And mortals knew no shores but their own.
.......
There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm
Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed."

On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near
the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow
roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound,
somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers,
when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a
nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two
over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which gleamed like
a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell.
This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are
associated with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might be
called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I
had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar
like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields
of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated
its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then
recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on
terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe--sporting
there alone--and to need none but the morning and the ether with which
it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it.
Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in
the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but
by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;--or was its native
nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and
the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from
earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.

Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreous
fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have penetrated to
those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from
hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river
valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would
have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as
some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things
must live in such a light. O Death, wh