| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
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| NUMBER: | 58256 |
| QUOTATION: | From the foundation of a wooden observatory ... we could see Monadnock, in simple grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thousand feet higher, still the “far blue mountain,” though with an altered profile. The first day the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like looking into the sky again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aerial Polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees and hear the lowing of kine. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. “A Walk to Wachusett” (1843), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 5, p. 143, Houghton Mifflin (1906). |
| BIOGRAPHY: | Columbia Encyclopedia. |
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| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
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