Thoreau has been my companion for some days past, it having struck me as
more appropriate to bring him out to a pond than to read him, as was
hitherto my habit, on Sunday mornings in the garden. He is a person who
loves the open air, and will refuse to give you much pleasure if you try
to read him amid the pomp and circumstance of upholstery; but out in the
sun, and especially by this pond, he is delightful, and we spend the
happiest hours together, he making statements, and I either agreeing
heartily, or just laughing and reserving my opinion till I shall have
more ripely considered the thing. He, of course, does not like me as
much as I like him, because I live in a cloud of dust and germs produced
by wilful superfluity of furniture, and have not the courage to get a
match and set light to it: and every day he sees the door-mat on which I
wipe my shoes on going into the house, in defiance of his having told me
that he had once refused the offer of one on the ground that it is best
to avoid even the beginnings of evil. But my philosophy has not yet
reached the acute stage that will enable me to see a door-mat in its
true character as a hinderer of the development of souls, and I like to
wipe my shoes. Perhaps if I had to live with few servants, or if it were
possible, short of existence in a cave, to do without them altogether, I
should also do without door-mats, and probably in summer without shoes
too, and wipe my feet on the grass nature no doubt provides for this
purpose; and meanwhile we know that though he went to the woods, Thoreau
came back again, and lived for the rest of his days like other people.
During his life, I imagine he would have refused to notice anything so
fatiguing as an ordinary German woman, and never would have deigned
discourse to me on the themes he loved best; but now his spirit belongs
to me, and all he thought, and believed, and felt, and he talks as much
and as intimately to me here in my solitude as ever he did to his
dearest friends years ago in Concord. In the garden he was a pleasant
companion, but in the lonely dimple he is fascinating, and the morning