WINTER VISITORS. 
289 
think that he should keep a caravansary on the world’s 
highway, where philosophers of all nations might put 
up, and on his sign should be printed, “ Entertainment 
for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have lei¬ 
sure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road.” 
He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest 
crotchets of any I chance to know; the same yester¬ 
day and to-morrow. Of yore we had sauntered and 
talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he 
was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. 
Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens 
and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the 
beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose 
fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his 
serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature 
cannot spare him. 
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we 
sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring 
the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We 
waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together 
so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not 
scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the 
bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which 
float through the western sky, and the mother-o’-pearl 
flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There 
we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here 
and there, and building castles in the air for which 
earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! 
Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New 
England Night’s Entertainment. Ah! such discourse 
we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I 
have spoken of, — we three, —■ it expanded and racked 
my little house; I should not dare to say how many 
19 
