Theodore Winthrop

“ It is never lonely with Nature. Without unnatural men or unnatural beasts, she is capital society by herself. And so we found her, — a lovely being in perfect toilet, which I describe, in an indiscriminating, masculine way, by saying that it was a forest and a river and lakes and a mountain and doubtless sky, all made resplendent by her judicious disposition of a most becoming light. Iglesias and I, being old friends, were received into close intimacy. ”

“ Among them we might imagine the mountain rising with thousands more of feet of heaven-piercing height: there is one degree of sublimity in mystery, as there is another degree in certitude. We lay to in a shady nook, just off Katahdin’s reflection in the river, while Iglesias sketched him. ”

“ Berries then, and little else, unless we had a chance at a trout or a partridge. It is not cheery, but dreary, to be left in pathlessness, blanketless, guideless, and with breadths of lake and mountain and Nature, shaggy and bearish, between man and man. ”

“ Sometimes we must fight our way. Below the placid reaches were the inevitable “rips” and rapids: some we could shoot without hitting anything; some would hit us heavily, did we try to shoot. Whenever the rocks in the current were only as thick as the plums in a boarding-school pudding, we could venture to run the gantlet; whenever they multiplied to a school-boy’s ideal, we were arrested. Just at the brink of peril we would sweep in by an eddy into a shady pool by the shore. At such spots we found a path across the carry. Cancut at once proceeded to bonnet himself with the trickling birch. ”

“ So we might fancy ourselves; for civilization had been here only to cut pines, not to plant houses. Yet these fair curves, and liberal reaches, and bright rapids of the birchen-bowered river were only solitary, not lonely. ”