Explore "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" by Henry David Thoreau on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye, / That clothe the wold and meet the sky; / And through the fields the road runs by / To many-towered Camelot. / Tennyson
Long before daylight we ranged abroad, hatchet in hand, in search of fuel, and made the yet slumbering and dreaming wood resound with our blows. Then with our fire we burned up a portion of the loitering night, while the kettle sang its homely strain to the morning star. We tramped about the shore, waked all the muskrats, and scared up the bittern and birds that were asleep upon their roosts; we hauled up and upset our boat and washed it and rinsed out the clay, talking aloud as if it were broad day, until at length, by three o'clock, we had completed our preparations and were ready to pursue our voyage as usual; so, shaking the clay from our feet, we pushed into the fog.