n Walden pond itself. What
company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue
devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters.
The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear
to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone--but the devil, he is
far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I
am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or
a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more
lonely than the Mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or
the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first
spider in a new house.

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow
falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and
original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden pond, and
stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old
time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful
evening, with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without
apples or cider; a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much,
who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley;[34] and
tho he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An
elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most
persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes,
gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of
unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology,
and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact
every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A
ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons,
and is likely to outlive all her children yet.

[Footnote 34: The English regicides who came to America, and after
1660 lived in concealment in New England, a part of the time in a cave
near New Haven. William Goffe died in Hadley, Mass., in 1679. Edward
Whalley, who had been one of Cromwell's major generals, died also in
Hadley a year before Goffe.]

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Born in 1819, died in 1891; graduated from Harvard in 1838;
in 1855 became professor at Harvard; editor of _The Atlantic
Monthly_ in 1857-62, _The North American Review_ in 1863-72;
minister to Spain in 1877-80, and Great Britain in 1880-85;
published "A Year's Life" in 1841, "The Visi