I never could have conceived that there was so beautiful a river-scene in Concord as this of the North Branch.  The stream flows through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood, which, as if but half satisfied with its presence, calm, gentle and unobtrusive as it is, seems to crowd upon it, and barely to allow it passage, for the trees are rooted on the very verge of the water, and dip their pendent branches into it.  On one side there is a high bank forming the side of a hill, the Indian name of which I have forgotten, though Mr. Thoreau told it to me; and here in some instances the trees stand leaning over the river, stretching out their arms as if about to plunge in headlong.  On the other side, the bank is almost on a level with the water, and there the quiet congregation of trees stood with feet in the flood, and fringed with foliage down to its very surface.  Vines here and there twine themselves about bushes or aspens or alder-trees, and hang their clusters, though scanty and infrequent this season, so that I can reach them from my boat, I scarcely remember a scene of more complete and lovely seclusion than the passage of the river through this wood.  Even an Indian canoe in olden times, could not have floated onward in deeper solitude than my boat.  I have never elsewhere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful reflection is than what we call reality.  The sky and the clustering foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way through the shade, giving lightsome hues in contrast with the quiet depth of the prevailing tints, all these seemed unsurpassably beautiful when beheld in upper air.  But on gazing downward, there they were, the same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty which satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene.  I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense.  At any rate the disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul.

* * * * *

From the “French and Italian Note Books.”

=_302._= A DUNGEON OF ANCIENT ROME.

We were now in the deepest and ugliest part of the old Mamertine Prison, one of the few remains of the kingly period of Rome, and which served the Romans as a state prison for hundreds of years before the Christian era.  A multitude of criminals or innocent persons, no doubt, have languished here in misery, and perished in darkness.  Here Jugurtha starved; here Catiline’s adherents were strangled; and methinks, there can not be in the world another such an evil den, so haunted with black memories and indistinct surmises of guilt and suffering.  In old Rome, I suppose, the citizens never spoke of this dungeon above their breath.  It looks just as bad as it is; round, only seven paces across, yet so obscure that our tapers could not illuminate it from side to side,—­the stones of which it is constructed