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 the
middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found
his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been
driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his
surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing
at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road
except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and
then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are
square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill
I can see civilisation and the abo