The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it.  The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us.  Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her.  We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.

Such was the heaviness of the dews along this river that we were generally obliged to leave our tent spread over the bows of the boat till the sun had dried it, to avoid mildew.  We passed the mouth of Penichook Brook, a wild salmon-stream, in the fog, without seeing it.  At length the sun’s rays struggled through the mist and showed us the pines on shore dripping with dew, and springs trickling from the moist banks,—­

      “And now the taller sons, whom Titan warms,
       Of unshorn mountains blown with easy winds,
       Dandle the morning’s childhood in their arms,
       And, if they chanced to slip the prouder pines,
       The under corylets did catch their shines,
       To gild their leaves.”

We rowed for some hours between glistening banks before the sun had dried the grass and leaves, or the day had established its character.  Its serenity at last seemed the more profound and secure for the denseness of the morning’s fog.  The river became swifter, and the scenery more pleasing than before.  The banks were steep and clayey for the most part, and trickling with water, and where a spring oozed out a few feet above the river the boatmen had cut a trough out of a slab with their axes, and placed it so as to receive the water and fill their jugs conveniently.  Sometimes this purer and cooler water, bursting out from under a pine or a rock, was collected into a basin close to the edge of and level with the river, a fountain-head of the Merrimack.  So near along life’s stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin; and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources.  Some youthful spring, perchance, still empties with tinkling music into the oldest river, even when it is falling into the sea, and we imagine that its music is distinguished by the river-gods from the general lapse of the stream, and falls sweeter on their ears in proportion as it is nearer to the ocean.  As the evaporations of the river feed thus these unsuspected springs which filter through its banks, so, perchance, our aspirations fall back again in springs on the margin of life’s stream to refresh and purify it.  The yellow and tepid river may float his scow, and cheer his eye with its reflections and its ripples, but the boatman quenches his thirst at this small rill alone.  It is this purer and cooler element that chiefly sustains his life.  The race will long survive that is thus discreet.