llus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become
of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects
of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to
themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted groves and
walks of Platanes," where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos
open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the
woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens
that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there
in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning
occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that
I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run
in my head and I am not where my body is--I am out of my senses. In
my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the
woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself,
and cannot help a shudder when I find myself so implicated even in what
are called good works--for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have
walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have
not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness,
and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking
will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single
farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the
dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony
discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle
of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the
threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite
familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of
houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply
deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people
who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw
the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie,
and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while
heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels
going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of
paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in