The clergy are as diseased and as much possessed with a devil as the reformers. They make their topic as offensive as the politician; for our religion is as unpublic and incommunicable as our poetical vein, and to be approached with as much love and tenderness.
March 15, 1842. . . . . The poor have come out to employ themselves in the sunshine, the old and feeble to scent the air once more. I hear the bluebird, the song-sparrow, and the robin, and the note of the lark leaks up through the meadows, as if its bill had been thawed by the warm sun. As I am going to the woods I think to take some small book in my pocket, whose author has been there already, whose pages will be as good as my thoughts, and will eke them out or show me human life still gleaming in the horizon when the woods have shut out the town. But I can find none. None will sail as far forward into the bay of nature as my thought. They stay at home. I would go home. When I get to the wood their thin leaves rustle in my fingers. They are bare and obvious, and there is no halo or haze about them. Nature lies fair and far behind them all.
Cold Spring. I hear nothing but a phebe, and the wind, and the rattling of a chaise in the wood. For a few years I stay here, not knowing, taking my own life by degrees, and
