" Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence fell. It made him feel — what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man — how youthful he still was. “It seems to me,” he observed, “that I never watched the coming of so beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good, and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the earth’s first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and the house! — it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in man’s heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove to be no better than moonshine! "

― Nathaniel Hawthorne , The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne