Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/35

 are perhaps the expression of the perfect knowledge which the saints attain. There are in music such strains as far surpass any faith which man ever had in the loftiness of his destiny. Things are to be learned which it will be sweet to learn, and worth the while. This cannot be all rumor.

"Here the woodcutters have felled an ancient pine forest, and brought to light, to those distant hills, a fair lake in the south west. One wonders if the very bare earth did not experience emotion at beholding so fair a prospect. This gleam reflected by the evening sky will sow flowers here of various hues, with its slanted rays. That water lies there in the sun, revealed to those hills, as if it needed not to be seen. Its beauty seems yet lonely—sufficient."

After the fragmentary journal of the voyage of 1839, interspersed as it is with extracts from later journals, comes a long series of extracts from the autumn journals kept at Staten Island, but ending in Concord, to which beloved home he returned at some date in November, 1843, now hard to fix. Probably it was during the interval between the dates, [xxvii]