Thoreau quote in script, with decorated capital bone china mug

I hand-lettered this Thoreau quote into my nature journal on 24 March, 1984. I was thoroughly immersed in snake painting - had been for the last two months and a half, and found in this sentiment a direct eco of the kind of involvement that is absolutely essential to the way in which I paint snakes... scales as far as the eye can see, all interlocking, all appearing broader or more foreshortened according to the contours of the landscape, all bathed in the colours of light and shadow, and all overlapping each other in one direction, with irrepressible snakely certainty from head to tail, however lost among the hills and valleys any distant loop might seem.