Many men have been likened to it,
but few deserve that honor. Though the wood-choppers have laid bare
first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by
it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have
skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my
youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one
permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I
may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its
surface as of yore. It struck me again to-night, as if I had not seen it
almost daily for more than twenty years--Why, here is Walden, the same
woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was
cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as
ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is
the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it
_may_ be to me. It is the work of a brave man, surely, in whom there was
no guile! He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it
in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord.
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