I have come to believe that most of us have experienced some lonely spot, some private nook, some glen or streamside scene that impressed us so deeply that even today its memory recalls the mood of a lost enchantment. At the age of eighty, my grandmother used to recall with delight a lonely tract she called Beautiful Big South Woods. There, as a girl one spring day, she had seen the whole floor of the woods, acre on acre, carpeted with the blooms of bloodroot and spring beauties and blue and pink hepaticas. She had seen the woods only once but she never forgot it.
      When Henry Thoreau was five, his parents, then living in the city of Boston, took him eighteen miles into the country to a woodland scene that he, too, never forgot. It was, he said, one of the earliest scenes stamped on the tablets of his memory. During succeeding years of childhood, that woodland formed the basis of his dreams. The spot to which he had been taken was Walden Pond, near Concord. Twenty-three years later, writing in his cabin on the shores of this same pond, Thoreau noted the unfading impression that fabulous landscape had made and how, even at that early age, he had given preference to this recess — where almost sunshine and shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene — over the tumultuous city in which he lived.
      — Edwin Way Teale, The Lost Woods as excerpted in Thoreau And The Art Of Life

Some lonely, lovely spot
A private nook
By a stream
A place of dreams.

A place of quiet, other than the gentle rustle of leaves in the wind
Other than the murmur of a tiny stream.

A place to come to terms with life
With one’s place in life
Beauty and mystery
A place of sweet mystery.
      — Roderick MacIver