"My dear, are you unwell?"

"No, my love, only an idea."

The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a
poet. The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply
sunk in learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an
intrepid philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the
philosopher's stone, and sing of the springs of poetry.

The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground
to suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot;
nor has Henry Thoreau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emerson's and of
the woods and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian
arrowhead upon the premises. Henry Thoreau's instinct is as sure
towards the facts of nature as the witch-hazel towards treasure. If
every quiet country town in New England had a son who, with a lore
like Selborne's and an eye like Buffon's, had watched and studied its
landscape and history, and then published the result, as Thoreau has
done, in a book as redolent of genuine and perceptive sympathy with
nature as a clover-field of honey, New England would seem as poetic
and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives in the berry pastures upon a
bank over Walden Pond, and in a little house of his own building. One
pleasant summer afternoon a small party of us helped him raise it--a
bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook Farm. Elsewhere in the village
he turns up arrowheads abundantly, and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau
initiated him into the mystery of finding them. But neither the Indians
nor nature nor Thoreau can invest the quiet residence of our author with
the dignity or even the suspicion of a legend. History stops short in