The Source

by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1827:

The River

And I behold once more

My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,

The same blue wonder that my infant eye

Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,--

Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed

The fragrant flag-roots in my father's fields,

And where thereafter in the world he went.

Look, here he is, unaltered, save that now

He hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales

With his redundant waves. 

Here is the rock where, yet a simple child,

I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,

Much triumphing,--and these the fields

Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly,

A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.

And hark! where overhead the ancient crows

Hold their sour conversation in the sky:--

These are the same, but I am not the same,

But wiser than I was, and wise enough

Not to regret the changes, tho' they cost

Me many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;

These trees and stones are audible to me,

These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,

I understand their faery syllables,

And all their sad significance. The wind,

That rustles down the well-known forest road--

It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.

The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,

All of them utter sounds of 'monishment

And grave parental love.

They are not of our race, they seem to say,

And yet have knowledge of our moral race,

And somewhat of majestic sympathy,

Something of pity for the puny clay,

That holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.

I feel as I were welcome to these trees

After long months of weary wandering,

Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;

They know me as their son, for side by side,

They were coeval with my ancestors,

Adorned with them my country's primitive times,

And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Once there was a sawmill here at Campbell's Falls, high up in Connecticut's hills and just west of the Naugatuck Valley, but industry played out early, and tranquility has had the upper hand ever since.  Water that passes here takes the long route to Ansonia via the Housatonic.  Rain that falls just a bit west follows an express route via the Naugatuck to the same destination.