I heard him whistle as he drove his team
through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their
coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.
Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics.
There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving
or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done
away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of a distant hive in
May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle
thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry
was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out
of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and
recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to
recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their
cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should
move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit
us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem,
few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for
the grove in our minds is laid waste--sold to feed unnecessary fires of
ambition, or sent to mill--and there is scarcely a twig left for them
to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial
season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the
mind, cast by the WINGS of some thought in its vernal or autumnal
migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of
the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They
no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China
grandeur. Those GRA-A-ATE THOUGHTS, those GRA-A-ATE men you hear of!

We hug the earth--how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate
ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my
account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top
of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for
I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen
before--so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked
about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I
certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered
around me--it was near the end of June--on the ends of the t