I look at a grass-bird on a wall in the dry Great Fields . . . (Journal, 7:489-490).

  I have got both of your letters at once. You must not think Concord so barren a place when Channing is away. There are the river & fields left yet, and I, though ordinarily a man of business, should have some afternoons and evenings to spend with you, I trust; that is: if you could stand so much of me. If you can spend your time profitably here, or without ennui, having an occasional ramble or tete-atete with one of the natives, it will give me pleasure to have you in the neighborhood. You see I am preparing you for our awful unsocial ways,—keeping in our dense a good part of the day, sucking or claws perhaps.—But then we make a religion of it, and that you cannot but respect.

  If you know the taste of your own heart and like it—come to Concord, and I’ll warrant you enough here to season the dish with,—aye, when though C and E[merson] and I were all away. We might paddle quietly up the river—then there are one or two more ponds to be seen, &c.

  I should very much enjoy further rambling with you in your vicinity, but I must postpone for the present. To tell the truth, I am planning to get seriously to work after these long months of inefficiency and idleness. I do not know whether you are haunted by any such demon which puts you on the alert to pluck the fruit of each day as it passes, and store it safely in your bin. True, it is will to live abandonedly from time to time, but to our working hours that must be as the spile to the bung. So for a long season I must enjoy only a low slanting glean in my mind’s eye from the Middleborough Pond far away.

  Methinks I am getting a little more strength into those knees of mine; and, for my part, I believe that God does delight into the strength of a man’s legs.

  Yours
  Henry D. Thoreau