The pond is one bright, flat spread,
without a ripple--a vast Claude Lorraine glass, in which I study the
sky, the light, the leafless trees, and an occasional crow, with
flapping wings, flying overhead. The brown fields have a few white
patches of snow left.
_Feb. 9_.--After an hour's ramble, now retreating, resting, sitting
close by the pond, in a warm nook, writing this, shelter'd from the
breeze, just before noon. The _emotional_ aspects and influences of
Nature! I, too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies (from
all the prevailing intellections, literature and poems,) to turn
everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death. Yet
how clear it is to me that those are not the born results, influences
of Nature at all, but of one's own distorted, sick or silly soul.
Here, amid this wild, free scene, how healthy, how joyous, how clean
and vigorous and sweet!
_Mid-afternoon_.--One of my nooks is south of the barn, and here I am
sitting now, on a log, still basking in the sun, shielded from the
wind. Near me are the cattle, feeding on corn-stalks. Occasionally a
cow or the young bull (how handsome and bold he is!) scratches and
munches the far end of the log on which I sit. The fresh milky odor
is quite perceptible, also the perfume of hay from the barn. The
perpetual rustle of dry corn-stalks, the low sough of the wind round
the barn gables, the grunting of pigs, the distant whistle of a
locomotive, and occasional crowing of chanticleers, are the sounds.
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