Page 2 (1/2)

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen ht all the farht, and I knew their price I walked over each farmer&039;s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with hi it to hi but a deed of it -- took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk -- cultivated it, and him too to so enough, leaving hiarded as a sort of real-estate broker by ht live, and the landscape radiated froly What is a house but a sedes, a seat? -- better if a country seat I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon ie, but to ht live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; sa I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring coion, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a s which he can afford to let alone

My iination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farers burned by actual possession The nearest that I caht the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials hich to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife -- every ed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farether However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farenerous, I sold hiave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left I found thus that I had been a rich e to my poverty But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow With respect to landscapes,

"I aht there is none to dispute"

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farot a feild apples only Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly iot all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk

The real attractions of the Hollowell far, about two hbor, and separated fro on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs froray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, nawed by rabbits, shohat kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it froes up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of redbark I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out so up so up in the pasture, or, in short, had es I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders -- I never heard what cos which had no other ht pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone But it turned out as I have said

All that I could say, then, with respect to fararden -- was, that I had had e I have no doubt that tiood and the bad; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed But I would say toas possible live free and uncommitted It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail

Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is my "Cultivator," says -- and the only translation I have seen etting a farreedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once The oftener you go there the ood" I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last

The present was my next experith, for convenience putting the experience of two years into one As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the hbors up

When first I took up hts as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but wasor chih, weather-stained boards, ide chinks, which ht white hewn studs and freshly planed door andcasings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the , when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon soination it retained throughout the dayme of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited a year before This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess ar were such as sweep over the ridges ofthe broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrialwind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally whenexcursions in the suarret; but the boat, after passing froone down the stream of time With this ress toward settling in the world This frahtly clad, was a sort of crystallization around estive soo outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like a " Such was not hbor to the birds; not by having ied myself near them I was not only nearer to soarden and the orchard, but to those ssters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager -- the wood thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others

I was seated by the shore of a se of Concord and soher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered ood, was my most distant horizon For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it ih up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of rees, its soft ripples or its shosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of so upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains

This shbor in the intervals of a gentle rain-stor perfectly still, but the sky overcast, , and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore A lake like this is never smoother than at such a ti, shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important From a hill-top near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which for toward each other suggested a streah a wooded valley, but stream there was none That way I looked between and over the near green hills to soed with blue Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and es in the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven&039;s own e But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded ive buoyancy to and float the earth One value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular This is as important as that it keeps butter cool When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury uished elevated perhaps by avalley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this s water, and I was reminded that this on which I das but dry land

Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least There was pasture enough for ination The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording a fas who enjoy freely a vast horizon" -- said Daer pastures

Both place and tied, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had ion viewed nightly by astronoine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia&039;s Chair, far from noise and disturbance I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe If it orth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness fro with as fine a ray to hts by him Such was that part of creation where I had squatted;

"There was a shepherd that did live,