Excursions: And Poems indir kitap bedava

ABOUT six o'clock we started for Quebec, one hundred and eighty miles distant by the river;gliding past Longueuil and Boucherville on the right, and Pointe aux Trembles, "so called fromhaving been originally covered with aspens," and Bout de l'Isle, or the end of the island, on the left. Irepeat these names not merely for want of more substantial facts to record, but because theysounded singularly poetic to my ears. There certainly was no lie in them. They suggested that somesimple, and, perchance, heroic human life might have transpired there. There is all the poetry in theworld in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the commonsense, but a string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of athing may easily be more than the thing itself to me. Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognitionby man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it. All the world reiterating this slendertruth, that aspens once grew there; and the swift inference is that men were there to see them. Andso it would be with the names of our native and neighboring villages, if we had not profaned them.The daylight now failed us, and we went below; but I endeavored to console myself for beingobliged to make this voyage by night, by thinking that I did not lose a great deal, the shores beinglow and rather unattractive, and that the river itself was much the more interesting object. I heardsomething in the night about the boat being at William Henry, Three Rivers, and in the RichelieuRapids, but I was still where I had been when I lost sight of Pointe aux Trembles. To hear a manwho has been waked up at midnight in the cabin of a steamboat inquiring, "Waiter, where are wenow?" is as if, at any moment of the earth's revolution round the sun, or of the system round itscentre, one were to raise himself up and inquire of one of the deck hands, "Where are we now?"