Dedicated to My Fellow Travellers in August, 1858

Wise and polite,--and if I drewTheir several portraits, you would ownChaucer had no such worthy crew,Nor Boccace in Decameron.

We crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends,Thence, in strong country carts, rode up the forksOf the Ausable stream, intent to reachThe Adirondac lakes. At Martin's BeachWe chose our boats; each man a boat and guide,--Ten men, ten guides, our company all told.

Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,Taháwus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,And other Titans without muse or name.Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on,Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills.We made our distance wider, boat from boat,As each would hear the oracle alone.By the bright morn the gay flotilla slidThrough files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,Through scented banks of lilies white and gold,Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,On through the Upper Saranac, and upPère Raquette stream, to a small tortuous passWinding through grassy shallows in and out,Two creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.

Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,Under low mountains, whose unbroken ridgePonderous with beechen forest sloped the shore.A pause and council: then, where near the headDue east a bay makes inward to the landBetween two rocky arms, we climb the bank,And in the twilight of the forest noonWield the first axe these echoes ever heard.We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,Barked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,Then struck a light and kindled the camp-fire.

The wood was sovran with centennial trees,--Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,Linden and spruce. In strict societyThree conifers, white, pitch and Norway pine,Five-leaved, three-leaved and two-leaved, grew thereby,Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.

'Welcome!' the wood-god murmured through the leaves,--'Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.'Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,Which o'erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire.Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.

Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and softIn well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,And greet unanimous the joyful change.So fast will Nature acclimate her sons,Though late returning to her pristine ways.Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;And, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned,Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds.Up with the dawn, they fancied the light airThat circled freshly in their forest dressMade them to boys again. Happier that theySlipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind,At the first mounting of the giant stairs.No placard on these rocks warned to the polls,No door-bell heralded a visitor,No courier waits, no letter came or went,Nothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold;The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop,The falling rain will spoil no holiday.We were made freemen of the forest laws,All dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends,Essaying nothing she cannot perform.

In Adirondac lakesAt morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded:Shoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers makeHis brief toilette: at night, or in the rain,He dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn:A paddle in the right hand, or an oar,And in the left, a gun, his needful arms.By turns we praised the stature of our guides,Their rival strength and suppleness, their skillTo row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp,To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughsFull fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down:Temper to face wolf, bear, or catamount,And wit to trap or take him in his lair.Sound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent,In winter, lumberers; in summer, guides;Their sinewy arms pull at the oar untiredThree times ten thousand strokes, from morn to eve.

Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen!No city airs or arts pass current here.Your rank is all reversed; let men or clothBow to the stalwart churls in overalls:They are the doctors of the wilderness,And we the low-prized laymen.In sooth, red flannel is a saucy testWhich few can put on with impunity.What make you, master, fumbling at the oar?Will you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here.The sallow knows the basket-maker's thumb;The oar, the guide's. Dare you accept the tasksHe shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes,Tell the sun's time, determine the true north,Or stumbling on through vast self-similar woodsTo thread by night the nearest way to camp?

Ask you, how went the hours?All day we swept the lake, searched every cove,North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,Or whipping its rough surface for a trout;Or, bathers, diving from the rock at noon;Challenging Echo by our guns and cries;Or listening to the laughter of the loon;Or, in the evening twilight's latest red,Beholding the procession of the pines;Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,In the boat's bows, a silent night-hunterStealing with paddle to the feeding-groundsOf the red deer, to aim at a square mist.Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woodsIs fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buckWho stands astonished at the meteor light,Then turns to bound away,--is it too late?

Our heroes tried their rifles at a mark,Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;Sometimes their wits at sally and retort,With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle;Or parties scaled the near acclivitiesCompeting seekers of a rumored lake,Whose unauthenticated waves we namedLake Probability,--our carbuncle,Long sought, not found.

Two Doctors in the campDissected the slain deer, weighed the trout's brain,Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow and moth;Insatiate skill in water or in airWaved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;The while, one leaden got of alcoholGave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants,Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus,Rosy polygonum, lake-margin's pride,Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge and moss,Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpeckerLoud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.As water poured through hollows of the hillsTo feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,So Nature shed all beauty lavishlyFrom her redundant horn.

Lords of this realm,Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the dayRounded by hours where each outdid the lastIn miracles of pomp, we must be proud,As if associates of the sylvan gods.We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,So pure the Alpine element we breathed,So light, so lofty pictures came and went.We trode on air, contemned the distant town,Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we plannedThat we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodgeAnd how we should come hither with our sons,Hereafter,--willing they, and more adroit.

Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery,--The midge, the blue-fly and the mosquitoPainted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:But, on the second day, we heed them not,Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.For who defends our leafy tabernacleFrom bold intrusion of the travelling crowd,--Who but the midge, mosquito and the fly,Which past endurance sting the tender cit,But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?

Our foaming ale we drank from hunters' pans,Ale, and a sup of wine. Our steward gaveVenison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;All ate like abbots, and, if any missedTheir wonted convenance, cheerly hid the lossWith hunters' appetite and peals of mirth.And Stillman, our guides' guide, and Commodore,Crusoe, Crusader, Pius Aeneas, said aloud,"Chronic dyspepsia never came from eatingFood indigestible":--then murmured some,Others applauded him who spoke the truth.

Nor doubt but visitings of graver thoughtChecked in these souls the turbulent heyday'Mid all the hints and glories of the home.For who can tell what sudden privaciesWere sought and found, amid the hue and cryOf scholars furloughed from their tasks and letInto this Oreads' fended Paradise,As chapels in the city's thoroughfares,Whither gaunt Labor slips to wipe his browAnd meditate a moment on Heaven's rest.Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spokeTo each apart, lifting her lovely showsTo spiritual lessons pointed home,And as through dreams in watches of the night,So through all creatures in their form and waysSome mystic hint accosts the vigilant,Not clearly voiced, but waking a new senseInviting to new knowledge, one with old.Hark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler?Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye.Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?

And presently the sky is changed; O world!What pictures and what harmonies are thine!The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,So like the soul of me, what if 't were me?A melancholy better than all mirth.Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,Or at the foresight of obscurer years?Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontoryWhereon the purple iris dwells in beautySuperior to all its gaudy skirts.And, that no day of life may lack romance,The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding downA private beam into each several heart.Daily the bending skies solicit man,The seasons chariot him from this exile,The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,Suns haste to set, that so remoter lightsBeckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

With a vermilion pencil mark the dayWhen of our little fleet three cruising skiffsEntering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming FallsOf loud Bog River, suddenly confrontTwo of our mates returning with swift oars.One held a printed journal waving highCaught from a late-arriving traveller,Big with great news, and shouted the reportFor which the world had waited, now firm fact,Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,And landed on our coast, and pulsatingWith ductile fire. Loud, exulting criesFrom boat to boat, and to the echoes round,Greet the glad miracle. Thought's new-found pathShall supplement henceforth all trodden ways,Match God's equator with a zone of art,And lift man's public action to a heightWorthy the enormous cloud of witnesses,When linkèd hemispheres attest his deed.We have few moments in the longest lifeOf such delight and wonder as there grew,--Nor yet unsuited to that solitude:A burst of joy, as if we told the factTo ears intelligent; as if gray rockAnd cedar grove and cliff and lake should knowThis feat of wit, this triumph of mankind;As if we men were talking in a veinOf sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,And a prime end of the most subtle elementWere fairly reached at last. Wake, echoing caves!Bend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops,Let them hear well! 'tis theirs as much as ours.

A spasm throbbing through the pedestalsOf Alp and Andes, isle and continent,Urging astonished Chaos with a thrillTo be a brain, or serve the brain of man.The lightning has run masterless too long;He must to school and learn his verb and nounAnd teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,Spelling with guided tongue man's messagesShot through the weltering pit of the salt sea.And yet I marked, even in the manly joyOf our great-hearted Doctor in his boat(Perchance I erred), a shade of discontent;Or was it for mankind a generous shame,As of a luck not quite legitimate,Since fortune snatched from wit the lion's part?Was it a college pique of town and gown,As one within whose memory it burnedThat not academicians, but some lout,Found ten years since the Californian gold?And now, again, a hungry companyOf traders, led by corporate sons of trade,Perversely borrowing from the shop the toolsOf science, not from the philosophers,Had won the brightest laurel of all time.'Twas always thus, and will be; hand and headAre ever rivals: but, though this be swift,The other slow,--this the Prometheus,And that the Jove,--yet, howsoever hid,It was from Jove the other stole his fire,And, without Jove, the good had never been.It is not Iroquois or cannibals,But ever the free race with front sublime,And these instructed by their wisest too,Who do the feat, and lift humanity.Let not him mourn who best entitled was,Nay, mourn not one: let him exult,Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant,And water it with wine, nor watch askanceWhether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit:Enough that mankind eat and are refreshed.

We flee away from cities, but we bringThe best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.We praise the guide, we praise the forest life:But will we sacrifice our dear-bought loreOf books and arts and trained experiment,Or count the Sioux a match for Agassiz?O no, not we! Witness the shout that shookWild Tupper Lake; witness the mute all-hailThe joyful traveller gives, when on the vergeOf craggy Indian wilderness he hearsFrom a log cabin stream Beethoven's notesOn the piano, played with master's hand.'Well done!' he cries; 'the bear is kept at bay,The lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire;All the fierce enemies, ague, hunger, cold,This thin spruce roof, this clayed log-wall,This wild plantation will suffice to chase.Now speed the gay celerities of art,What in the desert was impossibleWithin four walls is possible again,--Culture and libraries, mysteries of skill,Traditioned fame of masters, eager strifeOf keen competing youths, joined or aloneTo outdo each other and extort applause.Mind wakes a new-born giant from her sleep.Twirl the old wheels! Time takes fresh start again,On for a thousand years of genius more.'

The holidays were fruitful, but must end;One August evening had a cooler breath;Into each mind intruding duties crept;Under the cinders burned the fires of home;Nay, letters found us in our paradise:So in the gladness of the new eventWe struck our camp and left the happy hills.The fortunate star that rose on us sank not;The prodigal sunshine rested on the land,The rivers gambolled onward to the sea,And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,Permitted on her infinite reposeAlmost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.