Page:Miscellanies - With a biographical sketch by Ralph Waldo Emerson and a general index to the writings. -- by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/93

Rh perchance inland seas, and at length the deep ocean itself.

Some extracts will show in what sense he was a poet as well as a reformer. He thus raises the anti-slavery "war-whoop" in New Hampshire, when an important convention is to be held, sending the summons,—

"To none but the whole-hearted, fully-committed, cross-the-Rubicon spirits. From rich 'old Cheshire,' from Rockingham, with her horizon setting down away to the salt sea  from where the sim sets behind Kearsarge, even to where he rises gloriously over Moses Norris's own town of Pittsfield,—and from Amoskeag to Ragged Mountains,—Coos—Upper Coos, home of the everlasting hills,—send out your bold advocates of human rights, wherever they lay, scattered by lonely lake, or Indian stream, or 'Grant,' or 'Location,' from the trout-haunted brooks of the Amoriscoggin, and where the adventurous streamlet takes up its mountain march for the St. Lawrence.

"Scattered and insulated men, wherever the light of philanthropy and liberty has beamed in upon your solitary spirits, come down to us like your streams and clouds and our own Grafton, all about among your dear hills, and your mountain-flanked valleys—whether you home along the swift Ammonoosuck, the cold Pemigewassett, or the ox-bowed Connecticut.