150 
WALDEN. 
ture, — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and win¬ 
ter, -— such health, such cheer, they afford forever! 
and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that 
all Nature would he affected, and the sun’s brightness 
fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds 
rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on 
mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a 
just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with 
the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable 
mould myself? 
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, con¬ 
tented? Not my or thy great-grandfather’s, but our 
great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, bo¬ 
tanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young 
always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed 
her health with their decaying fatness. For my pana¬ 
cea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture 
dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come 
out of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons 
which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me 
have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning 
air! If men will not drink of this at the fountain-head 
of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and 
sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have 
lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this 
world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noon¬ 
day even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stop¬ 
ples long ere that and follow westward the steps of Au¬ 
rora. I am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the 
daughter of that old herb-doctor JEsculapius, and who 
is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one 
hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent 
