o be honest and regular in the
administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to anything
that came within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man
very much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, that an
error in the balance of an account or an ink-blot on the fair page of
a book of record. Here, in a word,--and it is a rare instance in my
life,--I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the situation
which he held.

Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I
took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown
into a position so little akin to my past habits, and set myself
seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my
fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren
of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile
influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days
on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about
pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after
growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of
Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at
Longfellow's hearthstone;--it was time, at length, that I should
exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food
for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector
was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I
look upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally
well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough
organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle
at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur
at the change.

Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in
my regard. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were apart
from me. Nature,--except it were human nature,--the nature that is
developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all
the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been spiritualized, passed
away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty if it had not departed, was
suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been something
sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it
lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It
might be true, indeed, that