Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or
like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with
light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have
forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond
Flints Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries,
spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the
creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to
ss where the usnea li hangs ioons from the white
spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the s gods, cover
the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorumps, like
butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the sink and
dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of imps, the
waxwrooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the
wild holly berries make the beholder fet his home with their
beauty, and he is dazzled aed by nameless other wild
forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of calling on
some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds
which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle
of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or s, or on a
hilltop; such as the black birch, of which we have some handsome
spes two feet in diameter; its cousin, the yellow birch, with
its loose golde, perfumed like the first; the beech, which has
so a bole aifully li-painted, perfe all its
details, of which, excepting scattered spes, I know but one
small grove of sizable trees left iownship, supposed by some
to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with
beeuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grain
sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the Celtis
octalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown;
some taller mast of a pine, a shiree, or a more perfect
hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the
woods; and many others I could mention. These were the shrines I
visited both summer and winter.
O ced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbows
arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the
grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through
colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a
short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted lo
might have tinged my employments and life. As I walked on the
railroad causeway, I used to wo the halo of light around my
shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. One who
visited me declared that the shadows of some Irishmen before him had
no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so
distinguished. Beo Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that,
after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his
fi in the castle of St. Angelo a resple light appeared
over the shadow of his head at m and evening, whether he was
in Italy or France, and it articularly spicuous when the
grass was moist with dew. This robably the same phenomenon to
which I have referred, which is especially observed in the m,
but also at other times, and even by moonlight. Though a stant
o is not only noticed, and, in the case of aable
imagination l