A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon / The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone, / Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear, / And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker. / ⋮ / Where darkness found him he lay glad at night; / There the red morning touched him with its light. / ⋮ / Go where he will, the wise man is at home, / His hearth the earth -- his hall the azure dome; / Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road, / By God's own light illumined and foreshowed. / Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we awoke this morning, we heard the faint, deliberate, and ominous sound of raindrops on our cotton roof. The rain had pattered all night, and now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river, and on the alders, and in the pastures, and instead of any bow in the heavens, there was the trill of the hair-bird all the morning. The cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole woodland choir beside. When we first stepped abroad, a flock of sheep, led by their rams, came rushing down a ravine in our rear, with heedless haste and unreserved frisking, as if unobserved by man, from some higher pasture where they had spent the night, to taste the herbage by the riverside; but when their leaders caught sight of our white tent through the mist, struck with sudden astonishment, with their forefeet braced, they sustained the rushing torrent in their rear, and the whole flock stood stock-still, endeavoring to solve the mystery in their sheepish brains. At length, concluding that it boded no mischief to them, they spread themselves out quietly over the field. We learned afterward that we had pitched our tent on the very spot which a few summers before had been occupied by a party of Penobscots. We could see rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence called Hooksett Pinnacle, a landmark to boatmen, and also Uncannunuc Mountain, broad off on the west side of the river.