Seen Through This Clear Atmosphere, The Works Of The Farmer, His
Ploughing And Reaping, Had A Beauty To Our Eyes Which He Never
Saw.
How fortunate were we who did not own an acre of these
shores, who had not renounced our title to the whole.
One who
knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the
poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is what he has
bought. What I see is mine. I am a large owner in the Merrimack
intervals.
Men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend,
Who yet no partial store appropriate,
Who no armed ship into the Indies send,
To rob me of my orient estate.
He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruits of riches, who summer
and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts. Buy a
farm! What have I to pay for a farm which a farmer will take?
When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that
nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real,
and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it
yet. There is a pleasant tract on the bank of the Concord,
called Conantum, which I have in my mind; - the old deserted
farm-house, the desolate pasture with its bleak cliff, the open
wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in the midst, and the
moss-grown wild-apple orchard, - places where one may have many
thoughts and not decide anything. It is a scene which I can not
only remember, as I might a vision, but when I will can bodily
revisit, and find it even so, unaccountable, yet unpretending in
its pleasant dreariness. When my thoughts are sensible of
change, I love to see and sit on rocks which I _have_ known, and
pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so established. I
not yet gray on rocks forever gray, I no longer green under the
evergreens. There is something even in the lapse of time by
which time recovers itself.
As we have said, it proved a cool as well as breezy day, and by
the time we reached Penichook Brook we were obliged to sit
muffled in our cloaks, while the wind and current carried us
along. We bounded swiftly over the rippling surface, far by many
cultivated lands and the ends of fences which divided innumerable
farms, with hardly a thought for the various lives which they
separated; now by long rows of alders or groves of pines or oaks,
and now by some homestead where the women and children stood
outside to gaze at us, till we had swept out of their sight, and
beyond the limit of their longest Saturday ramble. We glided
past the mouth of the Nashua, and not long after, of Salmon
Brook, without more pause than the wind.
Salmon Brook,
Penichook,
Ye sweet waters of my brain,
When shall I look,
Or cast the hook,
In your waves again?
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