Hear what he says after having ploughed in his
new vineyard for the first time: "How I soaked up the sunshine
to-day! At night I glowed all over; my whole being had had an
earth bath; such a feeling of freshly ploughed land in every
cell of my brain. The furrow had struck in; the sunshine had
photographed it upon my soul." Later he built him a little study
somewhat apart from his dwelling, to which he could retire and muse
and write whenever the mood impelled him. This little one-room
study, covered with chestnut bark, is on the brow of a hill which
slopes toward the river; it commands an extended view of the Hudson.
But even this did not meet his requirements. The formality and
routine of conventional life palled upon him; the expanse of the
Hudson, the noise of railway and steamboat wearied him; he craved
something more retired, more primitive, more homely. "You cannot
have the same kind of attachment and sympathy for a great river;
it does not flow through your affections like a lesser stream," he
says, thinking, no doubt, of the trout-brooks that thread his
father's farm, of Montgomery Hollow Stream, of the Red Kill, and
of others that his boyhood knew. Accordingly he cast about for
some sequestered spot in which to make himself a hermitage.
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