drinking in everything,
like a sponge that saturates itself with all floating vapors and odors,
though it seems inert and unsuspicious until you press it and it tells
the tale.

Most men do their work out of doors and their dreaming at home; and
those whose work is done at home need something like a wherry in which
to dream out of doors. On a squally day, with the wind northwest, it is
a dream of action, and to round yonder point against an ebbing tide
makes you feel as if you were Grant before Richmond; when you put
about, you gallop like Sheridan, and the winds and waves become a
cavalry escort. On other days all elements are hushed into a dream of
peace, and you look out upon those once stormy distances as Landseer's
sheep look into the mouth of the empty cannon on a dismantled fort.
These are the days for revery, and your thoughts fly forth, gliding
without friction over this smooth expanse; or, rather, they are like
yonder pair of white butterflies that will flutter for an hour just
above the glassy surface, traversing miles of distance before they
alight again.

By a happy trait of our midsummer, these various phases of wind and
water may often be included in a single day. On three mornings out of
four the wind blows northwest down our bay, then dies to a calm before
noon. After an hour or two of perfect stillness, you see the line of
blue ripple coming up from the ocean till it conquers all the paler
water, and the southwest breeze sets in. This middle zone of calm is
like the noonday of the Romans, when they feared to speak, lest the
great god Pan should be awakened. While it lasts, a thin, aerial veil
drops over the distant hills of Conanicut, then draws nearer and nearer
till it seems to touch your boat, the very nearest section of space
being filled with a faint disembodied blueness, like that which fills
on winter days, in colder regions, the hollows of the snow. Sky and sea
show but gradations of the same color, and afford but modifications of
the same element. In this quietness, yonder schooner seems not so much
to lie at anchor in the water as to anchor the water, so that both
cease to move; and though faint ripples may come and go elsewhere on
the surface, the vessel rests in this liquid island of absolute calm.
For there certainly is elsewhere a sort of motionless movement, as
Keats speaks of "a little noiseless noise among the leaves," or as the
summer clouds form and disappear without apparent wind