Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/148

 ; as if the melodies of all Congo and the Guinea Coast had irrupted into our streets; now to see the procession of a hundred yoke of oxen, all as august and grave as Osiris; now to gaze at the droves of neat cattle, and milch cows, all as unspotted and πότνια as Isis or Io,—I cannot help thinking of the feast of Adonis at Sestos and Abydos.

Such as had no loves at all,—

Went lovers home from this great festival.

So enriched and reinforced did men go home from this our fair.

My life is far among those clouds yonder, as if they hung over the land where I would fain dwell. I see its atmosphere through the distant boughs of the elms.

The grandeur of the similes is another feature which characterizes great poetry. The poet seems to speak a gigantic and universal language. Its images and pictures ever occupy much space in the landscape as if they could only be seen from mountains and plains with a wide horizon, or across arms of the sea. They were not slight and transient like the stains on a whitewashed [100]