of them. How much fairer than the pool before the
farmers door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come.
Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their
plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what
youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She
flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of
heaven! ye disgrace earth.

Baker Farm

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like
fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light,
so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their
oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, where
the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher,
are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the
ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen
hangs in festoons from the white spruce trees, and toadstools, round
tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi
adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where
the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of
imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds,
and the wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their
beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden
fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of calling on some scholar,
I paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this
neighborhood, standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the
depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hilltop; such as the black birch, of
which we have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin,
the yellow birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first;
the beech, which has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted,
perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, I
know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposed
by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with
beechnuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grain
sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the Celtis
occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown; some
taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than
usual, standing like a pagoda in th