The sides of these cliffs, though a
quarter of a mile distant, were almost heard to rustle while we
looked at them, it was such a leafy wilderness; a place for fauns
and satyrs, and where bats hung all day to the rocks, and at
evening flitted over the water, and fire-flies husbanded their
light under the grass and leaves against the night. When we had
pitched our tent on the hillside, a few rods from the shore, we
sat looking through its triangular door in the twilight at our
lonely mast on the shore, just seen above the alders, and hardly
yet come to a stand-still from the swaying of the stream; the
first encroachment of commerce on this land. There was our port,
our Ostia. That straight geometrical line against the water and
the sky stood for the last refinements of civilized life, and
what of sublimity there is in history was there symbolized.
For the most part, there was no recognition of human life in the
night, no human breathing was heard, only the breathing of the
wind. As we sat up, kept awake by the novelty of our situation,
we heard at intervals foxes stepping about over the dead leaves,
and brushing the dewy grass close to our tent, and once a
musquash fumbling among the potatoes and melons in our boat, but
when we hastened to the shore we could detect only a ripple in
the water ruffling the disk of a star.
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