"May 1st. All the morning I have been at work, under the clear blue sky, on a hill side. Sometimes it almost seemed as if I were at work in the sky itself, though the material in which I wrought was the ore from our gold-mine. There is nothing so disagreeable or unseemly in this sort of toil as you could think. It defiles the hands indeed, but not the soul. The farm is growing very beautiful now,--not that we yet see anything of the peas and potatoes which we have planted, but the grass blushes green on the slopes and hollows. I do not believe that I should be so patient here if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way of life. We had some tableaux last evening. They went off very well." "May 11th. This morning I arose at milking time, in good trim for work; and we have been employed partly in an Augean labor of clearing out a wood-shed, and partly in carting loads of oak. This afternoon I hope to have something to do in the field, for these jobs about the house are not at all suited to my taste." "June 1st. I think this present life of mine gives me an antipathy to pen and ink, even more than my Custom-house experience did. In the midst of toil, or after a hard day's work, my soul obstinately refuses to be poured out on paper. It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung heap, just as well as under a pile of money." "August 15th. Even my Custom-house experience was not such a thraldom and weariness as this. O, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it, without becoming proportionably brutified! Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so." "Salem, Sept. 3d. Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there had been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing the potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself."