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the compass, and it is always harvest-time with me. 

 I am always gathering my crop from these woods and 

 fields and waters, and no man is in my way or inter- 

 feres with me." So intimate was his relation with 

 these outdoor surroundings and the fleeting phenom- 

 ena of the year that he could say, "These regular 

 phenomena of the seasons get at last to be simply and 

 plainly phenomena or phases of my life. Almost I be- 

 lieve the Concord River would not rise and overflow 

 its banks again, were I not here." He illustrated ab- 

 solutely his own dictum: "To insure health, a man's 

 relation to Nature must come very near to a personal 

 one; he must be conscious of a friendliness in her; 

 when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the 

 gap to him. I cannot conceive of any life which de- 

 serves the name, unless there is a certain tender rela- 

 tion to Nature. This it is which makes winter warm, 

 and supplies society in the desert and wilderness." 

 He was ever "looking into nature with such easy sym- 

 pathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in 

 the face of the sky." 



One cannot escape the impression, in reading Thor- 

 eau's Journal, that he considered Concord's resources 

 in the realm of nature-study practically boundless. 

 He was continually noting correspondences between 

 the phenomena of his limited environment and those 

 of foreign climes. Emerson records that on returning 

 a borrowed volume of Kane's Arctic Explorations, he 

 remarked that "most of the phenomena noted might 



