27 To Qt W I 1/6 & lb Sugar 10d 0.39 June 5th 1805 Settled this acct by Recev.g Cash in Full $8.82½ How many young finny contemporaries of various character and destiny, form and habits, we have even in this water! And it will not be forgotten by some memory that we _were_ contemporaries. It is of _some_ import. We shall be some time friends, I trust, and know each other better. Distrust is too prevalent now. We are so much alike! have so many faculties in common! I have not yet met with the philosopher who could, in a quite conclusive, undoubtful way, show me _the_, and, if not _the_, then how _any_, difference between man and a fish. We are so much alike! How much could a really tolerant, patient, humane, and truly great and natural man make of them, if he should try? For they are to be understood, surely, as all things else, by no other method than that of sympathy. It is easy to say what they are not to us, _i. e._, what we are not to them; but what we might and ought to be is another affair. * * * * * In the tributaries the brook minnow and the trout. Even in the rills emptying into the river, over which you stride at a step, you may see small trout not so large as your finger glide past or hide under the bank. * * * * * The character of this [the horned pout], as indeed of all fishes, depends directly upon that of the water it inhabits, those taken in clear and sandy water being of brighter hue and cleaner and of firmer and sweeter flesh. It makes a peculiar squeaking noise when drawn out, which has given it the name of the minister or preacher. * * * * * The bream is the familiar and homely sparrow, which makes her nest everywhere, and is early and late. The pickerel is the hawk, a fish of prey, hovering over the finny broods. The pout is the owl, which steals so noiselessly about at evening with its clumsy body. The shiner is the summer yellowbird, or goldfinch, of the river. The sucker is the sluggish bittern, or stake-driver. The minnow is the hummingbird. The trout is the partridge woodpecker. The perch is the robin.[504] * * * * * We read Marlowe as so much poetical pabulum. It is food for poets, water from the Castalian Spring, some of the atmosphere of Parnassus, raw and crude indeed, and at times breezy, but pure and bracing. Few have so rich a phrase! He had drunk deep of the Pierian Spring, though not deep enough, and had that fine madness, as Drayton says, "Which justly should possess a poet's brain."