Reading in this old book of the ordinance and virtues of the familiar herbs, I escape from the severities of botanical science into a maze of queer fancies, well suited to those retrospective hours when we love best what we least believe. And by the pleasant suggestion of astrology I am led on to contemplate the starry heavens, which I do in the ancient pastoral way, peopling them with mythical forms and connecting them with the seasonable changes of rustic toil. I forget for the moment all the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, and see eye to eye with Cleostratus of Tenedos who nightly watched the stars from the sacred slopes of Ida.
Much as the companionships of nature have meant for me, I would not have any man content himself with these alone. It is not right to live the slave of Pales, or become the rhapsode of docks and nettles. To be all for the lower life, were it the fairest, is derogation; and Har and Heva before they may enter into their kingdom of the flowers must first be fallen spirits. But continually in the interludes of human endeavour to rebathe the mind at these clear wells does indeed exceedingly purify and strengthen against the returning and imminent encounter. Those long retreats at Walden may not often be repeated, for man is either risen too high or too far fallen to live well in the sole company of animals and flowers. What sociologists call the consciousness of kind is as vital to man as the consciousness of self; and to pine for adoption into an alien kind is vain on this side transmigration.
Not seldom my wanderings in town and country lead me to quiet churchyards, or to those vast cemeteries where the living have established the dead in avenues and streets of tombs after their drear suburban fashion. Solitude has ever persuaded to the contemplation of death, and in these silent places I feel no shock of sadness but am rather possessed by a familiar spirit of peace. As I wander from path to path, my fancy is not lamed by mournful thoughts, but finds suggestion amid the poor laconic histories by which these headstones appeal to him that passes by.
It is with most men a natural desire to take their last rest in some green God's acre, far from the smoke and turmoil of towns, lying in a fair space amid a small company, where there is a wide prospect of tilled lands, and the reapers cut the swathes against the very churchyard wall. And this is my most usual aspiration; yet there are times when I would not shrink in thought from the Valley of Ezekiel, and would be content to be written a mere number in some city of the dead, where at last after all the loneliness of life I should no longer be kept apart, but be gathered to my fellows where they lie in their thousands, and be received a member of their society. And though I well know that it matters not a cummin-seed whether my bones are washed to and fro on the bed of the sea or my ashes cast to the winds of heaven, yet I humour this fancy, and find a quiet pleasure in the thought that death at least may end this isolation.