A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



summoned a cutter, I would have fled with 

 Charlie away from the vacuum that had suddenly 

 come into it all, and plunged once more into the 

 madding crowd. 



One grows restless when he is forced to sit 

 down with the ghosts of bright hours perished, 

 even when it is before his own wood fire. It is 

 too much like the temptations of those old saints, 

 without their resisting power. Do my best, a 

 Florentine maid fitted in between me and the 

 flames, absurdly enough wearing the air of a 

 &quot; Lost Lenore.&quot; She beckoned from autumnal 

 woods with a bunch of calamus. She came over 

 russet fields, always like one of Canova s nymphs, 

 and she murmured beside the still waters, &quot; I 

 would not live always,&quot; as if she wished me to 

 understand that she was only a fleeting fantasy. 

 But always to me she was a princess in disguise, 

 and I was detecting her under her rusticity. 



When a girl or a hallucination gets so braided 

 into one s imagination, one is not going to take 

 her at her word too recklessly and let her slip out 

 of keeping. The tears the tears, why the tears? 

 Merely being engaged is not always final, at least 

 with a girl or a hallucination. 



At the end of five days Gabe got through to 

 me with a team and a large farm sled. He had 

 had hard work, and his horses were lathered and 

 steaming. When he came in and lit his pipe with 

 a coal of my fire, I pushed a chair over at him and 

 tackled him, as we say, on a vital subject, coming 

 at him bluntly and familiarly. 



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