t she had to do, she
overflows with a blessed superfluity of love. It is good to be alive
now. Thank God for breath,--yes, for mere breath! when it is made up of
such a heavenly breeze as this. It comes to the cheek with a real kiss;
it would linger fondly around us, if it might; but, since it must be
gone, it caresses us with its whole kindly heart, and passes onward, to
caress likewise the next thing that it meets. There is a pervading
blessing diffused over all the world. I look out of the window and
think, "O perfect day! O beautiful world! O good God!" And such a day is
the promise of a blissful eternity. Our Creator would never have made
such weather, and given us the deep heart to enjoy it, above and beyond
all thought, if He had not meant us to be immortal. It opens the gates
of heaven, and gives us glimpses far inward.

Bless me! this flight has carried me a great way; so now let me come
back to our old abbey. Our orchard is fast ripening; and the apples and
great thumping pears strew the grass in such abundance that it becomes
almost a trouble--though a pleasant one--to gather them. This happy
breeze, too, shakes them down, as if it flung fruit to us out of the
sky; and often, when the air is perfectly still, I hear the quiet fall
of a great apple. Well, we are rich in blessings, though poor in
money....

* * * * *

_Friday, October 6._--Yesterday afternoon I took a solitary walk to
Walden Pond. It was a cool, windy day, with heavy clouds rolling and
tumbling about the sky, but still a prevalence of genial autumn
sunshine. The fields are still green, and the great masses of the woods
have not yet assumed their many-colored garments; but here and there are
solitary oaks of deep, substantial red, or maples of a more brilliant
hue, or chestnuts either yellow or of a tenderer green than in summer.
Some trees seem to return to their hue of May or early June before they
put on the brighter autumnal tints. In some places, along the borders of
low and moist land, a whole range of trees were clothed in the perfect
gorgeousness of autumn, of all shades of brilliant color, looking like
the palette on which Nature was arranging the tints wherewith to paint a
picture. These hues appeared to be thrown together without design; and
yet there was perfect harmony among them, and a softness and a delicacy
made up of a thousand different brightnesses. There is not, I think, so
much contrast among