out of the great heart of so- 
 ciety either of its two ventricles of hold-back 
 and go-ahead. 
 
 It seems as if every considerable American 
 town must have its one specimen of every- 
 thing, and so there is a college in Waterville, 
 the buildings of which are three in number, 
 of brick, and quite up to the average ugliness 
 which seems essential in edifices of this de- 
 scription. Unhappily, they do not reach that 
 extreme of ugliness where it and beauty come 
 together in the clasp of fascination. We erect" 
 handsomer factories for cottons, woollens, and 
 steam-engines, than for doctors, lawyers, and
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 19 
 
 parsons. The truth is, that, till our struggle 
 with nature is over, till this shaggy hemi- 
 sphere is tamed and suhj ugated, the workshop 
 will be the college whose degrees will be most 
 valued. Moreover, steam has made travel so 
 easy that the great university of the world is 
 open to all comers, and the old cloister sys- 
 tem is falling astern. Perhaps it is only the 
 more needed, and, were I rich, I should like 
 to found a few lazyships in my Alma Mater 
 as a kind of counterpoise. The Anglo-Saxon 
 race has accepted the primal curse as a bless- 
 ing, has deified work, and would not have 
 thanked Adam for abstaining from the apple. 
 They would have dammed the four rivers 
 of Paradise, substituted cotton for fig-leaves 
 among the antediluvian populations, and com- 
 mended man's first disobedience as a wise 
 measure of political economy. But to return 
 to our college. We cannot have fine build- 
 ings till we are less in a hurry. We snatch 
 an education like a meal at a railroad-station. 
 Just in time to make us dyspeptic, the whistle 
 shrieks, and we must rush, or lose our places 
 in the great train of life. Yet noble architec-
 
 20 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 ture is one element of patriotism, and an emi- 
 nent one of culture, the finer portions of 
 which are taken in by unconscious absorption 
 through the pores of the mind from the sur- 
 rounding atmosphere. I suppose we must 
 wait, for we are a great bivouac as yet rather 
 than a nation, on the march from the At- 
 lantic to the .Pacific, and pitch tents instead 
 of building houses. Our very villages seem 
 to be in motion, following westward the be- 
 witching music of some Pied Piper of Hame- 
 lin. We still feel the great push toward sun- 
 down given to the peoples somewhere in the 
 gray dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone 
 of all animated nature emigrates eastward. 
 
 Friday, IWi. The coach leaves Water- 
 ville at five o'clock in the morning, and one 
 must breakfast in the dark at a quarter past 
 four, because a train starts at twenty minutes 
 before five, the passengers by both convey- 
 ances being pastured gregariously. So one 
 must be up at half past three. The primary 
 geological formations contain no trace of man, 
 and it seems to me that these eocene periods 
 of the day are not fitted for sustaining the
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 21 
 
 luiman forms of life. One of the Fathers held 
 that the sun was created to be worshipped at 
 his rising by the Gentiles. The more reason 
 that Christians (except, perhaps, early Chris- 
 tians) should abstain from these heathenish 
 ceremonials. As one arriving by an early 
 train is welcomed by a drowsy maid with the 
 sleep scarce brushed out of her hair, and 
 finds empty grates and polished mahogany, on 
 whose arid plains the pioneers of breakfast 
 have not yet encamped, so a person waked 
 thus unseasonably is sent into the world before 
 his faculties are up and dressed to serve him. 
 It might have been for this reason that my 
 stomach resented for several hours a piece of 
 fried beefsteak which I forced upon it, or, 
 more properly speaking, a piece of that leath- 
 ern conveniency which in these regions as- 
 sumes the name. You will find it as hard 
 to believe, my dear Storg, as that quarrel of 
 the Sorbonists, whether one should say ego 
 amat or no, that the use of the gridiron is 
 unknown hereabout, and so near a river 
 named after St. Lawrence, too! 
 
 To-day has been the hottest day of the sea-
 
 22 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 son, yet our drive has not been unpleasant. 
 For a considerable distance we followed the 
 course of the Sebasticook River, a pretty 
 stream with alternations of dark brown pools 
 and wine-colored rapids. On each side of the 
 road the land had been cleared, and little one- 
 story farm-houses were scattered at intervals. 
 But the stumps still held out in most of the 
 fields, and the tangled wilderness closed in 
 behind, striped here and there with the slim 
 white trunks of the elm. As yet only the 
 edges of the great forest have been nibbled 
 away. Sometimes a root-fence stretched up 
 its bleaching antlers, like the trophies, of a 
 giant hunter. Now and then the houses 
 thickened into an unsocial-looking village, and 
 we drove up to the grocery to leave and take 
 a mail-bag, stopping again presently to water 
 the horses at some pallid little tavern, whose 
 one red-curtained eye (the bar-room) had been 
 put out by the inexorable thrust of Maine 
 Law. Had Shenstone travelled this road, he 
 would never have written that famous stanza 
 of his ; had Johnson, he would never have 
 quoted it. They are to real inns as the skull
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 23 
 
 of Yorick to his face. Where these villages 
 occurred at a distance from the river, it was 
 difficult to account for them. On the river- 
 bank, a saw-mill or a tannery served as a logi- 
 cal premise, and saved them from total incon- 
 sequentiality. As we trailed along, at the 
 rate of about four miles an hour, it was dis- 
 covered that one of our mail-bags was missing. 
 " Guess somebody '11 pick it up," said the 
 driver coolly : " 't any rate, likely there 's 
 nothin' in it." Who knows how long it took 
 some Elam D. or Zebulon K. to compose the 
 missive intrusted to that vagrant bag, and 
 how much longer to persuade Pamela Grace 
 or Sophronia Melissa that it had really and 
 truly been written? The discovery of our 
 loss was made by a tall man who sat next to 
 me on the top of the coach, every one of 
 whose senses seemed to be prosecuting its 
 several investigation as we went along. Pres- 
 ently, sniffing gently, he remarked: "Tears 
 to me 's though I smelt sunthin'. Ain't the 
 aix het, think ? " The driver pulled up, and, 
 sure enough, the off fore-wheel was found 
 to be smoking. In three minutes he had
 
 24 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 snatched a rail from the fence, made a lever, 
 raised the coach, and taken off the wheel, 
 bathing the hot axle and box with water from 
 the river. It was a pretty spot, and I was 
 not sorry to lie under a beech -tree (Tityrus- 
 like, meditating over my pipe) and watch the 
 operations of the fire-annihilator. I could not 
 help contrasting the ready helpfulness of our 
 driver, all of whose wits were about him, cur- 
 rent, and redeemable in the specie of action on 
 emergency, with an incident of travel in Italy, 
 where, under a somewhat similar stress of cir- 
 cumstances, our vetturino had nothing for it 
 but to dash his hat on the ground and call on 
 Saut' Antonio, the Italian tlercules. 
 
 There being four passengers for the Lake, 
 a vehicle called a mud -wagon was detailed 
 at Newport for our accommodation. In this 
 we jolted and rattled along at a livelier pace 
 than in the coach. As we got farther north, 
 the country (especially the hills) gave evi- 
 dence of longer cultivation. About the thriv- 
 ing town of Dexter we saw fine farms and 
 crops. The houses, too, became prettier; 
 hop-vines were trained about the doors, and
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 25 
 
 hung their clustering thyrsi over the open 
 windows. A kind of wild rose (called by 
 the country folk the primrose) and asters were 
 planted about the door-yards, and orchards, 
 commonly of natural fruit, added to the pleas- 
 ant home-look. But everywhere we could 
 see that the war between the white man and 
 the forest was still fierce, and that it would 
 be a long while yet before the axe was buried. 
 The haying being over, fires blazed or smoul- 
 dered against the stumps in the fields, and the 
 blue smoke widened slowly upward through 
 the quiet August atmosphere. It seemed to 
 me that I could hear a sigh now and then 
 from the immemorial pines, as they stood 
 watching these camp-fires of the inexorable 
 invader. Evening set in, and, as we crunched 
 ahd crawled up the long gravelly hills, I some- 
 times began to fancy that Nature had forgot- 
 ten to make the corresponding descent on 
 the other side. But erelong we were rushing 
 down at full speed ; and, inspired by the 
 dactylic beat of the horses' hoofs, I essayed 
 to repeat the opening lines of Evangeline. 
 At the moment I was beginning, we plunged
 
 26 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 into a hollow, where the soft clay had been 
 overcome by a road of unhewn logs. I got 
 through one line to this corduroy accompani- 
 ment, somewhat as a country choir stretches 
 a short metre on the Procrustean rack of a long- 
 drawn tune. The result was like this : 
 
 " Thihfs ihis thehe fohorest prihiKimeheval ; thehe 
 murhurmuring pihiiies hahand thehe hehem- 
 lohocks ! " 
 
 At a quarter past eleven, p. M., we reached 
 Greenville, (a little village which looks as if it 
 had dripped down from the hills, and settled 
 in the hollow at the foot of the lake,) having 
 accomplished seventy-two miles in eighteen 
 hours. The tavern was totally extinguished. 
 The driver rapped upon the bar-room window, 
 and after a while we saw heat-lightnings of un- 
 successful matches followed by a low grumble 
 of vocal thunder, which I am afraid took the 
 form of imprecation. Presently there was a 
 great success, and the steady blur of lighted 
 tallow succeeded the fugitive brilliance of the 
 pine. A hostler fumbled the door open, and 
 stoc-d staring at but not seeing us, with the
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 27 
 
 sleep sticking out all over him. We at last 
 contrived to launch him, more like ail insensi- 
 ble missile than an intelligent or intelligible 
 being, at the slumbering landlord, who came 
 out wide-awake, and welcomed us as so many 
 half-dollars, twenty-five cents each for bed, 
 ditto breakfast. O Shenstone, Shenstone ! 
 The only roost was in the garret, which had 
 been made into a single room,' and contained 
 eleven double-beds, ranged along the walls. 
 It was like sleeping in a hospital. However, 
 nice customs curtsy to eighteeu-hour rides, and 
 we slept. 
 
 Saturday, 13M. This morning I performed 
 my toilet in the bar-room, where there was an 
 abundant supply of water, and a halo of inter- 
 ested spectators. After a sufficient breakfast, 
 we embarked on the little steamer Moosehead, 
 and were soon throbbing up the lake. The 
 boat, it appeared, had been chartered by a 
 party, this not being one of her regular trips. 
 Accordingly we were mulcted in twice the 
 usual fee, the philosophy of which I could not 
 understand. However, it always comes easier 
 to us to comprehend why we receive than why
 
 28 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 we pay. I dare say it was quite clear to the 
 captain. There were three or four clearings 
 on the western -shore ; but after passing these, 
 the lake became wholly primeval, and looked 
 to us as it did to the first adventurous French- 
 man who paddled across it. Sometimes a 
 cleared point would be pink with the blossom- 
 ing willow-herb, " a cheap and excellent sub- 
 stitute " for heather, and, like all such, not 
 quite so good as the real thing. On all sides 
 rose deep-blue mountains of remarkably grace- 
 ful outline, and more fortunate than common 
 in their names. There were the Big and Little 
 Squaw, the Spencer and Lily-bay Mountains. 
 It was debated whether we saw Katahdin or 
 not (perhaps more useful as an intellectual 
 exercise than the assured vision would have 
 been), and presently Mount Kineo rose ab- 
 ruptly before us, in shape not unlike the island 
 of Capri. Mountains are called great natural 
 features, and why they should not retain their 
 names long enough for them also to become 
 naturalized, it is hard to say. Why should 
 every new surveyor rechristen them with the 
 gubernatorial patronymics of the current year ?
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 29 
 
 They are geological noses, and, as they are 
 aquiline or pug, indicate terrestrial idiosyn- 
 crasies. A cosmical physiognomist, after a 
 glance at them, will draw no vague inference 
 as to the character of the country. The word 
 nose is no better than any other word; but 
 since the organ has got that name, it is con- 
 venient to keep it. Suppose we had to label 
 our facial prominences every season with the 
 name of our provincial governor, how should 
 we like it ? If the old names have no other 
 meaning, they have that of age ; and, after all, 
 meaning is a plant of slow growth, as every 
 reader of Shakespeare knows. It ^s well 
 enough to call mountains after their discover- 
 ers, for Nature has a knack of throwing doub- 
 lets, and somehow contrives it that discoverers 
 have good names. Pike's Peak is a curious 
 hit in this way. But these surveyors' names 
 have no natural stick in them. They remind 
 0112 of the epithets of poetasters, which peel off 
 like a badly gummed postage-stamp. The 
 early settlers did better, and there is some- 
 thing pleasant in the sound of Graylock, Sad- 
 dleback, and Great Haystack.
 
 30 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 " I love those names 
 Wherewith the exiled fanner tames 
 Nature down to companionship 
 
 With his old world's more homely mood, 
 And strives the shaggy wild to clip 
 
 With arms of familiar habitude." 
 
 It is possible that Mount Marcy and Mount 
 Hitchcock may sound as well hereafter as Hel- 
 lespont and Peloponnesus, \vhen the heroes, 
 their namesakes, have become mythic with an- 
 tiquity. But that is to look forward a great 
 way. I am no fanatic for Indian nomencla- 
 ture, the name of my native district haviug 
 been P^gsgusset, but let us at least agree 
 on names for ten years. 
 
 There were a couple of loggers on board, 
 in red flannel shirts, and with rifles. They 
 were the first I had seen, and I was interested 
 in their appearance. They were tall, well- 
 knit men, straight as Robin Hood, and with a 
 quiet, self-contained look that pleased me. I 
 fell into talk with one of them. 
 
 " Is there a good market for the farmers 
 here in the woods ? " I asked. 
 
 " None better. They can sell what they
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 31 
 
 raise at their doors, and for the best of prices. 
 The lumberers want it all, and more." 
 
 " It must be a lonely life. But then we all 
 have to pay more or less life for a living." 
 
 " Well, it is lonesome. Should n't like it. 
 After all, the best crop a man can raise is a 
 good crop of society. We don't live none too 
 long, anyhow ; and without society a fellow 
 could n't tell mor 'n half the time whether he 
 was alive or not." 
 
 This speech gave me a glimpse into the life 
 of the lumberers' camp. It was plain that 
 there a man would soon find out how much 
 alive he was, there he could learn to esti- 
 mate his quality, weighed in the nicest self- 
 adjusting balance. The best arm at the. axe 
 or the paddle, the surest eye for a road or for 
 the weak point of a. jam, the steadiest foot upon 
 the squirming log, the most persuasive voice 
 to the tugging oxen, all these things are 
 rapidly settled, and so an aristocracy is evolved 
 from this democracy of the woods, for good 
 old mother Nature speaks Saxon still, and 
 with her either Canning or Kenning means 
 King.
 
 32 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 A string of five loons was flying back and 
 forth in long, irregular zigzags, uttering at 
 intervals their wild, tremulous cry, which al- 
 ways seems far away, like the last faint pulse 
 of echo dying among the hills, and which is 
 one of those few sounds that, instead of dis- 
 turbing solitude, only deepen and confirm it. 
 On our inland ponds they are usually seen in 
 pairs, and I asked if it were common to meet 
 five together. My question was answered by 
 a queer-looking old man, chiefly remarkable for 
 a pair of enormous cowhide boots, over which 
 large bine trousers of Crocking strove in vain 
 to crowd themselves. 
 
 "Wahl, 't ain't ushil," said he, "and it's 
 called a sign o' rain com in', that is." 
 
 " Do you think it will rain ? " 
 
 With the caution of a veteran auftpf.r, he 
 evaded a direct reply. "Wahl, they du say 
 it 's a sign o' rain comin'," said he. 
 
 I discovered afterward that my interlocutor 
 was Uncle Zeb. Formerly, every New Eng- 
 land town had its representative uncle. He 
 was not a pawnbroker, but some elderly man 
 who, for want of more defined family ties, had
 
 ' Walil, 't ain't ushil,' said be."
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 35 
 
 gradually assumed this avuncular relation to 
 the community, inhabiting the border-land be- 
 tween respectability and the almshouse, with 
 no regular calling, but working at haying, wood- 
 sawing, whitewashing, associated with the de- 
 mise of pigs and the ailments of cattle, and 
 possessing as much patriotism as might be im- 
 plied in a devoted attachment to " New Eng- 
 land " with a good deal of sugar and very 
 little water in it. Uncle Zeb was a good 
 specimen of this palseozoic class, extinct among 
 us for the most part, or surviving, like the 
 Dodo, in the Botany Bays of society. He was 
 ready to contribute (somewhat muddily) to all 
 general conversation ; but his chief topics 
 were his boots and the 'Roostick war. Upon 
 the lowlands and levels of ordinary palaver he 
 would make rapid and unlooked-for incursions ; 
 but, provision failing, he would retreat to these 
 two fastnesses, whence it was impossible to 
 dislodge him, and to which he knew innumer- 
 able passes and short cuts quite beyond the 
 conjecture of common woodcraft. His mind 
 opened naturally to these two subjects, like a 
 book to some favorite passage. As the ear ac-
 
 36 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 customs itself to any sound recurring regularly, 
 such as the ticking of a clock, and, without a 
 conscious effort of attention, takes no impres- 
 sion from it whatever, so does the mind find a 
 natural safeguard against this pendulum species 
 of discourse, and performs its duties in the par- 
 liament by an unconscious reflex action, like 
 the beating of the heart or the movement of 
 the lungs. If talk seemed to be flagging, our 
 Uncle would put the heel of one boot upon the 
 toe of the other, to bring it within point-blank 
 range, and say, " Wahl, I stump the Devil him- 
 self to make that 'ere boot hurt my foot," leav- 
 ing us in doubt whether it were the virtue of 
 the foot or its case which set at nought the 
 wiles of the adversary ; or, looking up sud- 
 denly, he would exclaim, " Wahl, we eat some 
 beans to the 'Roostick war, I tell you!" 
 When his poor old clay was wet with gin, 
 his thoughts and words acquired a rank flavor 
 from it, as from too strong a fertilizer. At 
 such times, too, his fancy commonly reverted 
 to a pre-historic period of his life, when he 
 singly had settled all the surrounding country, 
 subdued the Injuns and other wild animals, 
 and named all the towns.
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 37 
 
 We talked of the winter-camps and the life 
 there. " The best thing is," said our uncle, 
 " to hear a log squeal thru the suo\v. Git a 
 good, cole, frosty mornin', in Febuary say, an' 
 take an' hitch the critters on to a log that '11 
 scale seven thousan', an' it '11 squeal as pooty 
 as an'thin' you ever hearu, I tell you." 
 
 A pause. 
 
 " Lessee, seen Gal Hutchius lately ?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Seems to me 's though I hed n't seen Cal 
 sence the 'Roostick war. Walil," etc., etc. 
 
 Another pause. 
 
 " To look at them boots you 'd think they 
 was too large ; but kind o' git your foot into 
 'em, and they 're as easy 's a glove." (I ob- 
 served that he never seemed really to get his 
 foot in, there was always a qualifying kind 
 0'.) " Wahl, my foot can play in 'em like a 
 young hedgehog." 
 
 By this time we had arrived at Kineo, a 
 flourishing village of one house, the tavern 
 kept by 'Squire Barrows. The 'Squire is a 
 large, hearty man, with a voice as clear and 
 strong as a northwest wind, and a great laugh
 
 38 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 suitable to it. His table is neat and well sup- 
 plied, and he waits upou it himself in the good 
 old landlordly fashion. One may be much 
 better off here, to my thinking, than in one of 
 those gigantic Columbaria which are foisted 
 upon us patient Americans for hotels, and 
 where one is packed away in a pigeon-hole so 
 near the heavens that, if the comet should flirt 
 its tail, (no unlikely thing in the month of flies,) 
 one would be in danger of being brushed 
 away. Here one does not pay his diurnal 
 three dollars for an undivided five-hundredth 
 part of the pleasure of looking at gilt ginger- 
 bread. Here one's relations are with the mon- 
 arch himself, and one is not obliged to wait 
 the slow* leisure of those " attentive clerks " 
 whose praises are sung by thankful deadheads, 
 and to whom the slave who pays may feel as 
 much gratitude as might thrill the heart of a 
 brown-paper parcel toward the express-man 
 who labels it and chucks it under his counter. 
 Sunday, \th. The loons were right. 
 About midnight it began to rain in earnest, 
 and did not hold up till about ten o'clock this 
 morning. "This is a Maine dew," said a
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 39 
 
 shaggy woodman cheerily, as he shook the wa- 
 ter out of his wide-awake, " if it don't look out 
 sharp, it '11 begin to rain afore it thinks on 't." 
 The day was mostly spent within doors ; but 
 I found good and intelligent society. We 
 should have to be shipwrecked on Juan Fer- 
 nandez not to find men who knew more than 
 we. Iii these travelling encounters one is 
 thrown upon his own resources, and is worth 
 just what he carries about him. The social 
 currency of home, the smooth- worn coin which 
 passes freely among friends and neighbors, is 
 of no account. We are thrown back upon the 
 old system of barter ; and, even with savages, 
 we bring away only as much of the wild wealth 
 of the woods as we carry beads of thought and 
 experience, strung one by one in painful years, 
 to pay for them with. A useful old jackknife 
 will buy more than the daintiest Louis Quinze 
 paper-folder fresh from Paris. Perhaps the 
 kind of intelligence one gets in these out-of-the- 
 way places is the best, where one takes a 
 fresh man after breakfast instead of the damp 
 morning paper, and where the magnetic tele- 
 graph of human sympathy flashes swift news 
 from brain to braiii.
 
 40 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 Meanwhile, at a pinch, to-morrow's weailier 
 can be discussed. The augury from the flight 
 of birds is favorable, the loons no longer 
 prophesying rain. The wind also is hauling 
 round to the right quarter, according to some, 
 to the wrong, if we are to believe others. 
 Each man has his private barometer of hope, 
 the mercury in which is more or less sensitive, 
 and the opinion vibrant with its rise or fall. 
 Mine has an index which can be moved me- 
 chanically. I fixed it at set fair, and resigned 
 myself. I read an old volume of the Patent- 
 Office Report on Agriculture, and stored away 
 a beautiful pile of facts and observations for 
 future use, which the current of occupation, 
 at its first freshet, would sweep quietly off to 
 blank oblivion. Practical application is the 
 only mordant which will set things in the 
 memory. Study, without it, is gymnastics, 
 and not work, which alone will get intellectual 
 bread. One learns more metaphysics from a 
 single temptation than from all the philoso- 
 phers. It is curious, though, how tyrannical 
 the habit of reading is, and what shifts we 
 make to escape thinking. There is no bore
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 41 
 
 we dread being left alone with so much as our 
 own minds. I have seen a sensible man study 
 a stale newspaper in a country tavern, and 
 husband it as lie would an old shoe on a raft 
 after shipwreck. Why not try a bit of hiber- 
 nation ? There are few brains that would not 
 be better for living on their own fat a little 
 while. With these reflections, I, notwith- 
 standing, spent the afternoon over my Report. 
 If our own experience is of so little use to us, 
 what a dolt is he who recommends to man or 
 nation the experience of others ! Like the 
 mantle in the old ballad, it is always too short 
 or too long, and exposes or trips us up. " Keep 
 out of that candle," says old Father Miller, 
 " or you '11 get a singeing." " Pooh, pooh, 
 father, I 've been dipped in the new asbestos 
 preparation," and frozz ! it is all over with 
 young Hopeful. How many warnings have 
 been drawn from Pretorian bands, and Janiza- 
 ries, and Mamelukes, to make Napoleon III. 
 impossible in 1851 ! I found myself thinking 
 the same thoughts over again, when we walked 
 later on the beach and picked up pebbles. 
 The old time-ocean throws upon its shores
 
 42 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 just such rounded and polished results of the 
 eternal turmoil, but we only see the beauty of 
 those we have got the headache in stooping 
 for ourselves, and wonder at the dull brown 
 bits of common stone with which our comrades 
 have stuffed their pockets. Afterwards this 
 
 little fable came of it. 
 
 \ 
 
 DOCTOR LOBSTER. 
 
 A PERCH, who had the -toothache, once 
 Thus moaned, like any human dunce : 
 " Why must great souls exhaust so soon 
 Life's thin and unsubstantial boon ? 
 Existence on such sculpin terms, 
 Their vulgar loves and hard-won worms, 
 "What is it all but dross to me, 
 "Whose nature craves a larger sea ; 
 "Whose inches, six from head to tail, 
 Enclose the spirit of a whale; 
 "Who, if great baits were still to win, 
 By watchful eye and fearless fin 
 Might with the Zodiac's awful twain 
 Room for a third immortal gain ? 
 Better the crowd's unthinking plan, 
 The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan ! 
 O Death, thou ever roaming shark, 
 Ingulf me in eternal dark ! "
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 43 
 
 The speech was cut in two by flight : 
 A real shark had come in sight ; 
 No metaphoric monster, one 
 It soothes despair to call upon, 
 But stealthy, sidelong, grim, I wis, 
 A bit of downright Nemesis ; 
 While it recovered from the shock, 
 Our fish took shelter 'neath a rock : 
 This was an ancient lobster's house, 
 A lobster of prodigious nous, 
 So old that barnacles had spread 
 Their white encampments o'er its head, 
 And of experience so stupend, 
 His claws were blunted at the end, 
 Turning life's iron pages o'er, 
 That shut and can be oped no more. 
 
 Stretching a hospitable claw, 
 
 " At once," said he, " the point I saw ; 
 
 My dear young friend, your case I rue, 
 
 Your great-great-grandfather I knew; 
 
 He was a tried and tender friend 
 
 I know, I ate him in the end : 
 
 In this vile sea a pilgrim long, 
 
 Still my sight 's good, my memory strong ; 
 
 The only sign that age is near 
 
 Is a slight deafness in this ear ; 
 
 I understand your case as well 
 
 As this my old familiar shell;
 
 44 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 This sorrow 's a new-fangled notion, 
 Come in since first I knew the ocean ; 
 "We had no radicals, nor crimes, 
 Nor lobster-pots, in good old times ; 
 Your traps and nets and hooks we owe 
 To Messieurs Louis Blanc and Co. ; 
 I say to all my sons and daughters, 
 Shun Red Republican hot waters ; 
 No lobster ever cast his lot 
 Among the reds, but went to pot : 
 Your trouble 's in the jaw, you said ? 
 Come, let me just nip off your head, 
 And, when a new one comes, the pain 
 "Will never trouble you again : 
 Nay, nay, fear naught : 't is nature's law. 
 Four times I've lost this starboard claw; 
 And still, erelong, another grew, 
 Good as the old, and better too ! " 
 
 The perch consented, and next day 
 An osprey, marketing that way, 
 Picked up a fish without a head, 
 Floating with belly up, stone dead. 
 
 MORAL. 
 
 Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws, 
 And sauce for goose is gander's sauce ; 
 But perch's heads are n't lobster's claws.
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 45 
 
 Monday, 15M. The morning was fine, 
 and we were called at four o'clock. At the 
 moment my door was knocked at, I was 
 mounting a giraffe with that charming nil ad- 
 mirari which characterizes dreams, to visit 
 Prester John. Rat-tat-tat-tat ! upon my door 
 and upon the horn gate of dreams also. I 
 remarked to my skowhegan (the Tatar for 
 giraffe-driver) that I was quite sure the ani- 
 mal had the raps, a common disease among 
 them, for I heard a queer knocking noise in- 
 side him. It is the sound of his joints, 
 Tambourgi ! (an Oriental term of reverence,) 
 and proves him to be of the race of El Kei- 
 rat. Rat-tat-tat-too ! and I lost my dinner at 
 the Prester' s, embarking for a voyage to the 
 Northwest Carry instead. Never use the 
 word canoe, my dear Storg, if you wish to 
 retain your self-respect. Birch is the term 
 among us backwoodsmen. I never knew it 
 till yesterday; but, like a true philosopher, I 
 made it appear as if I had been intimate with 
 it from childhood. The rapidity with which 
 the human mind levels itself to the standard 
 around it gives us the most pertinent warning
 
 46 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 as to the company we keep. It is as hard 
 for most characters to stay at their own aver- 
 age poiiit in all companies, as for a thermome- 
 ter to say 65 for twenty-four hours together. 
 I like this in our friend Johannes Taurus, that 
 he carries everywhere and maintains his in- 
 sular temperature, and will have everything 
 accommodate itself to that. Shall I confess 
 that this morning I would rather have broken 
 the moral law, than have endangered the equi- 
 poise of the birch by my awkwardness ? that 
 I should have been prouder of a compliment 
 to my paddling, than to have had both my 
 guides suppose me the author of Hamlet ? 
 Well, Cardinal Richelieu used to jump over 
 chairs. 
 
 We were to paddle about twenty miles ; but 
 we made it rather more by crossing and re- 
 crossing the lake. Twice we lauded, onco 
 at a camp, where we found the cook alone, 
 baking bread and gingerbread. Monsieur 
 Soyer would have been startled a little by this 
 shaggy professor, this Pre-Raphaelite of 
 cookery. He represented the salaratus period 
 of the art, and his bread was of a brilliant yel-
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 47 
 
 low, like those cakes tinged with saffron, which 
 hold out so long against time and the flies in 
 little water-side shops of seaport towns, 
 dingy extremities of trade fit to moulder on 
 Lethe wharf. His water was better, squeezed 
 out of ice-cold granite in the neighboring 
 mountains, and sent through subterranean 
 ducts to sparkle up by the door of the camp. 
 " There 's nothin' so sweet an' hulsome as 
 your real spring water," said Uncle Zeb, " git 
 it pure. But it 's dreffle hard to git it that 
 ain't got sunthin' the matter of it. Snow- 
 water '11 burn a man's inside out, I lamed 
 that to the 'Roostick war, and the snow 
 lays terrible long on some o' thes'ere hills. 
 Me an' Eb Stiles was up old Kl ahdn once jest 
 about this time o' year, an' we come acrost a 
 kind o' holler like, as full o' snow as your 
 stockin 's full o' your foot. / see it fust, an' 
 took an' rammed a settin'-pole ; wahl, it was 
 all o' twenty foot into 't, an' could n't fin' no 
 bottom. I dunno as there 's snow-water 
 enough in this to do no hurt. I don't some- 
 how seem to think that real spring- water 's so 
 plenty as it used to be." And Uncle Zeb, with
 
 48 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 perhaps a little over-refinement of scrupulosity, 
 applied his lips to the Ethiop ones of a bottle 
 of raw gin, with a kiss that drew out its very 
 soul, a basia that Secuudus might have 
 sung. He must have been a wonderful judge 
 of water, for he analyzed this, and detected its 
 latent snow simply by his eye, and without the 
 clumsy process of tasting. I could not help 
 thinking that he had made the desert his dwell- 
 ing-place chiefly in order to enjoy the minis- 
 trations of this one fair spirit unmolested. 
 
 We pushed on. Little islands loomed trem- 
 bling between sky and water, like hanging 
 gardens. Gradually the filmy trees denned 
 themselves, the aerial enchantment lost its 
 potency, and we came up with common prose 
 islands that had so late been magical' and po- 
 etic. The old story of the attained and uuat- 
 tained. About noon we reached the head of 
 the lake, and took possession of a deserted 
 wont/en, in which to cook and eat our dinner. 
 No Jew, I am sure, can have a more thorough 
 dislike of salt pork than I have in a normal 
 stat?, yet I had already eaten it raw with hard 
 bread for lunch, and relished it keenly. We
 
 "We sat round and ate thankfully.'
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 51 
 
 soon had our tea-kettle over the fire, and before 
 long the cover was chattering with the escaping 
 steam, which had thus vainly begged of all men 
 to be saddled and bridled, till James Watt one 
 day happened to overhear it. One of our 
 guides shot three Canada grouse, and these 
 were turned slowly between the fire and a bit 
 of salt pork, which dropped fatness upon them 
 as it fried. Although my fingers were certainly 
 not made before knives and forks, yet they 
 served as a convenient substitute for those 
 more ancient inventions. We sat round, Turk- 
 fashion, and ate thankfully, while a party of 
 aborigines of the Mosquito tribe, who had 
 camped in the wongen before we arrived, dined 
 upon us. I do not know what the British 
 Protectorate of the Mosquitoes amounts to ; 
 but, as I squatted there at the mercy of these 
 blood-thirsty savages, I no longer wondered 
 that the classic Everett had been stung into a 
 willingness for war on the question. 
 
 " This 'ere 'd be about a complete place for 
 a camp, ef there was on'y a spring o' sweet 
 water handy. Frizzled pork goes wal, don't 
 it ? Yes, an' sets wal, too," said Uncle Zeb,
 
 52 A MOOSEHEAD JOURXAL. 
 
 and lie again tilted his bottle, which rose 
 nearer and nearer to an angle of forty-five at 
 every gurgle. He then broached a curious 
 dietetic theory : " The reason we take salt 
 pork along is cos it packs handy : you git the 
 greatest amount o' board in the smallest com- 
 pass, let alone that it 's more nourishin' 
 than an'thin' else. It kind o' don't disgest 
 so quick, but stays by ye, anourishiu' ye all 
 the while. 
 
 " A feller can live wal on frizzled pork an* 
 good spring- water, git it good. To the 'Roos- 
 tick war we did n't ask for nothin' better, 
 on'y beans." (Tilt, tilt, gurgle, gurgled) 
 Then, with an apparent feeling of inconsis- 
 tency, " But then, come to git used to a par- 
 ticular kind o' spring-water, an' it makes a 
 feller hard to suit. Most all sorts o' water 
 taste kind o' zV/sipid away from home. Now, 
 I 've gut a spring to my place that 's as sweet 
 wahl, it 's as sweet as maple sap. A feller 
 acts about water jest as he does about a pair 
 o' boots. It's all on it in gittin' wonted. 
 Now, them boots," etc., etc. (Gurgle, gurgle, 
 gurgle, smack f)
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 53 
 
 All this while he was packing away the 
 remains of the pork and hard bread in two 
 large firkins. This accomplished, we re-em- 
 barked, our uncle on his way to the birch 
 essaying a kind of song in four or five parts, 
 of which the words were hilarious and the 
 tune profoundly melancholy, and which was 
 finished, and the rest of his voice apparently 
 jerked out of him in one sharp falsetto note, 
 by his tripping over the root of a tree. We 
 paddled a short distance up a brook which 
 came into the lake smoothly through a little 
 meadow not far off. We soon reached the 
 Northwest Carry, and our guide, pointing 
 Ilirough the woods, said: "That's the Can- 
 nydy road. You can travel that clearn to 
 Kebeck, a hundred an' twenty mile," a 
 privilege of which I respectfully declined to 
 avail myself. The offer, however, remains 
 open to the public. The Carry is called two 
 miles ; but this is the estimate of somebody 
 who had nothing to lug. I had a headache 
 and all my baggage, which, with a traveller's 
 instinct, I had brought with me. (P. S. 
 I did not even take the keys out of my pocket,
 
 54 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 and both my bags were wet through before 
 I came back.) My estimate of the distance 
 is eighteen thousand six hundred and seventy- 
 four miles and three quarters, the fraction 
 being the part left to be travelled after one 
 of my companions most kindly insisted on 
 relieving me of my heaviest bag. I know 
 very well that the ancient Roman soldiers 
 used to carry sixty pounds' weight, and all 
 that; but I am not, and never shall be, an 
 ancient Roman soldier, no, not even in the 
 miraculous Thundering Legion. Uncle Zeb 
 slung the two provender firkins across his 
 shoulder, and trudged along, grumbling that 
 " he never see sech a coutrairy pair as them." 
 He had begun upon a second bottle of his 
 "particular kind o' spring- water," and, at 
 every rest, the gurgle of this peripatetic foun- 
 tain might be heard, followed by a smack, a 
 fragment of mosaic song, or a confused clatter 
 with the cowhide boots, being an arbitrary 
 symbol, intended to represent the festive 
 .dance. Christian's pack gave him not half 
 so much trouble as the firkins gave Uncle 
 Zeb. It grew harder and harder to sling
 
 " He had begun on a second bottle."
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 57 
 
 them, and with every fresh gulp of the Bata- 
 viau elixir, they got heavier. Or rather, the 
 truth was, that his hat grew heavier, in which 
 he was carrying on an extensive manufac- 
 ture of bricks without straw. At last affairs 
 reached a crisis, and a particularly favorable 
 pitch offering, with a puddle at the foot of it, 
 even the boots afforded no sufficient ballast, 
 and away went our uncle, the satellite firkins 
 accompanying faithfully his headlong flight. 
 Did ever exiled monarch or disgraced minis- 
 ter find the cause of his fall in himself? Is 
 there not always a strawberry at the bottom 
 of our cup of life, on which we can lay all 
 the blame of our deviations from the straight 
 path ? Till now Uncle Zeb had contrived to 
 give a gloss of volition to smaller stumblings 
 and gyrations, by exaggerating them into an 
 appearance of playful burlesque. But the 
 present case was beyond any such subterfuges. 
 He held a bed of justice where he sat, and 
 then arose slowly, with a stern determination 
 of vengeance stiffening every muscle of his 
 face. But what would he select as the cul- 
 prit ? " It 's that cussed firkin," he mumbled
 
 58 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 to himself. "I never knowed a firkin cair 
 on so, no, not in the 'Roostehicick war. 
 .There, go long, will ye ? and don't come back 
 till you've lamed how to walk with a genel- 
 man ! " And, seizing the unhappy scapegoat 
 by the bail, he hurled it into the forest. It 
 is a curious circumstance, that it was not the 
 firkin containing the bottle which was thus 
 condemned to exile. 
 
 The end of the Carry was reached at last, 
 and, as we drew near it, we heard a sound of 
 shouting and laughter. It came from a party 
 of men making hay of the wild grass in Se- 
 boomok meadows, which lie around Seboomok 
 pond, into which the Carry empties itself. 
 Their camp was near, and our two hunters 
 set out for it, leaving us seated in the birch on 
 the plashy border of the pond. The repose 
 was perfect. Another heaven hallowed and 
 deepened the polished lake, and through that 
 nether world the fish-hawk's double floated 
 with balanced wings, or, wheeling suddenly, 
 flashed his whitened breast against the sun. 
 As the clattering kingfisher flew unsteadily 
 across, and seemed to push his heavy head
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 59 
 
 along with ever-renewing effort, a visionary 
 mate flitted from downward tree to tree below. 
 Some tall alders shaded us from the sun, in 
 whose yellow afternoon light the drowsy for- 
 est was steeped, giving out that wholesome 
 resinous perfume, almost the only warm odor 
 which it is refreshing to breathe. The tame 
 haycocks in the midst of the wildness gave one 
 a pleasant reminiscence of home, like hearing 
 one's native tongue in a strange country. 
 
 Presently our hunters came back, bringing 
 with them a tall, thin, active-looking man, 
 witli black eyes, that glanced unconsciously 
 on all sides, like one of those spots of sunlight 
 which a child dances up and down the street 
 with a bit of looking-glass. This was M., the 
 captain of the hay-makers, a famous river- 
 driver, and who was to have fifty men under 
 him next winter. I could now understand 
 that sleepless vigilance of eye. He had con- 
 sented to take two of our party in his birch to 
 search for moose. A quick, nervous, decided 
 man, he got them into the birch, and was off 
 instantly, without a superfluous word. He evi- 
 dently looked upon them as he would upon a
 
 60 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 couple of logs which he was to deliver at a 
 certain place. Indeed, I doubt if life and the 
 world presented themselves to Napier himself 
 in a more logarithmic way. His only thought 
 was to do the immediate duty well, and to pilot 
 his particular raft down the crooked stream of 
 life to the ocean beyond. The birch seemed to 
 feel him as an inspiring soul, and slid away 
 straight and swift for the outlet of the pond. 
 As he disappeared under the overarching alders 
 of the brook, our two hunters could not re- 
 press a grave and measured applause. There 
 is never any extravagance among these wood- 
 men ; their eye, accustomed to reckoning the 
 number of feet which a tree will scale, is rapid 
 and close in its guess of the amount of stuff" in 
 a man. It was laudari a laudato, however, 
 for they themselves were accounted good men 
 in a birch. I was amused, in talking with 
 them about him, to meet with an instance of 
 that tendency of the human mind to assign 
 some utterly improbable reason for gifts which 
 seem unaccountable. After due praise, one of 
 them said, " I guess he 's got some Injun in 
 him," although I knew very well that the
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 61 
 
 speaker Lad a thorough contempt for the 
 red-man, mentally and physically. Here was 
 mythology in a small way, the same that 
 under more favorable auspices hatched Helen 
 out of an egg arid gave Merlin an Incubus for 
 a father. I was pleased with all I saw of 
 M. He was in his narrow sphere a true avag 
 ai/Speoi/, and the ragged edges of his old hut 
 seemed to become coronated as I looked at 
 him. He impressed me as a man really edu- 
 cated, that is, with his aptitudes drawn out 
 and ready for use. He was A. M. and LL. D. 
 in Woods College, Axe-master and Doctor 
 of Logs. Are not our educations commonly 
 like a pile of books laid over a plant in a pot ? 
 The compressed nature struggles through at 
 every crevice, but can never get the cramp 
 aud stunt out of it. We spend all our youth 
 in building a vessel for our voyage of life, and 
 set forth with streamers flying; but the mo- 
 ment we come nigh the great loadstone moun- 
 tain of our proper destiny, out leap all our 
 carefully-driven bolts and nails, and we get 
 many a mouthful of good salt brine, and many 
 a buffet of the rough water of experience, be- 
 fore we secure the bare right to live.
 
 62 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 "We now entered the outlet, a long-drawn 
 aisle of alder, on each side of which spired tall 
 firs, spruces, and white cedars. The motion 
 of the birch reminded me of the gondola, and 
 they represent among water-craft the felidte, 
 the cat-tribe, stealthy, silent, treacherous, and 
 preying by night. I closed my eyes, and 
 strove to fancy myself in the dumb city, whose 
 only horses are the bronze ones of St. Mark. 
 But Nature would allow no rival, and bent 
 down an alder-bough to brush my cheek and 
 recall me. Only the robin sings in the emerald 
 chambers of these tall sylvan palaces, and the 
 squirrel leaps from hanging balcony to balcony. 
 
 The rain which the loons foreboded had 
 raised the west branch of the Penobscot so 
 much, that a strong current was setting back 
 into the pond ; and, when at last we brushed 
 through into the river, it was full to the brim, 
 ^- too full for moose, the hunters said. Rivers 
 with low banks have always the compensation 
 of giving a sense of entire fulness. The sun 
 sank behind its horizon of pines, whose pointed 
 summits notched the rosy west in an endless 
 black sierra. At the same moment the golden
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 63 
 
 moon swung slowly up in the east, like the 
 other scale of that Homeric balance in which 
 Zeus weighed the deeds of men. Sunset and 
 moonrise at once! Adam had no more in 
 Eden except the head of Eve upon his 
 shoulder. The stream was so smooth, that the 
 floating logs we met seemed to hang in a glow- 
 ing atmosphere, the shadow-half being as real 
 as the solid. And gradually the mind was 
 etherized to a like dreamy placidity, till fact 
 and fancy, the substance and the image, float- 
 ing on the current of reverie, became but as 
 the upper and under halves of one unreal 
 reality. 
 
 In the west still lingered a pale-green light. 
 I do not know whether it be from greater 
 familiarity, but it always seems to me that the 
 pinnacles of pine-trees make an edge to the 
 landscape which tells better against the twi- 
 light, or the fainter dawn before the rising 
 moon, than the rounded and cloud-cumulus 
 outline of hard-wood trees. 
 
 After paddling a couple of miles, we found 
 the arbored mouth of the little Malahoodus 
 River, famous for moose. We had been on
 
 64 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 the look-out for it, and I was amused to hear 
 one of the hunters say to the other, to assure 
 himself of his familiarity with the spot, " You 
 drove the West Branch last spring, did n't 
 you ? " as one of us might ask about a horse. 
 We did not explore the Malahoodus far, but 
 left the other birch to thread its cedared soli- 
 tudes, while we turned back to try our fortunes 
 in the larger stream. We paddled on about 
 four miles farther, lingering now and then op- 
 posite the black mouth of a moose-path. The 
 incidents of our voyage were few, but quite as 
 exciting and profitable as the items of the news- 
 papers. A stray log compensated very well 
 for the ordinary run of accidents, and the float- 
 ing car kiss of a moose which we met couM 
 pass muster instead of a singular discovery of 
 human remains by workmen in digging a cellar. 
 Once or twice we saw what seemed ghosts of 
 trees ; but they turned out to be dead cedars, 
 in winding-sheets of long gray moss, made 
 spectral by the moonlight. Just as we were 
 turning to drift back down-stream, we heard a 
 loud gnawing sound close by us on the bank. 
 One of our guides thought it a hedgehog, the
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 65 
 
 other a bear. I inclined to the bear, as mak- 
 ing the adventure more imposing. A rifle was 
 fired at the sound, which began again with the 
 most provoking indifference, ere the echo, flar- 
 ing madly at first from shore to shore, died far 
 away in a hoarse sigh. 
 
 Half past Eleven, p. M. No sign of a 
 moose yet. The birch, it seems, was strained 
 at the Carry, or the pitch was softened as she 
 lay on the shore during dinner, and she leaks 
 a little. If there be any virtue in the sitzbad, 
 I shall discover it. If I cannot extract green 
 cucumbers from the moon's rays, I get some- 
 thing quite as cool. One of the guides shivers 
 so as to shake the birch. 
 
 Quarter to Twelve. Later from the Fresh- 
 et! The water in the birch is about three 
 inches deep, but the dampness reaches already 
 nearly to the waist. I am obliged to remove 
 the matches from the ground-floor of my trou- 
 sers into the upper story of a breast-pocket. 
 Meanwhile, we are to sit immovable, for 
 fear of frightening the moose, which in- 
 duces cramps. 
 
 Half past Ticelce. A crashing is heard on
 
 66 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 the left bunk. This is a moose in good ear- 
 nest. We are besought to hold our breaths, 
 if possible. My fingers so numb, I could not, 
 if I tried. Crash ! crash ! again, and then a 
 plunge, followed by dead stillness. " Swim- 
 min' crik," whispers guide, suppressing all un- 
 necessary parts of speech, '" don't stir." I, 
 for one, am not likely to. A cold fog which 
 has been gathering for the last hour has fin- 
 ished me. I fancy myself one of those naked 
 pigs that seem rushing out of market-doors in 
 winter, frozen in a ghastly attitude of gallop. 
 If I were to be shot myself, I should feel no 
 interest in it. As it is, I am only a spectator, 
 having declined a gun. Splash ! again ; this 
 time the moose is in sight, and click ! click ! 
 one rifle misses fire after the other. The fog 
 lias quietly spiked our batteries. The moose 
 goes crashing up the bank, and presently we 
 can hear it chewing its cud close by. So we 
 lie in wait, freezing. 
 
 At one o'clock, I propose to land at a de- 
 serted wongen I had noticed on the way up, 
 where I will make a fire, and leave them to 
 refrigerate as much longer as they please.
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 67 
 
 Axe hi hand, I go plunging through waist- 
 deep weeds dripping with dew, haunted bv 
 an intense conviction that the gnawing sound 
 we had heard was a bear, and a bear at least 
 eighteen hands high. There is something pok- 
 erish about a deserted dwelling, even in broad 
 daylight ; but here in the obscure wood, and 
 the moon filtering unwillingly through the 
 trees ! Well, I made the door at last, and 
 found the place packed fuller with darkness 
 than it ever had been with hay. Gradually I 
 was able to make things out a little, and be- 
 gan to hack frozenly at a log which I groped 
 out. I was relieved presently by one of the 
 guides. He cut at once into one of the up- 
 rights of the building till he got some dry 
 splinters, and we soon had a fire like the burn- 
 ing of a whole wood-wharf in our part of the 
 country. My companion went back to the 
 birch, and left me to keep house. First I 
 knocked a hole in the roof (which the fire 
 began to lick in a relishing way) for a chim- 
 ney, and then cleared away .a damp growth 
 of " pison-elder," to make a sleeping place. 
 When the unsuccessful hunters returned, I
 
 68 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 Lad everything quite comfortable, and was 
 steaming at the rate of about ten horse-power 
 a minute. Young Telemachus was sorry to 
 give up the moose so soon, and, with the 
 teeth chattering almost out of his head, he de- 
 clared that he would like to stick it out all 
 night. However, he reconciled himself to the 
 fire, and, making our beds of some "splits" 
 which we poked from the roof, we lay down 
 at half past two. I, who have inherited a 
 habit of looking into every closet before I go 
 to bed, for fear of fire, had become in two 
 days such a stoic of the woods, that I went 
 to sleep tranquilly, certain that my bedroom 
 would be in a blaze before morning. And so, 
 indeed, it was ; and the withes that bound it 
 together being burned off, one of the sides fell 
 in without waking me. 
 
 Tuesday, 16/A. After a sleep of two hours 
 and a half, so sound that it was as good as 
 eight, we started at half past four for the hay- 
 makers' camp again. We found them just 
 getting breakfast. We sat down upon the 
 deacon-seat before the fire blazing between the 
 bedroom and the salle a manger, which were
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 69 
 
 simply two roofs of spruce-bark, sloping to the 
 ground on one side, the other three being left 
 open. We found that we had, at least, been 
 luckier than the other party, for M. had brought 
 back his convoy without even seeing a moose. 
 As there was not room at the table for all of 
 us to breakfast together, these hospitable 
 woodmen forced us to sit down first, although 
 we resisted stoutly. Our breakfast consisted 
 of fresh bread, fried salt pork, stewed whortle- 
 berries, and tea. Our kind hosts refused to 
 take money for it, nor would M. accept any- 
 thing for his trouble. This seemed even more 
 open-handed when I remembered that they 
 had brought all their stores over the Carry 
 upon their shoulders, paying an ache extra for 
 every pound. If their hospitality lacked any- 
 thing of hard external polish, it had all the 
 deeper grace which springs only from sincere 
 manliness. I have rarely sat at a table d'hote 
 which might not have taken a lesson from 
 them, in essential courtesy. I have never sen 
 a finer race of men. They have all the virtues 
 of the sailor, without that unsteady roll in the 
 gait with which the ocean proclaims itself quite
 
 70 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 as much in the moral as in the physical habit 
 of a man. They appeareH to me to have hewn 
 out a short northwest passage through wintry 
 woods to those spice-lands of character which 
 we dwellers in cities must reach, if at all, by 
 weary voyages in the monotonous track of the 
 trades. 
 
 By the way, as we were embirching last 
 evening for our moose-chase, I asked what I 
 was to do with my baggage. " Leave it here," 
 said our guide, and he laid the bags upon a 
 platform of alders, which he bent down to 
 keep them beyond reach of the rising water. 
 
 " Will they be safe here ? " 
 
 " As safe as they would be locked up in 
 your house at home." 
 
 And so I found them at my return ; only the 
 hay-makers had carried them to their camp for 
 greater security against the chances of the 
 weather. 
 
 We got back to Kineo in time for dinner ; 
 and in the afternoon, the weather being fine, 
 went up the mountain. As we landed at the 
 foot, our guide pointed to the remains of a 
 red shirt and a pair of blanket trousers.
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 71 
 
 " That," said lie, " is the reason there 's such 
 a trade in ready-made clo'es. A suit gits pooty 
 well wore out by the time a camp breaks up in 
 the spring, and the lumberers want to look 
 about right when they come back into the set- 
 tlements, so they buy somethin' ready-made 
 and heave ole bust -up into the bush." True 
 enough, thought I, this is the Ready-made Age. 
 It is quicker being covered than fitted. So 
 we all go to the slop-shop and come out uni- 
 formed, every mother's son with habits of 
 thinking and doing cut on one pattern, with 
 no special reference to his peculiar build. 
 
 Kineo rises 1750 feet above the sea, and 
 750 above the lake. The climb is very easy, 
 with fine outlooks at every turn over lake 
 and forest. Near the top is a spring of water, 
 which even Uncle Zeb might have allowed to 
 be wholesome. The little tin dipper was 
 scratched all over with names, showing that, 
 vanity, at least, is not put out of breath by the 
 ascent. Ozymandias, King of kings ! We 
 are all scrawling on something of the kind. 
 "My name is engraved on the institutions of 
 my country," thinks the statesman. But,
 
 72 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 alas ! institutions are as changeable as lir.-dip 
 pers ; men are content to drink tie same old 
 water, if the shape of the cup only be new, 
 and our friend gets two lines in the Biograph- 
 ical Dictionaries. After all, these inscrip- 
 tions, which make us smile up here, are about 
 as valuable as the Assyrian ones which Hincks 
 and Rawlinson read at cross-purposes. Have 
 we not Smiths and Browns enough, that we 
 must ransack the ruins of Nimroud for more ? 
 Near the spring we met a Bloomer ! It was 
 the first chronic one I had ever seen. It 
 struck me as a sensible costume for the occa- 
 sion, and it will be the only wear in the Greek 
 Kalends, when women believe that sense is an 
 equivalent for grace. 
 
 The forest primeval is best seen from the 
 top of a mountain. It then impresses one by 
 its extent, like an Oriental epic. To be in it 
 is nothing, for then an acre is as good as a 
 thousand square miles. You cannot see five 
 rods in any direction, and the ferns, mosses, 
 and tree-trunks just around you are the best 
 of it. As for solitude, night will make a better 
 one with ten feet square of pitch dark ; and
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 73 
 
 mere size is hardly an element of grandeur, 
 except in works of man, as the Colosseum. 
 It is through one or the other pole of vanity 
 that men feel the sublime in mountains. It is 
 either, How small great I am beside it ! or, 
 Big as you are, little I's soul will hold a dozen 
 of you. The true idea of a forest is not a selva 
 selcagyia, but something humanized a little, 
 as we imagine the forest of Ardeu, with trees 
 standing at royal intervals, a commonwealth, 
 and not a communism. To some moods, it is 
 congenial to look over endless leagues of un- 
 broken savagery without a hint of man. 
 
 Wednesday. This morning fished. Tele- 
 machus caught a laker of thirteen pounds and 
 a half, and I an overgrown cusk, which we 
 threw away, but which I found afterwards 
 Agassiz would have been glad of, for all is fish 
 that comes to his net, from the fossil down. 
 The fish, when caught, are straightway knocked 
 on the head. A lad who went with us seem- 
 ing to show an over-zeal in this operation, we 
 remonstrated. But he gave a good, human 
 reason for it, " He no need to ha' gone and 
 been a fish if he did n't like it," an excuse
 
 74 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 which superior strength or cunning has always 
 found sufficient. It was some comfort, in this 
 case, to think that St. Jerome believed in a 
 limitation of God's providence, and that it did 
 not extend to inanimate things or creatures 
 devoid of reason. 
 
 Thus, my dear Storg, I have finished my 
 Oriental adventures, and somewhat, it must be 
 owned, in the diifuse Oriental manner. There 
 is very little about Moosehead Lake in it, and 
 not even the Latin name for moose, which I 
 might have obtained by sufficient research. If 
 1 had killed one, I would have given you his 
 name in that dead language. I did not profess 
 to give you an account of the lake ; but a jour- 
 nal, and, moreover, my journal, with a little 
 nature, a little human nature, and a great deal 
 of I in it, which last ingredient I take to be 
 the true spirit of this species of writing ; all 
 the rest being so much water for tender throats 
 which cannot take it neat.
 
 
 AT SEA.
 
 AT SEA. 
 
 f]HE sea was meant to be looked at from 
 the shore, as mountains are from the 
 plain. Lucretius made this discovery 
 long ago, and was blunt enough to blurt it 
 forth, romance and sentiment in other words, 
 the pretence of feeling what we do not feel 
 being inventions of a later day. To be sure, 
 Cicero used to twaddle about Greek literature 
 and philosophy, much as people do about 
 ancient art nowadays ; but I rather sympa- 
 thize with those stout old Romans who de- 
 spised both, and believed 1hat to found an 
 empire was as grand an achievement as to 
 build an epic or to carve a statue. But though 
 there might have been twaddle, (as why not, 
 since there was a Senate ? ) I rather think Pe-
 
 78 
 
 trarch was the first choragus of that senti- 
 mental dance which so long led young folks 
 away from the realities of life like the piper of 
 Hamelin, and whose succession ended, let us 
 hope, with Chateaubriand. But for them, 
 Byron, whose real strength lay in his sincerity, 
 would never have talked about the " sea bound- 
 ing beneath him like a steed that knows his 
 rider," and all that sort of thing. Even if it 
 had been true, steam has been as fatal to that 
 part of the romance of the sea as to hand-loom 
 weaving. But what say you to a twelve days' 
 calm such as we dozed through in mid-Atlantic 
 and in mid- August ? I know nothing so tedious 
 at once and exasperating as that regular slap 
 of the willed sails when the ship rises and falls 
 with the slow breathing of the sleeping sea, 
 one greasy, brassy swell following another, 
 slow, smooth, immitigable as the series of 
 Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." Even 
 at his best, Neptune, in a tete-a-tete, has a way 
 of repeating himself, an obtuseness to the ne 
 quid nimis, that is stupefying. It reminds me 
 of organ-music and my good friend Sebastian 
 Bach. A fugue or two will do very well ; but
 
 AT SEA. 79 
 
 a concert made up of nothing else is altogether 
 too epic for me. There is nothing so desper- 
 ately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer 
 wonder at the cruelty of pirates. Fancy an 
 existence in which the coming up of a clumsy 
 finback whale, who says Pooh ! to you solemnly 
 as you lean over the taffrail, is an event as ex- 
 citing as an election on shore ! The dampness 
 seems to strike into the wits as into the lucifer- 
 matches, so that one may scratch a thought 
 half a dozen times and get nothing at last but 
 a faint sputter, the forlorn hope of fire, which 
 only goes far enough to leave a sense of suffo- 
 cation behind it. Even smoking becomes an 
 employment instead of a solace. Who less 
 likely to come to their wit's end than W. M. T. 
 and A. H. C. ? Yet I have seen them driven 
 to five meals a day for mental occupation. I 
 sometimes sit and pity Noah ; but even he had 
 this advantage over all succeeding navigators, 
 that, wherever he landed, he was sure to get 
 no ill news from home. He should be canon- 
 ized as the patron-saint of newspaper corre- 
 spondents, being the only man who ever had 
 the very last authentic intelligence from every- 
 where.
 
 80 AT SEA. 
 
 The finback whale recorded just above lias 
 much the look of a brown-paper parcel, the 
 whitish stripes that run across him answering 
 for the pack-thread. He has a kind of acci- 
 dental hole in the top of his head, through 
 which he pooh-poohs the rest of creation, and 
 which looks as if it had been made by the 
 chance thrust of a chestnut rail. He was our 
 first event. Our second was harpooning a 
 sunfish, which basked dozing on the lap of the 
 sea, looking so much like the giant turtle of 
 an alderman's drpam, that I am persuaded he 
 would have made mock-turtle soup rather 
 than acknowledge his imposture. But he 
 broke away just as they were hauling him 
 over the side, and sank placidly through the 
 clear water, leaving behind him a crimson trail 
 that wavered a moment and was gone. 
 
 The sea, though, has better sights than these. 
 When we were up with the Azores, we began 
 to meet flying-fish and Portuguese men-of- 
 war beautiful as the galley of Cleopatra, tiny 
 craft that dared these seas before Columbus. 
 I have seen one of the former rise from the 
 crest of a wave, and, glancing from another
 
 AT SEA. 81 
 
 some two hundred feet beyond, take a fresli 
 flight of perhaps as long. How Calderon 
 would have similized this pretty creature had 
 lie ever seen it ! How would he have run him 
 up and down the gamut of simile ! If a fish, 
 then a fish with wings ; if a bird, then a bird 
 with fins ; and so on, keeping up the poor 
 shuttle-cock of a conceit as is his wont. 
 Indeed, the poor thing is the most killing bait 
 for a comparison, and I assure you I have 
 three or four in my inkstand; but be calm, 
 they shall stay there. Moore, who looked on 
 all nature as a kind of Gradus ad Parnassum, 
 a thesaurus of similitude, and spent his life in 
 a game of What is my thought like? wilh 
 himself, did the flying-fish on his way to Ber- 
 muda. So I leave him in peace. 
 
 The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, 
 all the more so that I had never heard of it, 
 is the trail of a shoal of fish through the phos- 
 phorescent water. It is like a flight of silver 
 rockets, or the streaming of northern lights 
 through that silent nether heaven. I thought 
 nothing could go beyond that rustling star- 
 foam which was churned up by our ship's
 
 82 AT SEA. 
 
 bows, or those eddies and disks of dreamy 
 flame that rose aiid wandered out of sight 
 behind us. 
 
 'T was fire our ship was plunging through, 
 Cold fire that o'er the quarter flew ; 
 And wandering moons of idle flame 
 Grew full and waned, and went and came, 
 Dappling with light the huge sea-snake 
 That slid behind us in the wake. 
 
 But there was something even' more delicately 
 rare in the apparition of the fish, as they 
 turned up in gleaming furrows the latent 
 moonshine which the ocean seemed to have 
 hoarded against these vacant interlunar nights. 
 In the 'Mediterranean one day, as we were 
 lying becalmed, I observed the water freckled 
 with dingy specks, which at last gathered to a 
 pinkish scum on the surface. The sea had 
 been so phosphorescent for some nights, that 
 when the Captain gave me my bath, by dous- 
 ing me with buckets from the house on deck, 
 the spray flew off my head and shoulders in 
 sparks. It occurred to me that this dirty- 
 looking scum might be the luminous matter, 
 and I had a pailful dipped up to keep till after
 
 AT SEA. 83 
 
 dark. When I went to look at it after night- 
 fall, it seemed at first perfectly dead ; but 
 when I shook it, the whole broke out into 
 what I can only liken to milky flames, whose 
 lambent silence was strangely beautiful, and 
 startled me almost as actual projection might an 
 alchemist. I could not bear to be the death 
 of so much beauty; so I poured it all over- 
 board again. . 
 
 Another sight worth taking a voyage for is 
 that of the sails by moonlight. Our course 
 was " south and by east, half south," so that 
 we seemed bound for the full moon as she 
 rolled up over our wavering horizon. Then 
 I used to go forward to the bowsprit and look 
 back. Our ship was a clipper, with every rag 
 set, stunsails, sky-scrapers, and all ; nor was 
 it easy to believe that such a wonder could 
 be built of canvas as that white many-storied 
 pile of cloud that stooped over me, or drew 
 back as we rose and fell with the waves. 
 
 These are all the wonders I can recall of 
 my five weeks at sea, except the sun. Were 
 you ever alone with the sun ? You think it a 
 very simple question ; but I never was, in the
 
 84 AT SEA. 
 
 full sense of the word, till I was held up to 
 him one cloudless day on the broad buckler 
 of the ocean. I suppose one might have the 
 same feeling in the desert. I remember get- 
 ting something like it years ago, when I 
 climbed alone to the top of a mountain, and 
 lay face up on the hot gray moss, striving to 
 get a notion of how an Arab might feel. It 
 was my American commentary of the Koran, 
 and not a bad one. In a New England win- 
 ter, too, when everything is gagged with snow, 
 as if some gigantic physical geographer were 
 taking a cast of the earth's face in plaster, the 
 bare knob of a hill will introduce you to the 
 sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea 
 you may be alone with him day after day, and 
 almost all day long. I never understood 
 before that nothing short of full daylight can 
 give the supremest sense of solitude. Dark- 
 ness will not do so, for the imagination peo- 
 ples it with more shapes than ever were 
 poured from the frozen loins of the populous 
 North. The sun, I sometimes think, is a 
 little grouty at sea, especially at high noon, 
 feeliug that he wastes his beams on those
 
 AT SEA. 85 
 
 fruitless furrows. It is otherwise with the 
 moon. She "comforts the night," as Chap- 
 man finely says, and I always found her a 
 companionable creature. 
 
 In the ocean-horizon I took untiring delight. 
 It is the true magic-circle of expectation and 
 conjecture, almost as good as a wishing-ring. 
 What will rise over that edge we sail toward 
 daily and never overtake ? A sail ? an island ? 
 the new shore of the Old World ? Something 
 rose every day, which I need not have gone so 
 far to see, but at whose levee I was a much 
 more faithful courtier than on shore. A cloud- 
 less sunrise in mid-ocean is beyond comparison 
 for simple grandeur. It is like Dante's style, 
 bare and perfect. Naked sun meets naked 
 sea, the true classic of nature. There may be 
 more sentiment in morning on shore, the 
 shivering fairy-jewelry of dew, the silver point- 
 lace of sparkling hoar-frost, but there is also 
 more complexity, more of the romantic. The 
 one savors of the elder Edda, the other of the 
 Minnesingers. 
 
 And I thus floating, lonely elf, 
 
 A kind of planet by myself,
 
 86 AT SEA. 
 
 The mists draw up and furl away, 
 
 And in the east a warming gray, 
 
 Faint as the tint of oaken woods 
 
 When o'er their buds May breathes and broods, 
 
 Tells that" the golden sunrise-tide 
 
 Is lapsing up earth's thirsty side, 
 
 Each moment purpling on the crest 
 
 Of some stark billow farther west : 
 
 And as the sea-moss droops and hears 
 
 The gurgling flood that nears and nears, 
 
 And then with tremulous content 
 
 Floats out each thankful filament, 
 
 So waited I until it came, 
 
 God's daily miracle, shame 
 
 That I had seen so many days 
 
 Unthankful, without wondering praise, 
 
 Not recking more this bliss of earth 
 
 Than the cheap fire that lights my hearth ! 
 
 But now glad thoughts and holy pour 
 
 Into my heart, as once a year 
 
 To San Miniato's open door, 
 
 In long procession, chanting clear, 
 
 Through slopes of sun, through shadows hoar, 
 
 The coupled monks slow-climbing sing, 
 
 And like a golden censf r swing 
 
 From rear to front, from front to rear 
 
 Their alternating bursts of praise,
 
 AT SEA. 87 
 
 Till the roof's fading seraphs gaze 
 Down through an odorous mist, that crawls 
 Lingeringly up the darkened walls, 
 And the dim arches, silent long, 
 Are startled with triumphant song. 
 
 I wrote yesterday that the sea still rimmed 
 our prosy lives with mystery and conjecture. 
 But one is shut up on shipboard like Mou- 
 taigne in his tower, with nothing to do but to 
 review his own thoughts and contradict him- 
 self. Dire, redire, et me contredire, will be the 
 staple of my journal till I see land. I say noth- 
 ing of such matters as the montagna bruna on 
 which Ulysses was wrecked ; but since the six- 
 teenth century could any man reasonably hope 
 to stumble on one of those wonders which were 
 cheap as dirt in the days of St. Saga ? Faustus, 
 Don Juan, and Tanhaliser are the last ghosts 
 of legend, that lingered almost till the Gallic 
 cock-crow of universal enlightenment and dis- 
 illusion. The Public School has done for Im- 
 agination. What shall I see in Outre-Mer, or 
 on the way thither, but what can be seen with 
 eyes ? To be sure, I stick by the sea-serpent,
 
 and would fain believe that science has scotched, 
 not killed, him. Nor is he to be lightly given 
 up, for, like the old Scandinavian snake, he 
 binds together for us the two hemispheres of 
 Past and Present, of Belief and Science. He 
 is the link which knits us seaboard Yankees 
 with our Norse progenitors, interpreting be- 
 tween the age of the dragon and that of the 
 'railroad train. We have made ducks and 
 drakes of that large estate of wonder and 
 delight bequeathed to us by ancestral vikings, 
 and this alone remains to us unthrift heirs of 
 Linn. 
 
 I feel an undefined respect for a man who 
 has seen the sea-serpent. He is to his brother- 
 fishers what the poet is to his fellow-men. 
 Where they have seen nothing better than a 
 school of horse-mackerel, or the idle coils of 
 ocean around Half-way Rock, he has caught 
 authentic glimpses of the withdrawing mantle- 
 hem of the Edda age. I care not for the 
 monster himself. It is not the thing, but the 
 belief in the thing, that is dear to me. May 
 it be long before Professor Owen is comforted 
 with the sight of his unfleshed vertebrae, long
 
 before they stretch many a rood behind Kim- 
 ball's or Barnum's glass, reflected in the shal- 
 low orbs of Mr. and Mrs. Public, which stare, 
 but see not ! When we read that Captain 
 Spalding, of the pink-stern Three Follies, has 
 beheld him rushing through the brine like an 
 infinite series of bewitched mackerel-casks, we 
 feel that the mystery of old Ocean, at least, 
 has not yet been sounded, that Faith and 
 Awe survive there unevaporate. I once ven- 
 tured the horse-mackerel theory to an old 
 fishermaji, browner than a tomcod. "Hos- 
 mackril ! " he exclaimed indignantly, " hos- 
 mackril be " (here he used a phrase com- 
 monly indicated in laical literature by the same 
 sign which serves for Doctorate in Divinity,) 
 " don't yer spose / know a hos-mackril ? " 
 The intonation of that "/" would have si- 
 lenced Professor Monkbarns Owen with his 
 provoking phoc.a forever. What if one should 
 ask him if lie knew a trilobite ? 
 
 The fault of modern travellers is, that they 
 see nothing out of sight. They talk of eocene 
 periods and tertiary formations, and tell us 
 how the world looked to the plesiosaur. They
 
 90 AT SEA. 
 
 take science (or nescience) with them, instead 
 of that soul of generous trust their elders had. 
 All their senses are sceptics and doubters, 
 materialists reporting things for other sceptics 
 to doubt still further upon. Nature becomes 
 a reluctant witness upon the stand, badgered 
 with geologist hammers and phials of acid. 
 There have been no travellers since those 
 included in Hakluyt and Purchas, except 
 Martin, perhaps, who saw an inch or two into 
 the invisible at the Orkneys. We have peri- 
 patetic lecturers, but no more travellers. 
 Travellers' stories are no longer proverbial. 
 We have picked nearly every apple (wormy or 
 otherwise) from the world's tree of knowledge, 
 and that without an Eve to tempt us. Two 
 or three have hitherto hung luckily beyond 
 reach on a lofty bough shadowing the interior 
 of Africa, but there is -a German Doctor at this 
 very moment pelting at them with sticks and 
 stones. It may be only next week, and these 
 too, bitten by geographers and geologists, will 
 be thrown away. 
 
 Analysis is carried into everything. Even 
 Deity is subjected to chemic tests. We must
 
 AT SEA. 91 
 
 have exact knowledge, a cabinet stuck full of 
 facts pressed, dried, or preserved in spirits in- 
 stead of the large, vague world our fathers had. 
 With them science was poetry; with us, poetry 
 is science. Our modern Eden is a hortus sic- 
 cus. Tourists defraud rather than enrich us. 
 They have not that sense of aesthetic propor- 
 tion which characterized the elder traveller. 
 Earth is no longer the fine work of art it was, 
 for nothing is left to the imagination. Job 
 Hortop, arrived at the height of the Bermudas, 
 thinks it full time to indulge us in a merman. 
 Nay, there is a story told by Webster, in his 
 " Witchcraft," of a merman with a mitre, who, 
 on being sent back to his watery diocese of fin- 
 land, made what advances he could toward an 
 episcopal benediction by bowing his head thrice. 
 Doubtless he had been consecrated by St. 
 Antony of Padua. A dumb bishop would be 
 sometimes no unpleasant phenomenon, by the 
 way. Sir John Hawkins is not satisfied with 
 telling us about the merely sensual Canaries, 
 but is generous enough to throw us in a hand- 
 ful of " certain flitting islands " to boot. 
 Henrv Hawkes describes the visible Mexican
 
 92 AT SEA. 
 
 cities, and then is not so frugal but that he can 
 give us a few invisible ones. Thus do these 
 generous ancient mariners make children of us 
 again. Their successors show us an earth 
 effete and past bearing, tracing out with the 
 eyes of industrious fleas every wrinkle and 
 crowfoot. 
 
 The journals of the elder navigators are 
 prose Odysseys. The geographies of our an- 
 cestors were works of fancy and imagination. 
 They read poems where we yawn over items. 
 Their world was a huge wonder-horn, ex- 
 haustless as that which Thor strove to drain. 
 Ours would scarce quench the small thirst of 
 a bee. No modem voyager brings back the 
 magical foundation-stones of a Tempest. No 
 Marco Polo, traversing the desert beyond the 
 city of Lok, would tell of things able to inspire 
 the mind of Milton with 
 
 " Calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire, 
 And airy tongues that syllable men's names 
 On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." 
 
 It was easy enough to believe the story of 
 Dante, when two thirds of even the upper-
 
 AT SEA. 93 
 
 world were yet untraversed and unmapped. 
 With every step of the recent traveller our 
 inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. 
 Those beautifully pictured notes of the Possi- 
 ble are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the 
 hard and cumbrous coin of the actual. How 
 are we not defrauded and impoverished ? Does 
 California vie with El Dorado ? or are Bruce's 
 Abyssinian kings a set-off for Prester John ? 
 A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. 
 And if the philosophers have not even yet 
 been able to agree whether the world has any 
 existence independent of ourselves, how do we 
 not gain a loss in every addition to the cata- 
 logue of Vulgar Errors ? Where are the 
 fishes which nidificated in trees ? Where the 
 monopodes sheltering themselves from the sun 
 beneath their single umbrella-like foot, um- 
 brella-like in everything but the fatal necessity 
 of being borrowed ? Where the Acephali, 
 with whom Herodotus, in a kind of ecstasy, 
 wound up his climax of men with abnormal 
 top-pieces ? Where the Roc whos^e eggs are 
 possibly boulders, needing no far-fetched the- 
 ory of glacier or iceberg to account for them ?
 
 94 AT SEA. 
 
 Where the tails of the men of Kent ? Where 
 the no legs of the bird of paradise? Where 
 the Unicorn, with that single horn of his, sov- 
 ereign against all manner of poisons ? Where 
 the Fountain of Youth? Where that Thes- 
 salian spring, which, without cost to the coun- 
 try, convicted and punished perjurers? Where 
 the Amazons of Orellaua ? All these, and a 
 thousand other varieties, we liave lost, and 
 have got nothing instead of them. And those 
 who have robbed us of them have stolen that 
 which not enriches themselves. It is so much 
 wealth cast into the sea beyond all approach 
 of diving-bells. We owe no thanks to Mr. J. 
 E. Worcester, whose Geography we studied 
 enforcedly at school. Yet even he had his 
 relentings, and in some softer moment vouch- 
 safed us a fine, inspiring print of the Mael- 
 strom, answerable to the twenty-four mile 
 diameter of its suction. Year by year, more 
 and more of the world gets disenchanted. 
 Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic 
 circles is invaded. Our youth are no longer 
 ingenious, as indeed no ingenuity is demanded 
 of them. Everything is accounted for, every-
 
 AT SEA. 95 
 
 thing cut and dried, and the world may be put 
 together as easily as the fragments of a dis- 
 sected map. The Mysterious bounds nothing 
 now on the North, South, East, or West. We 
 have played Jack Homer with our earth, till 
 there is never a plum left in it. 
 
 Cambridge : Printed by Welch, JJigelow, & Co.
 
 
 This book is DUE on the last 
 date stamped below.
 
 PS Lowell - 
 
 2322 A Moosehead 
 M78 journal 
 
 Mia. 
 PS 
 
 2322 
 M78
 
 WORKS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " James Russell Lowell has produced so much verse of various 
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 fen, now some thirty-six years ago, that the -world is apt to asso- 
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 We find in LowelCs prose such -wealth of -wit and humor, such , 
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