wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new
morrow. Again I followed the stream; now climbing a steep rocky
bank that hemmed it in; now wading through long grasses and wild
flowers in its path; now through meadows; and anon through woods
that crowded down to the very lip of the water.

At length, in a nook of the river, gloomy with the weight of
overhanging foliage, and still and deep as a soul in which the
torrent eddies of pain have hollowed a great gulf, and then,
subsiding in violence, have left it full of a motionless,
fathomless sorrow--I saw a little boat lying. So still was the
water here, that the boat needed no fastening. It lay as if some
one had just stepped ashore, and would in a moment return. But
as there were no signs of presence, and no track through the
thick bushes; and, moreover, as I was in Fairy Land where one
does very much as he pleases, I forced my way to the brink,
stepped into the boat, pushed it, with the help of the
tree-branches, out into the stream, lay down in the bottom, and
let my boat and me float whither the stream would carry us. I
seemed to lose myself in the great flow of sky above me unbroken
in its infinitude, except when now and then, coming nearer the
shore at a bend in the river, a tree would sweep its mighty head
silently above mine, and glide away back into the past, never
more to fling its shadow over me. I fell asleep in this cradle,
in which mother Nature was rocking her weary child; and while I
slept, the sun slept not, but went round his arched way. When I
awoke, he slept in the waters, and I went on my silent path
beneath a round silvery moon. And a pale moon looked up from the
floor of the great blue cave that lay in the abysmal silence
beneath.