Sometimes the waves were high
and rough, and adventures were to be had; then every muscle was given
a chance, and he would return to breakfast tired but refreshed. There
was little to be learned about a skiff and its management which he did
not acquire. He knew how many pounds a boat ought to weigh, and every
detail respecting it. In the "Autocrat" he says,--"My present fleet on
the Charles River consists of three rowboats: 1. A small flat-bottomed
skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys. 2. A
fancy 'dory' for two pairs of sculls, in which I sometimes go out with
my young folks. 3. My own particular water-sulky, a 'skeleton' or
'shell' race-boat, twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which
boat I pull with ten-foot sculls, alone, of course, as it holds but
one, and tips him out if he does not mind what he is about." The
description is all delightful, and a little later on there is a
reference to such a morning as I have already attempted to recall. "I
dare not publicly name the rare joys," he says, "the infinite
delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet June morning when the river
and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along
ripping it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing
after me, like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the
seam still shining for many a long rood behind me.... To take shelter
from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look
down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths,
studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles,
while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave
is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the
ocean,--lying there, moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the
columns of Tadmor in the desert could not seem more remote from life,
--the cool breeze on one's forehead,--.
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