Thoreau writes in his journal:
Sitting on the Cliffs, I see plainly for the first time that the island in Fair Haven is the triangular point of a hill cut off, and forty or fifty rods west, on the mainland, I see the still almost raw and shelving edge of the bank, the raw sand-scar as if sodded over the past summer,—as a man cuts off a piece of pudding on his plate,—as if the intermediate portion of the hill had sunk and left a cranberry meadow . . .
