IN THE MAINE WOODS. HAT is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals, or glades, than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. It is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated-a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere wet and miry. The aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake-prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree. The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and A MOUNTAIN LAKE. there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water-so anterior, so superior to all the changes that are. to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be. These Here prevail are not the artificial forests of an English king-a royal preserve merely. no forest-laws but those of Nature. The aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor Nature disforested. It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver-birches and watery maples-the ground dotted with insipid, small, red berries, and strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks; a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other fishes. The forest resounds at rare intervals with the note of the chickadee, the blue-jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of fish-hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and the howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. Such is the home of the DENIZENS OF THE FOREST. moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian. Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring; where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds, and trickling rills. II.-SHOOTING RAPIDS. We reached the dam at noon. The boatmen went through one of the log sluices in the bateau, where the fall was ten feet at the bottom, and took us in below. Here was the longest rapid in our voyage, and perhaps the running this was as dangerous and arduous a task as any. In shooting rapids the boatman has this problem to solve: to choose a circuitous and safe course amid a thousand sunken rocks, scattered over a long distance, at the same time that he is moving steadily on at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. Stop he can not the only question is, Where will he go? The bow-man chooses the course with all his eyes about him, striking broad off with his paddle, and drawing the boat by main force into her course. The stern-man faithfully follows the bow. Down the rapids we shot at a headlong rate. If we struck a rock, we were split from end to end in an instant. Now like a bait bobbing for some river monster amid the eddies, now darting to this side of the stream, now to that, gliding swift and smooth near to our destruction, or striking broad off with the paddle and drawing the boat to right or left with all our might in order to avoid a rock, we soon ran through the mile, and floated in Quakish Lake. After such a voyage, the troubled and angry waters, which once had seemed terrible and not be trifled with, appeared tamed and subdued; they had been bearded and worried in their channels, pricked and whipped into submission with the spike-pole and paddle, and all their spirit and their danger taken out of them; and the most swollen and impetuous rivers seemed but playthings henceforth. I began at length to understand the boatmen's familiarity with and contempt for the rapids. "Those Fowler boys," said Mrs. M., "are perfect ducks for the water." They had run down to Lincoln, according to her, thirty or forty miles, in a bateau, in the night, for a doctor, when it was so dark that they could not see a rod before them, and the river was swollen so as to be almost a continuous rapid, so that the doctor cried, when they brought him up by daylight, "Why, Tom, how did you see to steer?" "We didn't steer much-only kept her straight." with no accident. A LIFE ON THE OCEAN WAVE. LIFE on the ocean wave, A home on the rolling deep; Where the scattered waters rave, And the winds their revels keep! On this dull, unchanging shore: Once more on the deck I stand Of my own swift-gliding craft: Set sail! farewell to the land; The gale follows fair abaft. And yet they met HENRY D. THOREAU. We shoot through the sparkling foam, Like an ocean-bird set free,— The land is no longer in view, The clouds have begun to frown; EPES SARGENT. SKIPPER IRESON'S RIDE. F all the rides since the birth of Time, Or one-eyed Calender's horse of brass, The strangest ride that ever was sped Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, Body of turkey, head of owl, Wrinkled scolds with hands on hips, With conch-shells blowing and fish-horns' twang, "Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt By the women o' Morble'ead!" Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. |