Deep into
distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of
mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture
lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs
like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit
the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade
knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm
wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara
but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see
it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two
handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he
sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway
Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy
soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your
first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical
vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of
sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did
the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely
all this is not without meaning.
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