第51章

It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of his volitional and muscular existence; and yet he may tax both of them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that he shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as well as in his easy-chair.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, 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 lie still over the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat, - to rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek, - 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, the stream whispering against the half-sunken pillars, - why should I tell of these things, that I should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots we must be not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with skaters!

I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage.Of the females that are the mates of these males I do not here speak.I preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this matter a good while ago.Of course, if you heard it, you know my belief is that the total climatic influences here are getting up a number of new patterns of humanity, some of which are not an improvement on the old model.Clipper-built, sharp in the bows, long in the spars, slender to look at, and fast to go, the ship, which is the great organ of our national life of relation, is but a reproduction of the typical form which the elements impress upon its builder.All this we cannot help; but we can make the best of these influences, such as they are.We have a few good boatmen, -no good horsemen that I hear of, - I cannot speak for cricketing, -but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the Common in five minutes.Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of.Boxing is rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow.Anything is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all tend.

I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibition only last evening.

It did my heart good to see that there were a few young and youngish youths left who could take care of their own heads in case of emergency.It is a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving himself into the primitive constituents of his humanity.Here is a delicate young man now, with an intellectual countenance, a slight figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a most unassuming deportment, a mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or Jonathan from between the ploughtails would of course expect to handle with perfect ease.