Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering.
On interior rivers, by night, in the glare of pine knots, steamboats
wooding up:
Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys of the
Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke and Delaware;
In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the
hills--or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink;
In a lonesome inlet, a sheldrake, lost from the flock, sitting on the
water, rocking silently;
In farmers' barns, oxen in the stable, their harvest labour done--they rest
standing--they are too tired;
Afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, while her cubs play
around;
The hawk sailing where men have not yet sailed--the farthest polar sea,
ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes;
White drift spooning ahead, where the ship in the tempest dashes.
On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike midnight
together;
In primitive woods, the sounds there also sounding--the howl of the wolf,
the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk;
In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead Lake, in summer visible
through the clear waters, the great trout swimming;
In lower latitudes, in warmer air, in the Carolinas, the large black
buzzard floating slowly, high beyond the tree-tops,
Below, the red cedar, festooned with tylandria--the pines and cypresses,
growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat;
Rude boats descending the big Pedee--climbing plants, parasites, with
coloured flowers and berries, enveloping huge trees,
The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly
waved by the wind;
The camp of Georgia waggoners, just after dark--the supper-fires, and the
cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
Thirty or forty great waggons--the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from
troughs,
The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees--the
flames--also the black smoke from the pitch-pine, curling and
rising;
Southern fishermen fishing--the sounds and inlets of North Carolina's
coast--the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery--the large sweep-
seines--the windlasses on shore worked by horses--the clearing,
curing, and packing houses;
Deep in the forest, in piney woods, turpentine dropping from the incisions
in the trees--There are the turpentine works,
There are the negroes at work, in good health--the ground in all directions
is covered with pine straw.
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