Now there is a dense mass of weeds along the waterside, where the muskrats lurk, and overhead a canopy of leaves conceals the birds and shuts out the sun.
Up the grassy hollows in the sprout-lands north of Goose Pond I feel as if in a strange country, — a pleasing sense of strangeness and distance.
Here are numerous open hollows more or less connected, where for some reason the wood does not spring up, — and I am glad of it, — filled with a fine wiry grass, with the panicled andromeda, which loves dry places, now in blossom around the edges, and small black cherries and sand cherries straggling down into them.
As wild and strange a place as you might find in the unexplored West or East. The quarter of a mile of sprout-land which separates it from the highway seems as complete a barrier as a thousand miles of earth.
Your horizon is there all your own.
Again I am attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild moss rose half open in the grass , all glowing with rosy light.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1854
See August 6, 1851 ("After how few steps, how little exertion, the student stands in pine woods . . .in a place still unaccountably strange and wild to him.")
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