to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the
animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the
animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is
among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world [Greek:
Kosmos], 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
fire-fly 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 far-away 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 altogether admirable and shining