Which way the river runs.

April 16. 

I think our overflowing river far handsomer and more abounding in soft and beautiful contrasts than a merely broad river would be. A succession of bays it is, a chain of lakes, an endlessly scalloped shore, rounding wood and field. Cultivated field and wood and pasture and house are brought into ever new and unexpected positions and relations to the water. There is just stream enough for a flow of thought; that is all. 


Many a foreigner who has come to this town has worked for years on its banks without discovering which way the river runs.


H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 16, 1852

A succession of bays it is, a chain of lakes. See April 7, 1853 (" he river is but a long chain of flooded meadows.") ); February 3, 1855 (“ It is all the way of one character, — a meadow river, or dead stream,—Musketicook,"); July 30, 1859 (“It is a mere string of lakes which have not made up their minds to be rivers.”)

Many a foreigner who has come to this town without discovering which way the river runs. See April 11, 1856 ("The current of the Assabet is so much swifter, and its channel so much steeper than that of the main stream, that, while a stranger frequently cannot tell which way the latter flows by his eye, you can perceive the declination of the channel of the former within a very short distance, even between one side of a tree and another. You perceive the waters heaped on the upper side of rocks and trees, and even twigs that trail in the stream.”)

April 16, 2012