MySpot: A Melancholy Nature

"Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; 

the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.  

One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself; 

he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; 

he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; 

mar those hills, and he suffers.  

How has the farmer planted himself in his fields; 

builded himself into his stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills by his struggle!  This home feeling, this domestication of nature, is important to the observer. 

This is the birdlime with which he catches the bird; 

this is the private door that admits him behind the scenes."

John Burroughs