ature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece.
In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a
bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good
fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink
of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his
slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the
woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a
decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the
guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the
woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can
befall me in life,--no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,)
which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,--my head
bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean
egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I
see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I
am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds
then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,
--master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of
uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find
something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the
tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon,
man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the
suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I
am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.
The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It
takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of
a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I
deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not
reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary
to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not
always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday
breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is
overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors
of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own
fire