expanse, reached through three miles of no-man’s route, framed in green hills forest-clad up to their summits.  The camp was a shelter of spruce bark, open wide in front and closed at the ends, drawn on three faces of an octohedron facing the fireplace.  The beds were made of layers of spruce and other fir branches spread on the ground and covered with the fragrant twigs of the arbor vitae.  Two huge maples overhung the camp, and at a distance of twenty feet from our lodge we entered the trackless, primeval forest.  The hills around furnished us with venison, and the lake with trout, and there we passed the weeks of the summer heats.  We were ten, with eight guides, and while we were camping there we received the news that the first Atlantic cable was laid, and the first message sent under the sea from one hemisphere to the other,—­an event which Emerson did not forget to record in noble lines.

CHAPTER XIII

THE ADIRONDACK CLUB—­EMERSON AND AGASSIZ

In the main, our occupations were those of a vacation, to kill time and escape from the daily groove.  Some took their guides and made exploration, by land or water; after breakfast there was firing at a mark, a few rounds each, for those who were riflemen; then, if venison was needed, we put the dog out on the hills; one boat went to overhaul the set lines baited the evening before for the lake trout.  When the hunt was over we generally went out to paddle on the lake, Agassiz and Wyman to dredge or botanize or dissect the animals caught or killed; those of us who had interest in natural history watching the naturalists, the others searching the nooks and corners of the pretty sheet of water with its inlet brooks and its bays and recesses, or bathing from the rocks.  Lunch was at midday, and then long talks, discussions de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis; and it was surprising to find how many subjects we found germane to our situation.

Emerson has told the daily life in verse in “The Adirondacs,” adding his own impressions of the place and time.  It is not generally considered among the most interesting of his poems, being a narrative with reflections, and such a subject could hardly rise above the interest of the subject of the narration, which was only a vacation study; but there are in it some passages which show the character of Emerson’s intellect better than anything else he has written.  His insight into nature, like that of the primitive mind as we find it in the Greek poetry, the instinctive investment of the great mother with the presence and attribute of personality, the re-creation from his own resources of Pan and the nature-powers, the groping about in that darkness of the primeval forest for the spiritual causes of the things he felt,—­all this is to me evident in the poem; and it is the sufficient demonstration of the antique mould of his intellect, serene, open-eyed to natural phenomena, seeing beyond