use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us
thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile
into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my
afternoon walk I would fain 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