I hear
them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western
slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their
vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now.
They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild
and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life
whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track
and let the cars go by;--

What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing,

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes
put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.

Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and
the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone
than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations
are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the
distant highway.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford,
or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as
it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At
a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain
vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of
a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance
produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre,
just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth
interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came
to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had
conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the
sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale
to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein
is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was
worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same
trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the
woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for
the voices of