134 
WALDEH. 
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 Lin¬ 
coln, 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 suf¬ 
ficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a 
certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the hori¬ 
zon 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 modu¬ 
lated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to 
some extent, an original sound, and therein is the ma¬ 
gic 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 certain 
minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who 
might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not 
unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into 
the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not mean 
to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those 
