Writing by Henry David Thoreau - Mount Greylock, MA
N 42° 38.213 W 073° 09.982
18T E 650335 N 4722122
At the summit of Mount Greylock, the highest point in the State of Massachusetts, is a large rock inscribed with the writing of Henry David Thoreau, which references his visit to Mount Greylock.
Waymark Code: WMA2JK
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Date Posted: 11/06/2010
Views: 17
The inscription on the rock reads as follows:
"As the light increased
I discovered around me an ocean of mist,
which by chance reached up to exactly the base of the tower,
and shut out every vestige of the earth,
while I was left floating on this fragment
of the wreck of the world,
on my carved plank in cloudland;
a situation which required,
no aid from the imagination
to render it impressive.
Henry David Thoreau
Reference to a visit to Mount Greylock from
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River"
Additional information about Thoreau's visit to Mount Greylock:
"By the mid-19th century improved transportation into the region attracted many visitors to Greylock. Among them were writers and artists inspired by the mountain scene: Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau summited and spent a night in July 1844. His account of this event in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers described his approach up what is today the Bellows Pipe Trail. Scholars contend that this Greylock experience transformed him, affirming his ability to do these excursions on his own, following his brother John's death; and served as a prelude to his experiment of rugged individualism at Walden Pond the following year in 1845."
-- Source