Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal on 1 September:
Yesterday took that secluded Marlboro road with W. E. C. [William Ellery Channing] in a wagon. Every rock was painted “Marlboro.” & we proposed to take the longest day in the year, & ride to Marlboro,—that flying Italy. We went to Willis’s Pond in Sudbury & paddled across it, & took a swim in its water, coloured like sugarbaker’s molasses. Nature, E. thought, is less interesting. Yesterday Thoreau told me it was more so, & persons less. I think it must always combine with man. Life is ecstatical, & we radiate joy & honour & gloom on the days & landscapes we converse with.
But I must remember a real or imagined period in my youth, when they who spoke to me of nature, were religious, & made it so, & made it deep: now it is to the young sentimentalists frippery; & a milliner’s shop has as much reason & worth.
(The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 11:265-6)
