"and you shall hear the sweetest songs." The doors of the boathouse
swing softly open, and the slender wherry, like a water-snake, steals
silently in the wake of the dispersing clouds.

The woods are hazy, as if the warm sunbeams had melted in among the
interstices of the foliage and spread a soft film throughout the whole.
The sky seems to reflect the water, and the water the sky; both are
roseate with color, both are darkened with clouds, and between them
both, as the boat recedes, the floating-bridge hangs suspended, with its
motionless fishermen and its moving team. The wooded islands are poised
upon the lake, each belted with a paler tint of softer wave. The air
seems fine and palpitating; the drop of an oar in a distant row-lock,
the sound of a hammer on a dismantled boat, pass into some region of
mist and shadows, and form a metronome for delicious dreams.

Every summer I launch my boat to seek some realm of enchantment beyond
all the sordidness and sorrow of earth, and never yet did I fail to
ripple with my prow at least the outskirts of those magic waters. What
spell has fame or wealth to enrich this midday blessedness with a joy
the more? Yonder barefoot boy, as he drifts silently in his punt beneath
the drooping branches of yonder vine-clad bank, has a bliss which no
Astor can buy with money, no Seward conquer with votes,--which yet is
no monopoly of his, and to which time and experience only add a more
subtile and conscious charm. The rich years were given us to increase,
not to impair, these cheap felicities. Sad or sinful is the life of
that man who finds not the heavens bluer and the waves more musical in
maturity than in childhood. Time is a severe alembic of youthful joys,
no doubt; we exhaust book after book and leave Shakespeare unopened; we
grow fastidious in men and women; all the rhetoric, all the logic, we
fancy we have heard before; we have seen the pictures, we have listened