Such poetry Iglesias had sung to me, until my life seemed incomplete while I did not know the sentiment by touch; description, even from the most impassioned witness, addressed to the most imaginative hearer, is feeble. We both wanted to be in a birch: Iglesias, because he knew the fresh, inspiring vivacity of such a voyage; I, because I divined it. We both needed to be somewhere near the heart of New England’s wildest wilderness. We needed to see Katahdin, — the distinctest mountain to be found on this side of the continent. Katahdin was known to Iglesias. He had scuffled up its eastern land-slides with a squad of lumbermen. He had birched it down to Lake Chesuncook in bygone summers, to see Katahdin distant. Now, in a birch we would slide down the Penobscot, along its line of lakes, camp at Katahdin, climb it, and speed down the river to tidewater.
That was the great object of all our voyage, with its educating preludes, — Katahdin and a breathless dash down the Penobscot. And while we flashed along the gleam of the river, Iglesias fancied he might see the visible, and hear the musical, and be stirred by the beautiful. These, truly, are not far from the daily life of any seer, listener, and perceiver; but there, perhaps, up in the strong wilderness, we might be recreated to a more sensitive vitality. The Antæan treatment is needful for terrestrials, unless they would dwindle. The diviner the power in any artist-soul, the more distinctly is
