of the land- scape there is among us! We have to be told that the
Greeks called the world Beauty, or Order, but we do not see
clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious
philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of
border life, on the confines of a world into which I make
occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and
allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat
are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I
would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and
sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the
causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal
that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the
familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes
finds himself in another land than is described in their owners'
deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the
actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which
the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms
which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up,
appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry
to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the
picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath.
The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace,
and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the
setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood.
Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into
some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and