I do not recollect any particular crisis such as Thoreau describes, but I can trace the process in myself.  I took no pains to cast the slough of cities; I registered no vows and consulted no teachers; it seemed that the thing was quietly done for me by the Higher Powers.  I had no part in the matter except to be docile.  Nature took me in hand, as sleep takes in hand the sick child; the only thing asked of me was my submission.  The result soon appeared in the altered scale of my perceptions.  I became indifferent to newspapers, to the doings and performances of public personages, to the rise and fall of literary reputations, and to a great many books which once interested me.  I saw that a considerable number of those whom I had counted public teachers were no better than persons who talked in their sleep.  They knew nothing of the elemental life of man, and were unfitted to pronounce verdicts upon his destiny.  Novelists particularly offended me by their gross ignorance of life.  The pictures of life they drew were as untrue as a description of a street-fight would be if written by a perfumed odalisque who had never crossed the threshold of a harem.  The ancient elemental life of man, spent in storm and sunshine, under wide skies, they had not so much as looked at, and their voluminous chatter about man and his doings had as little relation to life as the philosophy that is enunciated in a monkey-house.  Opera-bouffe performed upon Helvellyn would be a sorry spectacle; what was all this bedizened rout of people playing before the footlights of cities, but a vain burlesque at which Nature laughed?  And as my sense of the importance of this kind of spectacle gradually sank, my appreciation of the serious drama conducted by Nature, upon a stage as old as time, whose footlights are the changeless planets, gradually rose.  I had become the neighbour of Eternity, through neighbourship with things that are themselves eternal.  I tasted the pleasure of enlarged existence, which had become possible through enlarged affinities.  I had eaten of the Tree of Life, which grows wherever there is a Garden brought to beauty by the sweat of man’s brow, and I had the knowledge of good and evil.

One form of neighbourship which brought me perpetual delight was—­if I may so describe it—­neighbourship with the stars.  I had hitherto scarce given a thought to astronomy, save of the vaguest kind, and all I knew of it was derived from the recollection of one or two popular lectures.  This was pardonable in a citizen, who is never able to see any considerable space of firmament.  But when a man comes to live in the country he can scarce remain indifferent to a pageant so sublime as the midnight heavens.  It is always with him; it obtrudes itself upon him; it becomes in time the scenery of his life.  It pleased me on clear evenings before I slept to go out and take what I called a star-bath, a term justified by the real sense I had of waves of soft light and