house.  Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives.  Their coat of arms is simply a lichen.  I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.  Their attics were in the tops of the trees.  They are of no politics.  There was no noise of labor.  I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning.  Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—­as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking.  They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them.  They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect myself.  It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy.  If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year.  Our forests furnish no mast for them.  So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,—­sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on.  They no longer build nor breed with us.  In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself.  Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry.  They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur.  Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth,—­how rarely we mount!  Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more.  We might climb a tree, at least.  I found my account in climbing a tree once.  It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,—­ so much more of the earth and the heavens.  I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them.  But, above all, I discovered around me,—­it was near the end of June,—­on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward.  I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets,—­for it was court-week,—­and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down.  Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts!  Nature has