I trod along by
the dark, sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above one
of its blackest and most placid pools (the very spot, with the
barkless stump of a tree aslantwise over the water, is depicting
itself to my fancy at this instant), and wondering how deep it was,
and if any overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in
thither, and if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier.
And perhaps the skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the
inscrutable depth, clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the
gripe of its old despair. So slight, however, was the track of these
gloomy ideas, that I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood
of wild ducks, which were floating on the river, and anon took flight,
leaving each a bright streak over the black surface. By and by, I
came to my hermitage, in the heart of the white-pine tree, and
clambering up into it, sat down to rest. The grapes, which I had
watched throughout the summer, now dangled around me in abundant
clusters of the deepest purple, deliciously sweet to the taste, and,
though wild, yet free from that ungentle flavor which distinguishes
nearly all our native and uncultivated grapes. Methought a wine
might be pressed out of them possessing a passionate zest, and
endowed with a new kind of intoxicating quality, attended with such
bacchanalian ecstasies as the tamer grapes of Madeira, France, and
the Rhine are inadequate to produce. And I longed to quaff a great
goblet of it that moment!
While devouring the grapes, I looked on all sides out of the
peep-holes of my hermitage, and saw the farmhouse, the fields, and
almost every part of our domain, but not a single human figure in the
landscape.
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