r and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and
change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind,
from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that
fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air
is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow
puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods,
too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what
period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual
youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reigns,
a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should
tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and
faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life--no disgrace,
no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing
on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into
infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes, I become a transparent
eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being
circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the
nearest friend sounds there foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to
be acquaintances--master or servant, is then a trifle and a
disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In
the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets
or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant
line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own
nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the
suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am
not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The
waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by
surprise, and yet is not unknown. . . .

I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house,
from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share.
The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson
light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I
seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment
reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How
do