He was happy in his intense discipline of
the flesh, as all men are when they have once tasted power--if it is
the power which awakens perception of the highest concerns. His
countenance had an April pensiveness about it; you would never have
guessed that he could write of owls so jocosely. His manner was such
as to suggest that he could mope and weep with them. I never crossed
an airy hill or broad field in Concord, without thinking of him who
had been the companion of space as well as of delicacy; the lover of
the wood-thrush, as well as of the Indian. Walden woods rustled the
name of Thoreau whenever we walked in them.
When we drove from the station to The Wayside, in arriving from
Europe, on a hot summer day, I distinctly remember the ugliness of the
un-English landscape and the forlornness of the little cottage which
was to be our home. Melancholy and stupid days immediately followed
(at least they were so in my estimation). I marveled at the amount of
sand in the flower-borders and at the horrifying delinquencies of our
single servant.
For some years I was eager to use all the eloquence I could muster in
my epistles to girl friends, in England or anywhere, as to the paucity
of life in Concord. Perhaps the following extracts from two letters,
one written at Bath, England, and the other at Concord, and never
sent, but kept by my mother from the flames with many more of my
expressions in correspondence, may convey the feelings of the whole
family:--
31 CHARLES STREET, BATH, ENGLAND.
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