_1876, '77_.--I find the woods in mid-May and early June my best places
for composition.[9] Seated on logs or stumps there, or resting on rails,
nearly all the following memoranda have been jotted down. Wherever I go,
indeed, winter or summer, city or country, alone at home or traveling, I
must take notes--(the ruling passion strong in age and disablement, and
even the approach of--but I must not say it yet.) Then underneath the
following excerpta--crossing the _t's_ and dotting the _i's_ of certain
moderate movements of late years--I am fain to fancy the foundations
of quite a lesson learn'd. After you have exhausted what there is in
business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on--have found that none
of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear--what remains? Nature
remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of
a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of
seasons--the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. We will begin
from these convictions. Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced,
that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air, or
draughts of water to drink. But that is part of our lesson.
Dear, soothing, healthy, restoration-hours--after three confining years
of paralysis--after the long strain of the war, and its wounds and
death.
Note:
[9] Without apology for the abrupt change of field and atmosphere--after
what I have put in the preceding fifty or sixty pages--temporary
episodes, thank heaven!--I restore my book to the bracing and buoyant
equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for
sanity of book or human life.
Who knows, (I have it in my fancy, my ambition,) but the pages now
ensuing may carry ray of sun, or smell of grass or corn, or call of
bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snow-flakes falling fresh
and mystic, to denizen of heated city house, or tired workman or
workwoman?--or may-be in sick-room or prison--to serve as cooling
breeze, or Nature's aroma, to some fever'd mouth or latent pulse.