March 25, 1859. A score of my townsmen have been shooting and trapping musquash and mink of late. They are gone all day; early and late they scan the rising tide; stealthily they set their traps in remote swamps, avoiding one another. Am not I a trapper, too? early and late scanning the rising flood, ranging by distant woodsides, setting my traps in solitude, and baiting them as well as I know how, that I may catch life and light, that my intellectual part may taste some venison and be invigorated, that my nakedness may be clad in some wild June warmth?
As to the color of spring, I should say that hitherto in dry weather it was fawn-colored; in wet, more yellowish or tawny. When wet, the green of the fawn is supplied by the lichens and the mosses.
March 26, 1842. I thank God that the cheapness which appears in time and the world, the trivialness of the whole scheme of things, is in my own cheap and trivial moment. I am time and the world. In me are summer and winter, village life, and commercial routine, pestilence and famine, and refreshing breezes, joy and sadness, life and death.
I most confess I have felt mean enough when asked how I was to act on society, what errand I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I did not feel
