The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest travelled.Īt a cool and early hour on a pleasant morning in July, my companion and I passed rapidly through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet, in the latter town. In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go and come. But we will not leap at once to our journey's end, though near, but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader over the plain, and along the resounding sea, though it be but to the tent of Achilles. Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other Īt length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we resolved to scale the blue wall which bound the western horizon, though not without misgivings, that thereafter no visible fairy land would exist for us. Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven Īnd yonder still, in spite of history's page, Which through the seas of space is hurled. Still holding on, upon your high emprise,Īnd breadth of beam, and length of running gear.

With frontier strength ye stand your ground, Thus we spoke our mind to them, standing on the Concord cliffs. Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travellers whether with Homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and his compeers, roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe.

A Walk to Wachusett by Henry David Thoreau A Walk to Wachusett by Henry David Thoreau (1843)

Walking by henry david thoreau