Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/178

 All their spices and their gold, And men sail the sea no more,— The sea itself become a shore To a broader deeper sea, A pro founder mystery.

Page 11.—The following is a more complete amplification of the thought recorded at the top of the above page, with a poem suggested by it:—

There dwelt along at considerable distances on this interval a quiet agricultural and pastoral people, with every house its well (as we sometimes proved), and other customary fixtures; and every household, though never so still and remote, it received in the noon-tide its dinner hour and probably its dinner about these times. There they lived on, those New England people, farmer-lives,—father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise; keeping up tradition, and expecting besides fair weather and abundant harvest, we did not learn what. Contented were they to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lives had fallen. [128]