aims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home I am
rich--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of
Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and keeps my philosophy from
Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies,
whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her
son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from
morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and
run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with
very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most
fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an
infinitely repellent particle.

'In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage my garden; and a week
ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to
protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the place
is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise,
who visit us in the course of the year.'

As time went on he was able to buy himself 'a new plaything'--a piece of
woodland, of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half
a mile wide or more, called Walden Pond. 'In these May days,' he told
Carlyle, then passionately struggling with his _Cromwell_, with the
slums of Chelsea at his back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches,
walnut, and pine, are in their spring glory, I go thither every
afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket,
all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures' (1845).

He loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer
or by readings of Plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the Morning
Muse.' Yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He confesses
that he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every capricious,
languid, and languescent study needs.' Carlyle's potent concentration
stirs his envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he found very
fascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar should shun
it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these
pernicious enchantments.'

In the doings of his neighbourhood he bore his part; he took a manly
interest in civil affairs, and was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in
matters of practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the beardless
and the gray-headed, flocked to his door, far beyond the dozen perso