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.
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