My whole life had settled back into
tramping ... only my Keats remained. I read and re-read his poems, not
caring to write a line myself.
* * * * *
I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston,
and bought a very cheap second-hand suit.
I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to
England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or
Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being
a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came
the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as
the poet Gray lived his.
* * * * *
I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where
Emerson and Thoreau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts
of Thoreau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone
of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave.
Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day....
On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at
the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat. A
tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door. He asked me
in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly
roll. But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup
of excellent, hot, strong coffee.
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