15–21 May 1843

Walked with Ellery. In the landscape felt the magic of color; the world is all opal, and those ethereal tints the mountains wear have the finest effects of music on us. Mountains are great poets, and one glance at this fine cliff scene undoes a great deal of prose, and rein- states us wronged men in our rights. All life, all society begins to get illuminated and trans- parent, and we generalize boldly and well. Space is felt as a great thing. There is some pinch and narrowness to us, and we laugh and leap to see the world, and what amplitudes it has of meadow, stream, upland, forest, and sea, which yet are but lanes and crevices to the great Space in which the world swims like a cockboat in the sea. A little canoe with three figures put out from a creek into the river and sailed downstream to the Bridge, and we rejoiced in the Blessed Water inviolable, magical, whose nature is Beauty, which instantly began to play its sweet games, all circles and dimples and lovely gleam- ing motions, — always Ganges, the Sacred River, and which cannot be desecrated or made to for- get itself. But there below are these farms, yet are the farmers unpoetic. The life of labor does not make men, but drudges. Pleasant it is, as the habits of all poets may testify, to think of great proprietors, to reckon this grove we walk. in a park of the noble; but a continent cut up into ten-acre farms is not desirable to the imagi- nation. The Farmer is an enchanted laborer, and after toiling his brains out, sacrificing thought, religion, taste, love, hope, courage at the shrine of toil, turns out a bankrupt as well as the merchant. Itis time to have the thing looked into, and with a transpiercing criticism settled whether life is worth having on such terms.' . . . Ellery said, " The village [of Concord] did not look so very bad from our point; — the three churches looked like geese swimming about in a pond."