It is worth the while to see the country’s people, how they pour into the town, the sober farmer folk, now all agog, their very shirt and coat-collars pointing forward,—­collars so broad as if they had put their shirts on wrong end upward, for the fashions always tend to superfluity,—­and with an unusual springiness in their gait, jabbering earnestly to one another.  The more supple vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever-shabby coat, though finer than the farmer’s best, yet never dressed; come to see the sport, and have a hand in what is going,—­to know “what’s the row,” if there is any; to be where some men are drunk, some horses race, some cockerels fight; anxious to be shaking props under a table, and above all to see the “striped pig.”  He especially is the creature of the occasion.  He empties both his pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a day.  He dearly loves the social slush.  There is no reserve of soberness in him.

I love to see the herd of men feeding heartily on coarse and succulent pleasures, as cattle on the husks and stalks of vegetables.  Though there are many crooked and crabbled specimens of humanity among them, run all to thorn and rind, and crowded out of shape by adverse circumstances, like the third chestnut in the burr, so that you wonder to see some heads wear a whole hat, yet fear not that the race will fail or waver in them; like the crabs which grow in hedges, they furnish the stocks of sweet and thrifty fruits still.  Thus is nature recruited from age to age, while the fair and palatable varieties die out, and have their period.  This is that mankind.  How cheap must be the material of which so many men are made.

The wind blew steadily down the stream, so that we kept our sails set, and lost not a moment of the forenoon by delays, but from early morning until noon were continually dropping downward.  With our hands on the steering-paddle, which was thrust deep into the river, or bending to the oar, which indeed we rarely relinquished, we felt each palpitation in the veins of our steed, and each impulse of the wings which drew us above.  The current of our thoughts made as sudden bends as the river, which was continually opening new prospects to the east or south, but we are aware that rivers flow most rapidly and shallowest at these points.  The steadfast shores never once turned aside for us, but still trended as they were made; why then should we always turn aside for them?

A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius.  It requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate.  These winged thoughts are like birds, and will not be handled; even hens will not let you touch them like quadrupeds.  Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts.

To the rarest genius it is the most expensive to succumb and conform to the ways of the world.  Genius is the worst of lumber, if the poet would float upon the breeze of popularity.  The bird of paradise is obliged constantly to fly against the wind, lest its gay trappings, pressing close to its body, impede its free movements.