no more distances, all the rest is sea and distant capes,—­patting the dog, or dandling the kitten in arms that were stretched by the cable and the oar, pulling against Boreas or the trade-winds.  He looks up at the stranger, half pleased, half astonished, with a mariner’s eye, as if he were a dolphin within cast.  If men will believe it, sua si bona norint, there are no more quiet Tempes, nor more poetic and Arcadian lives, than may be lived in these New England dwellings.  We thought that the employment of their inhabitants by day would be to tend the flowers and herds, and at night, like the shepherds of old, to cluster and give names to the stars from the river banks.

We passed a large and densely wooded island this forenoon, between Short’s and Griffith’s Falls, the fairest which we had met with, with a handsome grove of elms at its head.  If it had been evening we should have been glad to camp there.  Not long after, one or two more were passed.  The boatmen told us that the current had recently made important changes here.  An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe.  I have a fancy for building my hut on one.  Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me.  There is commonly such a one at the junction of two rivers, whose currents bring down and deposit their respective sands in the eddy at their confluence, as it were the womb of a continent.  By what a delicate and far-stretched contribution every island is made!  What an enterprise of Nature thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry!  Pindar gives the following account of the origin of Thera, whence, in after times, Libyan Cyrene was settled by Battus.  Triton, in the form of Eurypylus, presents a clod to Euphemus, one of the Argonauts, as they are about to return home.

                        “He knew of our haste,
     And immediately seizing a clod
     With his right hand, strove to give it
     As a chance stranger’s gift. 
     Nor did the hero disregard him, but leaping on the shore,
     Stretching hand to hand,
     Received the mystic clod. 
     But I hear it sinking from the deck,
     Go with the sea brine
     At evening, accompanying the watery sea. 
     Often indeed I urged the careless
     Menials to guard it, but their minds forgot. 
     And now in this island the imperishable seed of spacious Libya
     Is spilled before its hour.”

It is a beautiful fable, also related by Pindar, how Helius, or the Sun, looked down into the sea one day,—­when perchance his rays were first reflected from some increasing glittering sandbar,—­and saw the fair and fruitful island of Rhodes

“springing up from the bottom,
Capable of feeding many men, and suitable for flocks;