Domicil'd at the farm-house of my friends, the
Staffords, near by, I lived half the time along this creek and its
adjacent fields and lanes. And it is to my life here that I, perhaps,
owe partial recovery (a sort of second wind, or semi-renewal of the
lease of life) from the prostration of 1874-'75. If the notes of that
outdoor life could only prove as glowing to you, reader dear, as the
experience itself was to me. Doubtless in the course of the
following, the fact of invalidism will crop out, (I call myself _a
half-Paralytic_ these days, and reverently bless the Lord it is no
worse,) between some of the lines--but I get my share of fun and
healthy hours, and shall try to indicate them. (The trick is, I find,
to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of
negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.)
NEW THEMES ENTERED UPON
_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.
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