Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/320

306 could I discover than sterile eminences and extensive shoals. They fled behind me; so pass away generations; so shift and sink, and die away affections.&quot; &quot;I debark in Sicily.&quot; [That was Tall's Island.] &quot;I sail again, and within a day or two [hour or two] I behold, as the sun is setting, the solitary majesty of Crete [that was Nobscot surely], mother of a religion, it is said, that lived two thousand years. Onward, and many specks bubble up along the blue Ægean.&quot; These must have been the muskrat houses in the meadows. &quot;Every one,&quot; I have no doubt, &quot;the monument of a greater man [being ?] than I am.&quot; The swelling river was belching on a high key from ten to eleven, quite a musical cracking, running like chain lightning of sound athwart my course. As I passed, the ice forced up by the water on one side suddenly settled on another with a crash, and quite a lake was formed above the ice behind me, so that my successor two hours after, to his wonder and alarm, saw my tracks disappear on one side of it and come out on the other. My seat from time to time is the springy horizontal bough of some fallen tree which is frozen into the ice, some old maple that was blown over and retained some life a year after, in the water, covered with the great shaggy perforate parmelia. Lying flat I quench my thirst where the ice is melted