and elegance. I
think that he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, where
philosophers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be
printed, "Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that
have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He is
perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance
to know; the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered and
talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged to
no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever way we turned,
it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he
enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittest
roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see
how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled
them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the
pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together
so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream,
nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the
clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl
flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked,
revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building
castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great
Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night's
Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and
the old settler I have spoken of--we three--it expanded and racked my
little house; I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there
was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its
seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stop
the consequent leak;--but I had enough of that kind of oakum already
picked.

There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," long to be
remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from
time to time; but I had no more for society there.

There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never
comes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The house-holder is to remain at
eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer
if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often performed this
duty of hospitality, waited long en