Henry Thoreau, Bachelor of Nature by Léon Bazalgette

In spite of all, dear Concord, a man would have to be very perverse and strangely made not to accept you with all your faults, your absurdities, the petty prosaicness of your townspeople. Not to embrace you as heartily as the river-bank embraces your Main Street, without debating your good and your evil. Not to respond with a smile to the smiling unison of this little world where farmers and citizens, tradesmen, workmen, store-keepers, educated people, after the purest tradition of democratic equality and simplicity, are scarcely distinguishable from one another. In the shade of those great elms that spread harmony over all, how can one fail to feel tenderly sympathetic with this family of honest souls?

See the two white churches there, the tavern and the jail, where they will receive you without the least compunction. Few of the things are absent from the village that make the solid happiness of the world. Not even a bowling green and a centre of high culture. There is the Mill-dam, where the people gossip and munch the news of the day, the blacksmith's, the post-office, the shops. And the little wooden houses with their Doric pediments, painted white, with the gardens stretching down to the willows to reach the water. Everything is in its place, everything in concord. The village sings in its grey-white, in the green of the meadows and the pine-crowned hills, with the approbation of those beautiful big maples on the common, as serene as philosophers. And on Sunday, when no townsman would have the bad taste to abuse the peace of the Sabbath by playing the piano or taking his skates to the river, and an awful silence reigns over the wooden sidewalks, how good it would be to allow oneself to be carried along by the godly simplicity of the town, dozing blissfully to the sound of the clock that spreads the enchantment of submission.