The most familiar sheet of water viewed from a new hill-top, yields a novel and unexpected pleasure.  When we have travelled a few miles, we do not recognize the profiles even of the hills which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley.  We do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep.  As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere.  It is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the east.  Yet the universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is intelligence.  The sun is not so central as a man.  Upon an isolated hill-top, in an open country, we seem to ourselves to be standing on the boss of an immense shield, the immediate landscape being apparently depressed below the more remote, and rising gradually to the horizon, which is the rim of the shield, villas, steeples, forests, mountains, one above another, till they are swallowed up in the heavens.  The most distant mountains in the horizon appear to rise directly from the shore of that lake in the woods by which we chance to be standing, while from the mountain-top, not only this, but a thousand nearer and larger lakes, are equally unobserved.

Seen through this clear atmosphere, the works of the farmer, his ploughing and reaping, had a beauty to our eyes which he never saw.  How fortunate were we who did not own an acre of these shores, who had not renounced our title to the whole.  One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it.  The poor rich man! all he has is what he has bought.  What I see is mine.  I am a large owner in the Merrimack intervals.

     Men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend,
       Who yet no partial store appropriate,
     Who no armed ship into the Indies send,
       To rob me of my orient estate.

He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruits of riches, who summer and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts.  Buy a farm!  What have I to pay for a farm which a farmer will take?

When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well.  The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.  There is a pleasant tract on the bank of the Concord, called Conantum, which I have in my mind;—­the old deserted farm-house, the desolate pasture with its bleak cliff, the open wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in the midst, and the moss-grown wild-apple