The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail’d, the farthest polar sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes, White drift spooning ahead where the ship in the tempest dashes, On solid land what is done in cities as the bells strike midnight together, In primitive woods the sounds there also sounding, the howl of the wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk, In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead lake, in summer visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming, In lower latitudes in warmer air in the Carolinas the large black buzzard floating slowly high beyond the tree tops, Below, the red cedar festoon’d with tylandria, the pines and cypresses growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat, Rude boats descending the big Pedee, climbing plants, parasites with color’d flowers and berries enveloping huge trees, The waving drapery on the live-oak trailing long and low, noiselessly waved by the wind,

The camp of Georgia wagoners just after dark, the supper-fires and the cooking and eating by whites and negroes, Thirty or forty great wagons, the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from troughs, The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees, the flames with the black smoke from the pitch-pine curling and rising; Southern fishermen fishing, the sounds and inlets of North Carolina’s coast, the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery, the large sweep-seines, the windlasses on shore work’d by horses, the clearing, curing, and packing-houses; Deep in the forest in piney woods turpentine dropping from the incisions in the trees, there are the turpentine works, There are the negroes at work in good health, the ground in all directions is cover’d with pine straw; In Tennessee and Kentucky slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking, In Virginia, the planter’s son returning after a long absence, joyfully welcom’d and kiss’d by the aged mulatto nurse,