What I see is mine. I am a large owner in the Merrimack
intervals.
Men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend,
Who yet no partial store appropriate,
Who no armed ship into the Indies send,
To rob me of my orient estate.
He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruits of riches, who summer
and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts. Buy a
farm! What have I to pay for a farm which a farmer will take?
When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that
nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real,
and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it
yet. There is a pleasant tract on the bank of the Concord,
called Conantum, which I have in my mind;--the old deserted
farm-house, the desolate pasture with its bleak cliff, the open
wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in the midst, and the
moss-grown wild-apple orchard,--places where one may have many
thoughts and not decide anything. It is a scene which I can not
only remember, as I might a vision, but when I will can bodily
revisit, and find it even so, unaccountable, yet unpretending in
its pleasant dreariness.
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