shifting camp for
every month in the year. It should tie their astronomy,
botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, and poetry
together. No bird, no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on
his day and hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins,
bluebirds and song-sparrows sang to me. I dissected the buds
of the birch and the oak; in every one of the last is a
star. The crow sat above as idle as I below. The river
flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this composite,
collective beauty which refuses to be analysed. Nothing is
beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole.
Learn the history of a craneberry. Mark the day when the
pine cones and acorns fall.

I go out daily and nightly to feed my eyes on the horizon
and the sky, and come to feel the want of this scope as I do
of water for my washing.

What learned I this morning in the woods, the oracular
woods? Wise are they, the ancient nymphs; pleasing, sober,
melancholy truth say those untameable savages, the pines.

He frequently went to Walden Pond of an afternoon and read Goethe or
some other great author.

There was an element of mysticism in Emerson's love of nature as there
is in that of all true nature-lovers. None knew better than he that
nature is not all birds and flowers. His love of nature was that of
the poet and artist, and not that of the scientist or naturalist.

"I tell you I love the peeping of the Hyla in a pond in April, or the
evening cry of the whippoorwill, better than all the bellowing of all
the Bulls of Bashan, or all the turtles of all Palestine."

Any personal details about his life which Emerson gives us are always
welcome. We learn that his different winter courses of lectures in
Boston, usually ten of them, were attended on an average by about five
hundred persons, and netted him about five hundred dollars.

When he published a new volume, he was very liberal with presentation
copies. Of his first volume of poems, published in 1846, he sent
eighty copies to his friends. When "May-Day" was published in 1867, he
sent fifty copies to friends; one of them went to Walt Whitman. I saw
it the day it came. It was in a white dress (silk, I think); very
beautiful. He sent a copy of his first volume of "Nature" to Landor.
One would like to know what Landor said in reply. The copy he sent to
Carlyle I saw in the Scot's library, in Cheyne Row, in