And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown the golden river at
sunset,--how sweet was it to return within the system of human
society, not as to a dungeon and a chain, but as to a stately edifice,
whence we could go forth at will into state--her simplicity! How
gently, too, did the sight of the Old Manse, best seen from the river,
overshadowed with its willow and all environed about with the foliage
of its orchard and avenue,--how gently did its gray, homely aspect
rebuke the speculative extravagances of the day! It had grown sacred
in connection with the artificial life against which we inveighed; it
had been a home for many years, in spite of all; it was my home too;
and, with these thoughts, it seemed to me that all the artifice and
conventionalism of life was but an impalpable thinness upon its
surface, and that the depth below was none the worse for it. Once, as
we turned our boat to the bank, there was a cloud, in the shape of an
immensely gigantic figure of a hound, couched above the house, as if
keeping guard over it. Gazing at this symbol, I prayed that the upper
influences might long protect the institutions that had grown out of
the heart of mankind.

If ever my readers should decide to give up civilized life, cities,
houses, and whatever moral or material enormities in addition to these
the perverted ingenuity of our race has contrived, let it be in the
early autumn. Then Nature will love him better than at any other
season, and will take him to her bosom with a more motherly
tenderness. I could scarcely endure the roof of the old house above me
in those first autumnal days. How early in the summer, too, the
prophecy of autumn comes! Earlier in some years than in others;
sometimes even in the first weeks of July. There is no other feeling
like what is caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception--if
it be not rather a foreboding--of the year's decay, so blessedly sweet