A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers quotes

… fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of “Concord” from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony.

It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks.

To an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and it is still perennial grass-ground to Concord farmers, who own the Great Meadows, and get the hay from year to year.

who were out not only in ’75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing.

Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write if ever they should put pen to paper.

Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and ploughing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for …

Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of Concord, as exhibited in the Revolution, and on later occasions.

It has been proposed that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling nine times round.

I have read that a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river has, probably, very near the smallest allowance.

Who would neglect the least celestial sound, Or faintest light that falls on earthly ground, If he could know it one day would be found That star in Cygnus whither we are bound, And pale our sun with heavenly radiance round?

Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.

We glided noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driving a pickerel or a bream from the covert of the pads, and the smaller bittern now and then sailed away on sluggish wings from some recess in the shore, or the larger lifted itself out of the …

… Concord voyageurs, not to say any prayer for the success of our voyage, but to gather the few berries which were still left on the hills, hanging by very slender threads, we weighed anchor again, and were soon out of sight of our native village.

The land seemed to grow fairer as we withdrew from it.

Far away to the southwest lay the quiet village, left alone under its elms and buttonwoods in mid afternoon; and the hills, notwithstanding their blue, ethereal faces, seemed to cast a saddened eye on their old playfellows;

and there would he stand abiding his luck, till he took his way home through the fields at evening with his fish.

Thus, by one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses.

This man was the last of our townsmen whom we saw, and we silently through him bade adieu to our friends.

Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with his slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him.

It is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in winter.

Some men are judges these August days, sitting on benches, even till the court rises;

The seeds of the life of fishes are everywhere disseminated, whether the winds waft them, or the waters float them, or the deep earth holds them; wherever a pond is dug, straightway it is stocked with this vivacious race.

They have a lease of nature, and it is not yet out.

The Chinese are bribed to carry their ova from province to province in jars or in hollow reeds, or the waterbirds to transport them to the mountain tarns and interior lakes.

There are fishes wherever there is a fluid medium, and even in clouds and in melted metals we detect their semblance.

Think how in winter you can sink a line down straight in a pasture through snow and through ice, and pull up a bright, slippery, dumb, subterranean silver or golden fish!

It is curious, also, to reflect how they make one family, from the largest to the smallest. The least minnow that lies on the ice as bait for pickerel, looks like a huge sea-fish cast up on the shore.

As you stand thus stooping over the bream in its nest, the edges of the dorsal and caudal fins have a singular dusty golden reflection, and its eyes, which stand out from the head, are transparent and colorless.

Seen in its native element, it is a very beautiful and compact fish, perfect in all its parts, and looks like a brilliant coin fresh from the mint.

It is a perfect jewel of the river, the green, red, coppery, and golden reflections of its mottled sides being the concentration of such rays as struggle through the floating pads and flowers to the sandy bottom, and in harmony with the sunlit brown and …

… a perfect jewel of the river, the green, red, coppery, and golden reflections of its mottled sides being the concentration of such rays as struggle through the floating pads and flowers to the sandy bottom, and in harmony with the sunlit brown and yellow pebbles.

Behind its watery shield it dwells far from many accidents inevitable to human life.

There is also another species of bream found in our river, without the red spot on the operculum, which, according to M. Agassiz, is undescribed.

The red chivin, according to some, is still the same fish, only older, or with its tints deepened as they think by the darker water it inhabits, as the red clouds swim in the twilight atmosphere.

He who has not hooked the red chivin is not yet a complete angler.

Other fishes, methinks, are slightly amphibious, but this is a denizen of the water wholly.

I have seen the fry, when frightened by something thrown into the water, leap out by dozens, together with the dace, and wreck themselves upon a floating plank.

It is the little light-infant of the river, with body armor of gold or silver spangles, slipping, gliding its life through with a quirk of the tail, half in the water, half in the air, upward and ever upward with flitting fin to more crystalline tides, yet still abreast of us dwellers on the bank.

It is almost dissolved by the summer heats. A slighter and lighter colored shiner is found in one of our ponds.

The Pickerel, Esox reticulatus, the swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes, which Josselyn calls the Freshwater or River Wolf, is very common in the shallow and weedy lagoons along the sides of the stream.

It is a solemn, stately, ruminant fish, lurking under the shadow of a pad at noon, with still, circumspect, voracious eye, motionless as a jewel set in water, or moving slowly along to take up its position, darting from time to time at such unlucky fish or frog or insect as comes within its range, and swallowing it at a gulp.

I have caught one which had swallowed a brother pickerel half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in its mouth, while the head was already digested in its stomach.

The unwise are accustomed to speak as if some were not sick; but methinks the difference between men in respect to health is not great enough to lay much stress upon. Some are reputed sick and some are not.

It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

Shad are still taken in the basin of Concord River at Lowell, where they are said to be a month earlier than the Merrimack shad, on account of the warmth of the water.

Armed with no sword, no electric shock, but mere Shad, armed only with innocence and a just cause, with tender dumb mouth only forward, and scales easy to be detached.

I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crowbar against that Billerica dam?

—Not despairing when whole myriads have gone to feed those sea monsters during thy suspense, but still brave, indifferent, on easy fin there, like shad reserved for higher destinies. Willing to be decimated for man’s behoof after the spawning season.

Away with the superficial and selfish phil-anthropy of men—who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below low-water-mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that fellow-creature who alone can appreciate it!

Who hears the fishes when they cry?

It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries. Thou shalt erelong have thy way up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe, if I am not mistaken. Yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized.

Still patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the Corporation with its dam.

Poor shad! where is thy redress?

When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter.

the first encroachment of commerce on this land. There was our port, our Ostia. That straight geometrical line against the water and the sky stood for the last refinements of civilized life, and what of sublimity there is in history was there symbolized.

For the most part, there was no recognition of human life in the night, no human breathing was heard, only the breathing of the wind.

As we sat up, kept awake by the novelty of our situation, we heard at intervals foxes stepping about over the dead leaves, and brushing the dewy grass close to our tent, and once a muskrat fumbling among the potatoes and melons in our boat, …

This natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient world before the horn was invented.

The very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farmyards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age.

“I would rather be a dog, and bay the moon,” than many a Roman that I know. The night is equally indebted to the clarion of the cock, with wakeful hope, from the very setting of the sun, prematurely ushering in the dawn.

All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature’s health or sound state.

Such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.

At length the antepenultimate and drowsy hours drew on, and all sounds were denied entrance to our ears.

The birds seemed to flit through submerged groves, alighting on the yielding sprays, and their clear notes to come up from below.

We were uncertain whether the water floated the land, or the land held the water in its bosom.

It was such a season, in short, as that in which one of our Concord poets sailed on its stream, and sung its quiet glories.

The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.

Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background.

They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in the desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.

I’ll walk with gentle pace, And choose the smoothest place And careful dip the oar, And shun the winding shore, And gently steer my boat Where water-lilies float, And cardinal flowers Stand in their sylvan bowers.

It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.

The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground.

It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.

The shallowest still water is unfathomable.

Wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground.

This is ancient Billerica, (Villarica?) now in its dotage, named from the English Billericay, and whose Indian name was Shawshine.

I never heard that it was young.

See, is not nature here gone to decay, farms all run out, meetinghouse grown gray and racked with age? If you would know of its early youth, ask those old gray rocks in the pasture.

On the other hand, the road runs up to Carlisle, city of the woods, which, if it is less civil, is the more natural. It does well hold the earth together.

It gets laughed at because it is a small town, I know, but nevertheless it is a place where great men may be born any day, for fair winds and foul blow right on over it without distinction.

It has a meetinghouse and horse-sheds, a tavern and a blacksmith’s shop, for center, and a good deal of wood to cut and cord yet. And

but as for farming, I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree.

There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.

I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground. What have I to do with ploughs? I cut another furrow than you see.

I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.

I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground.

What have I to do with ploughs? I cut another furrow than you see. Where the off ox treads, there is it not, it is farther off; where the nigh ox walks, it will not be, it is nigher still.

There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground.

What have I to do with ploughs? I cut another furrow than you see.

Where the off ox treads, there is it not, it is farther off; where the nigh ox walks, it will not be, it is nigher still. If corn fails, my crop fails not, and what are drought and rain to me?

What have I to do with ploughs? I cut another furrow than you see. Where the off ox treads, there is it not, it is farther off; where the nigh ox walks, it will not be, it is nigher still.

If corn fails, my crop fails not, and what are drought and rain to me?

The rude Saxon pioneer will sometimes pine for that refinement and artificial beauty which are English, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and classical names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills, the Cliffs of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Derwent, and Winandermere, …

We are apt enough to be pleased with such books as Evelyn’s Sylva, Acetarium, and Kalendarium Hortense, but they imply a relaxed nerve in the reader. Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic.

A highly cultivated man—all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners! The young pines springing up in the cornfields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man—all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

The young pines springing up in the cornfields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.

We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement.

There are other, savager, and more primeval aspects of nature than our poets have sung. It is only white man’s poetry.

Homer and Ossian even can never revive in London or Boston.

And yet behold how these cities are refreshed by the mere tradition, or the imperfectly transmitted fragrance and flavor of these wild fruits.

If we could listen but for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization.

Nations are not whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations; but the Indian does well to continue Indian.

After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning, and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature.

All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Muhammadans, and the same translated suffice for all.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

Joseph Wolff, the missionary, distributed copies of Robinson Crusoe, translated into Arabic, among the Arabs, and they made a great sensation. “Robinson Crusoe’s adventures and wisdom,” says he, “were read by Muhammadans in the marketplaces of Sanaa, Hodyeda, and Loheya, and admired and believed!”

Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.

In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence for our classical dictionary—and then, perchance, have stuck up their names to shine in some corner of the firmament.

Not that there was any peculiar efficacy in our look, but rather a sense of shame left in him which disarmed him.

It is a very true and expressive phrase, “He looked daggers at me,” for the first pattern and prototype of all daggers must have been a glance of the eye.

First, there was the glance of Jove’s eye, then his fiery bolt, then, the material gradually hardening, tridents, spears, javelins, and finally, for the convenience of private men, daggers, krisses, and so forth, were invented.

First, there was the glance of Jove’s eye, then his fiery bolt, then, the material gradually hardening, tridents, spears, javelins, and finally, for the convenience of private men, daggers, krisses, and so forth, were invented.

It is wonderful how we get about the streets without being wounded by these delicate and glancing weapons, a man can so nimbly whip out his rapier, or without being noticed carry it unsheathed. Yet it is rare that one gets seriously looked at.

As we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the Merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons;

Society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but I presume that there is not less religion than formerly. If the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another.

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.

whose life is as blameless, how blameworthy soever it may be, on the Lord’s Mona-day as on his Suna-day.

There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes.

Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and conscious blasphemy or irreverence; but of indirect and habitual, enough.

I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches.

It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.

I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I …

all the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.

The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.

Old Drayton thought that a man that lived here, and would be a poet, for instance, should have in him certain “brave, translunary things,” and a “fine madness” should possess his brain. Certainly it were as well, that he might be up to the occasion.

The wonder is, rather, that all men do not assert as much. That would be a rare praise, if it were true, which was addressed to Francis Beaumont—“Spectators sate part in your tragedies.”

Think what a mean and wretched place this world is; that half the time we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it.

This is half our life. Who would undertake the enterprise if it were all? And, pray, what more has day to offer? A lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction.

This is half our life. Who would undertake the enterprise if it were all? And, pray, what more has day to offer? A lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction.

Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.

I make ye an offer, Ye gods, hear the scoffer, The scheme will not hurt you, If ye will find goodness, I will find virtue.

But in all my wanderings I never came across the least vestige of authority for these things. They have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.

If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer. To see from earth to heaven, and see there standing, still a fixture, that old Jewish scheme!

Having come to it so recently and freshly, it has the greater charm, so that I cannot find any to talk with about it.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

The reading which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindus, the Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to last.

thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly, till there are three barrels of sermons! Who, without cant, can read them aloud? Who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out of the meetinghouse? They never were read, they never were heard.

Let but one of these sentences be rightly read, from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meetinghouse upon another.

Yet the New Testament treats of man and man’s so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man’s religious or moral nature, or in man even.

It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.

I know of no book that has so few readers.

There is none so truly strange, and heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than Greeks and Jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block.

I have not the most definite designs on the future.

Absolutely speaking, “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you” is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver.

An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case. The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.

He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.

The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians, and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen. It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.

If I should ask the minister of Middlesex to let me speak in his pulpit on a Sunday, he would object, because I do not pray as he does, or because I am not ordained. What under the sun are these things?

Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches.

The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine. The church is a sort of hospital for men’s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.

… religious books twanging a canting peal round the earth, seeming to issue from some Egyptian temple and echo along the shore of the Nile, right opposite to Pharaoh’s palace and Moses in the bulrushes, startling a multitude of storks and alligators basking in the sun.

Everywhere “good men” sound a retreat, and the word has gone forth to fall back on innocence. Fall forward rather on to whatever there is there.

Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy.

What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. He should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered till they are quite healed.

There is more religion in men’s science than there is science in their religion. Let us make haste to the report of the committee on swine.

A man’s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does.

He should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered till they are quite healed. There is more religion in men’s science than there is science in their religion. Let us make haste to the report of the committee on swine.

A man’s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith.

The last is never adopted. This it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does.

I have seen some who did not know when to turn aside their eyes in meeting yours. A truly confident and magnanimous spirit is wiser than to contend for the mastery in such encounters.

Serpents alone conquer by the steadiness of their gaze. My friend looks me in the face and sees me, that is all.

The best relations were at once established between us and this man, and though few words were spoken, he could not conceal a visible interest in us and our excursion.

Even we youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village of Chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was its obscure north district only, and the giant weaver was not yet fairly born.

So old are we; so young is it.

We were thus entering the State of New Hampshire on the bosom of the flood formed by the tribute of its innumerable valleys.

Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.

Indeed, the best books have a use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not anticipated in the preface, nor concluded in the appendix.

Even Virgil’s poetry serves a very different use to me today from what it did to his contemporaries. It has often an acquired and accidental value merely, proving that man is still man in the world.

In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us.

These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran.

It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions. We can, therefore, publish only our advertisement of it.

There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed, or in some way musically measured—is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit.

As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.

It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. What else have the Hindus, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians done, that can be told?

the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day.

The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising.

Homer is gone; and where is Jove? and where The rival cities seven? His song outlives Time, tower, and god—all that then was, save Heaven.

… ancients, and it is still the mythology of the moderns, the poem of mankind, interwoven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching in grandeur and harmony the architecture of the heavens themselves, seems to point to a time when a mightier genius inhabited the earth.

But, after all, man is the great poet, and not Homer nor Shakespeare; and our language itself, and the common arts of life, are his work.

Poetry is so universally true and independent of experience, that it does not need any particular biography to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or later to some Orpheus or Linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity and the gods themselves.

and where, O Arjoon, is there another?” Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children.

He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.

The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive. Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring;

But is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature of the Russians and the Chinese, or even French philosophy and much of German criticism.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

“There are the worshippers with offerings, and the worshippers with mortifications; and again the worshippers with enthusiastic devotion;

Merchants, arise, And mingle conscience with your merchandise.

Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another.

Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.

They teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge, for, to speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it is not easy to distinguish elementary knowledge. There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.

They must not yield wheat and potatoes, but must themselves be the unconstrained and natural harvest of their author’s lives.

… be as vigorous as a sugar-maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure, beside what runs into the troughs, and not like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the endeavor to heal its wounds.

The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow.

We love to think in winter, as we walk over the snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant creatures, which have such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick folds of fur, impervious …

Alamo and Fanning! and after rolls the tide of war. The very walls and fences seem to travel. But the most rapid trot is no flow after all; and thither, reader, you and I, at least, will not follow.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.

For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Hussein Effendi praised the epistolary style of Ibrahim Pasha to the French traveller Botta, because of “the difficulty of understanding it; there was,” he said, “but one person at Jidda, who was capable of understanding and explaining the Pasha’s correspondence.”

A man’s whole life is taxed for the least thing well done.

It is its net result. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?

and so will the strokes of that scholar’s pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away.

The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence.

Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body. We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hardworking men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort.

We are amused to read how Ben Jonson engaged that the dull masks with which the royal family and nobility were to be entertained should be “grounded upon antiquity and solid learning.”

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.

The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things, to the scholar is rarely well remembered;

From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.

A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

The scholar requires hard and serious labor to give an impetus to his thought. He will learn to grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an axe or a sword.

He is anxious only about the fruitful kernels of time. Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails.

The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days were an eternity.

Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another. Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails.

The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days were an eternity.

Then spend an age in whetting thy desire, Thou needs’t not hasten if thou dost stand fast.

They overstep her modesty, somehow or other, and confer no favor. They do not speak a good word for her. Most cry better than they speak, and you can get more nature out of them by pinching than by addressing them.

The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the mealymouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature.

Better that the primrose by the river’s brim be a yellow primrose, and nothing more, than that it be something less.

The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the mealymouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature.

Better that the primrose by the river’s brim be a yellow primrose, and nothing more, than that it be something less.

Aubrey relates of Thomas Fuller that his was “a very working head, insomuch that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eat up a penny loaf, not knowing that he did it.

not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us.

Fortunately we had no business in this country.

The Concord had rarely been a river, or rivus, but barely fluvius, or between fluvius and lacus. This Merrimack was neither rivus nor fluvius nor lacus, but rather amnis here, a gently swelling and stately rolling flood approaching the sea.

Wherefore he requests that their “Honors would be pleased to order him three or four men to help garrison his said house,” which they did.

But methinks that such a garrison would be weakened by the addition of a man.

Make bandog thy scout watch to bark at a thief, Make courage for life, to be capitain chief; Make trap-door thy bulwark, make bell to begin, Make gunstone and arrow show who is within.

But now, at any rate, as I have frequently observed, a man may desert the fertile frontier territories of truth and justice, which are the State’s best lands, for fear of far more insignificant foes, without forfeiting any of his civil rights therein.

Nay, townships are granted to deserters, and the General Court, as I am sometimes inclined to regard it, is but a deserters’ camp itself.

As we rowed along near the shore of Wicasuck Island, which was then covered with wood, in order to avoid the current, two men, who looked as if they had just run out of Lowell, where they had been waylaid by the Sabbath, meaning to …

Whether it might have proved tragedy, or comedy, or tragicomedy, or pastoral, we cannot tell. This Sunday ended by the going down of the sun, leaving us still on the waves.

But they who are on the water enjoy a longer and brighter twilight than they who are on the land, for here the water, as well as the atmosphere, absorbs and reflects the light, and some of the day seems to have sunk down into the waves.

The light gradually forsook the deep water, as well as the deeper air, and the gloaming came to the fishes as well as to us, and more dim and gloomy to them, whose day is a perpetual twilight, though sufficiently bright for their weak and …

I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race.

But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.

“Time drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action which ought to be performed, and is delayed in the execution.” So says Vishnu Sharma; and we perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the Suns.

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

There are many skillful apprentices, but few master workmen. On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

There are many skillful apprentices, but few master workmen.

On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher. Who does not see that heresies have some time prevailed, that reforms have already taken place?

Even they who first built these barns and cleared the land thus, had some valor. The abrupt epochs and chasms are smoothed down in history as the inequalities of the plain are concealed by distance.

But unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.

Now that we are casting away these melon seeds, how can we help feeling reproach? He who eats the fruit, should at least plant the seed; aye, if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed. Seeds!

Now that we are casting away these melon seeds, how can we help feeling reproach?

He who eats the fruit, should at least plant the seed; aye, if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed.

Seeds! there are seeds enough which need only to be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor. O thou spendthrift! Defray thy debt to the world;

Defray thy debt to the world; eat not the seed of institutions, as the luxurious do, but plant it rather, while thou devourest the pulp and tuber for thy subsistence; that so, perchance, one variety may at last be found worthy of preservation.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

All laborers must have their nooning, and at this season of the day, we are all, more or less, Asiatics, and give over all work and reform.

We thought that we might lead a dignified Oriental life along this stream as well, and the maple and alders would be our Khat-trees.

It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.

Think you that sitting hens are troubled with ennui these long summer days, sitting on and on in the crevice of a hayloft, without active employment?

“The oracles often give victory to our choice, and not to the order alone of the mundane periods. As, for instance, when they say that our voluntary sorrows germinate in us as the growth of the particular life we lead.”

The reform which you talk about can be undertaken any morning before unbarring our doors.

We need not call any convention. When two neighbors begin to eat corn bread who before ate wheat, then the gods smile from ear to ear, for it is very pleasant to them. Why do you not try it? Don’t let me hinder you.

We need not call any convention. When two neighbors begin to eat corn bread who before ate wheat, then the gods smile from ear to ear, for it is very pleasant to them.

Why do you not try it? Don’t let me hinder you.

There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation.

The States have leisure to laugh from Maine to Texas at some newspaper joke, and New England shakes at the double-entendres of Australian circles, while the poor reformer cannot get a hearing.

Men do not fail commonly for want of knowledge, but for want of prudence to give wisdom the preference.

What we need to know in any case is very simple. It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it.

We should be slow to mend, my friends, as slow to require mending, “Not hurling, according to the oracle, a transcendent foot towards piety.” The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely.

You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

What was the excitement of the Delphic priestess compared with the calm wisdom of Socrates?—or whoever it was that was wise.—Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles. What was the excitement of the Delphic priestess compared with the calm wisdom of Socrates?—or whoever it was that was wise.—

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

Men find that action is another thing Than what they in discoursing papers read; The world’s affairs require in managing More arts than those wherein you clerks proceed.

We know not yet what we have done, still less what we are doing. Wait till evening, and other parts of our day’s work will shine than we had thought at noon, and we shall discover the real purport of our toil.

As when the farmer has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can tell best where the pressed earth shines most.

To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever.

Aristotle said, “As time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the Tanais nor the Nile can have flowed forever.” We are independent of the change we detect.

The longer the lever the less perceptible its motion. It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital.

The hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste. All good abides with him who waiteth wisely; we shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurrying over the hills of the west.

We are independent of the change we detect. The longer the lever the less perceptible its motion. It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. The hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste.

All good abides with him who waiteth wisely; we shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurrying over the hills of the west.

Be assured that every man’s success is in proportion to his average ability. The meadow flowers spring and bloom where the waters annually deposit their slime, not where they reach in some freshet only.

Be assured that every man’s success is in proportion to his average ability. The meadow flowers spring and bloom where the waters annually deposit their slime, not where they reach in some freshet only.

A man is not his hope, nor his despair, nor yet his past deed. We know not yet what we have done, still less what we are doing.

Wait till evening, and other parts of our day’s work will shine than we had thought at noon, and we shall discover the real purport of our toil.

Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years, with sufficient accuracy.

Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.

Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.

Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

But will the government never be so well administered, inquired one, that we private men shall hear nothing about it? “The king answered: At all events, I require a prudent and able man, who is capable of managing the state affairs of my kingdom.

The ex-minister said: The criterion, O Sire! of a wise and competent man is, that he will not meddle with suchlike matters.” Alas that the ex-minister should have been so nearly right!

In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.

It is grateful to make one’s way through this latest generation as through dewy grass. Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious.

In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.

It is grateful to make one’s way through this latest generation as through dewy grass.

Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious.

They are cobwebs and trifling obstacles in an earnest man’s path, it is true, and at length one even becomes attached to his unswept and undusted garret. I love man—kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead un-kind.

Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors.

Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly. They are all Dudleian; and piety derives its origin still from that exploit of pius Aeneas, who bore his father, Anchises, on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy.

for it is not to be forgotten, that while the law holds fast the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose.

When I have not paid the tax which the State demanded for that protection which I did not want, itself has robbed me; when I have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, itself has imprisoned me.

Poor creature! if it knows no better I will not blame it. If it cannot live but by these means, I can. I do not wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquering Mexico.

… countless reforms are called for, because society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could wriggle neither way.

All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground.

Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.

All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant.

A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.

Virtues as rivers pass, But still remains that virtuous man there was.

Virtues as rivers pass, But still remains that virtuous man there was.

Most men have no inclination, no rapids, no cascades, but marshes, and alligators, and miasma instead.

We read that when in the expedition of Alexander, Onesicritus was sent forward to meet certain of the Indian sect of Gymnosophists, and he had told them of those new philosophers of the West, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Diogenes, and their doctrines, one of them named …

It may be so. But even this infirmity of noble minds marks the gradual decay of youthful hope and faith. It is the allowed infidelity of age.

There is a saying of the Wolofs, “He who was born first has the greatest number of old clothes,” consequently M. Chateaubriand has more old clothes than I have.

It is comparatively a faint and reflected beauty that is admired, not an essential and intrinsic one. It is because the old are weak, feel their mortality, and think that they have measured the strength of man. They will not boast;

“He who enjoyeth but the Amrita which is left of his offerings, obtaineth the eternal spirit of Brahma, the Supreme.”

What, after all, does the practicalness of life amount to? The things immediate to be done are very trivial. I could postpone them all to hear this locust sing.

The most glorious fact in my experience is not anything that I have done or may hope to do, but a transient thought, or vision, or dream, which I have had.

I could postpone them all to hear this locust sing. The most glorious fact in my experience is not anything that I have done or may hope to do, but a transient thought, or vision, or dream, which I have had.

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

But how can I communicate with the gods who am a pencil-maker on the earth, and not be insane?

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

But how can I communicate with the gods who am a pencil-maker on the earth, and not be insane?

“I am the same to all mankind,” says Krishna; “there is not one who is worthy of my love or hatred.”

Behold the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The former has nothing to do in this world; the latter is full of activity.

The one looks in the sun till his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his westward course.

There is such a thing as caste, even in the West, but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds; the State is thy parent.

the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial. There is a struggle between the Oriental and Occidental in every nation; some who would be forever contemplating the sun, and some who are hastening toward the sunset.

The former class says to the latter, When you have reached the sunset, you will be no nearer to the sun. To which the latter replies, But we so prolong the day.

The former “walketh but in that night, when all things go to rest the night of time. The contemplative Muni sleepeth but in the day of time, when all things wake.”

… perhaps the worthiest of mankind, and the fathers of modern thinking—for the contemplations of those Indian sages have influenced, and still influence, the intellectual development of mankind—whose works even yet survive in wonderful completeness, are, for the most part, not recognized as ever having existed.

If the lions had been the painters it would have been otherwise.

In everyone’s youthful dreams philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world.

but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the traveller, and directed him farther on his way to Isfahan or Baghdad.

Thank God, no Hindu tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste.

I know of no book which has come down to us with grander pretensions than this, and it is so impersonal and sincere that it is never offensive nor ridiculous.

and its fixed sentences keep up their distant fires still, like the stars, by whose dissipated rays this lower world is illumined. The whole book by noble gestures and inclinations renders many words unnecessary.

English sense has toiled, but Hindu wisdom never perspired.

Though the sentences open as we read them, unexpensively, and at first almost unmeaningly, as the petals of a flower, they sometimes startle us with that rare kind of wisdom which could only have been learned from the most trivial experience;

… up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incorruptible ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, and I am assured that they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by.

Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand.

There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of blood must circulate forever.

But if it comes to this, that you compare notes, then you are all wrong. As it is, each takes us up into the serene heavens, whither the smallest bubble rises as surely as the largest, and paints earth and sky for us.

Any sincere thought is irresistible.

The very austerity of the Brahmans is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler luxury. Wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more refined pleasure. Their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream.

Why, what we would fain call new is not skin deep; the earth is not yet stained by it. It is not the fertile ground which we walk on, but the leaves which flutter over our heads.

The newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses.

When we dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface, we call it new, and the plants which spring from it; and when our vision pierces deeper into space, and detects a remoter star, we call that new also.

Its beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, flat and bounded, but atmospheric and roving or free. In reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its hue and color.

Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now.

We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the more like the heavens.

In reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now.

We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the more like the heavens.

Of what moment are facts that can be lost—which need to be commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.

the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is.

Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.

We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones?

the living fact commemorates itself. Why look in the dark for light? Strictly speaking, the historical societies have not recovered one fact from oblivion, but are themselves, instead of the fact, that is lost.

The researcher is more memorable than the researched.

The crowd stood admiring the mist and the dim outlines of the trees seen through it, when one of their number advanced to explore the phenomenon, and with fresh admiration all eyes were turned on his dimly retreating figure.

We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones?

Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern.

It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

but consider the Universal History, and then tell us—when did burdock and plantain sprout first? It has been so written for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages.

They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.

The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it.

Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him.

If I am not I, who will be?

But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials.

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary. The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone.

There was but the sun and the eye from the first.

The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fiber of the other.

If we could pierce the obscurity of those remote years, we should find it light enough; only there is not our day. Some creatures are made to see in the dark.

There has always been the same amount of light in the world.

The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect the general illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them. The eyes of the oldest fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of light prevailed then as now.

See how the pines spire without end higher and higher, and make a graceful fringe to the earth. And who shall count the finer cobwebs that soar and float away from their utmost tops, and the myriad insects that dodge between them.

Leaves are of more various forms than the alphabets of all languages put together; of the oaks alone there are hardly two alike, and each expresses its own character.

In all her products Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds.

“Here lies,”—“Here lies”;—why do they not sometimes write: There rises? Is it a monument to the body only that is intended? “Having reached the term of his natural life”;—would it not be truer to say: Having reached the term of his unnatural life?

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

If any character is given, it should be as severely true as the decision of the three judges below, and not the partial testimony of friends. Friends and contemporaries should supply only the name and date, and leave it to posterity to write the epitaph.

Faith, then ye have Two in one grave, For in his favor, Here too lies the Engraver.

Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true.

But they only are the true epitaphs which Old Mortality retouches.

But fire and smoke soon tamed the scene; the rocks consented to be our walls, and the pines our roof. A woodside was already the fittest locality for us.

The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man.

Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men.

It was pleasant to lie with our heads so low in the grass, and hear what a tinkling ever-busy laboratory it was.

A thousand little artisans beat on their anvils all night long.

Far in the night as we were falling asleep on the bank of the Merrimack, we heard some tyro beating a drum incessantly, in preparation for a country muster, as we learned, and we thought of the line—

Suddenly old Time winked at me—Ah, you know me, you rogue—and news had come that it was well. That ancient universe is in such capital health, I think undoubtedly it will never die.

Heal yourselves, doctors; by God, I live.

Then idle Time ran gadding by And left me with Eternity alone; I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the verge of sight—

It doth expand my privacies To all, and leave me single in the crowd.

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

Now chiefly is my natal hour, And only now my prime of life. I will not doubt the love untold, Which not my worth nor want hath bought, Which wooed me young and wooes me old, And to this evening hath me brought.

… and beauteous fabric of the soul, and that of it that roves about the body, and many times, for want of tune and air, breaks forth into many extravagances and excesses, might be sweetly recalled and artfully wound up to their former consent and agreement.”

Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. It is the only assured tone.

There are in it such strains as far surpass any man’s faith in the loftiness of his destiny. Things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn. Formerly I heard these

so, shaking the clay from our feet, we pushed into the fog.

Though we were enveloped in mist as usual, we trusted that there was a bright day behind it.

Ply the oars! away! away! In each dewdrop of the morning Lies the promise of a day.

A man may jump down his own cellar stairs or dash his brains out against his chimney, if he is mad. So far as my experience goes, travellers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way.

Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what’s the hurry?

If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on the very spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there;

but the places that have known him, they are lost—how much anxiety and danger would vanish.

I am not alone if I stand by myself.

Who knows where in space this globe is rolling? Yet we will not give ourselves up for lost, let it go where it will.

I read these things at a vast advantage there, and it seemed to me that the advertisements, or what is called the business part of a paper, were greatly the best, the most useful, natural, and respectable.

Almost all the opinions and sentiments expressed were so little considered, so shallow and flimsy, that I thought the very texture of the paper must be weaker in that part and tear the more easily.

The advertisements and the prices current were more closely allied to nature, and were respectable in some measure as tide and meteorological tables are;

My only companions were the mice, which came to pick up the crumbs that had been left in those scraps of paper; still, as everywhere, pensioners on man, and not unwisely improving this elevated tract for their habitation.

They nibbled what was for them; I nibbled what was for me.

Once or twice in the night, when I looked up, I saw a white cloud drifting through the windows, and filling the whole upper story.

The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us. Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her.

We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.

Such was the heaviness of the dews along this river that we were generally obliged to leave our tent spread over the bows of the boat till the sun had dried it, to avoid mildew.

but it is the mist of prejudice alone, which the winds will not disperse.

The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it.

The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us. Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her.

but it is the mist of prejudice alone, which the winds will not disperse. The most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it.

The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us.

Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.

The like urgency has caused many things to be remembered which never transpired.

The truth is, there is money buried everywhere, and you have only to go to work to find it.

Not far from these falls stands an oak-tree, on the interval, about a quarter of a mile from the river, on the farm of a Mr.

The fleas bit the sheep, and the sheep bit the ground, and the sore had spread to this extent. It is astonishing what a great sore a little scratch breedeth.

Who knows but Sahara, where caravans and cities are buried, began with the bite of an African flea?

This poor globe, how it must itch in many places! Will no god be kind enough to spread a salve of birches over its sores?

It is astonishing what a great sore a little scratch breedeth. Who knows but Sahara, where caravans and cities are buried, began with the bite of an African flea?

This poor globe, how it must itch in many places!

Will no god be kind enough to spread a salve of birches over its sores?

Yet these men had no need to travel to be as wise as Solomon in all his glory, so similar are the lives of men in all countries, and fraught with the same homely experiences.

One half the world knows how the other half lives.

About noon we passed a small village in Merrimack at Thornton’s Ferry, and tasted of the waters of Naticook Brook on the same side, where French and his companions, whose grave we saw in Dunstable, were ambuscaded by the Indians.

During the many hours which we spend in this waking sleep, the hand stands still on the face of the clock, and we grow like corn in the night.

Men are as busy as the brooks or bees, and postpone everything to their business; as carpenters discuss politics between the strokes of the hammer while they are shingling a roof.

This noontide was a fit occasion to make some pleasant harbor, and there read the journal of some voyageur like ourselves, not too moral nor inquisitive, and which would not disturb the noon;

Too quick resolves do resolution wrong, What, part so soon to be divorced so long? Things to be done are long to be debated; Heaven is not day’d, Repentance is not dated.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.

Where is the skillful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge?

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.

Where is the skillful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge?

Nature herself has not provided the most graceful end for her creatures. What becomes of all these birds that people the air and forest for our solacement? The sparrows seem always chipper, never infirm. We do not see their bodies lie about.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. Where is the skillful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge?

Nature herself has not provided the most graceful end for her creatures.

What becomes of all these birds that people the air and forest for our solacement? The sparrows seem always chipper, never infirm. We do not see their bodies lie about. Yet there is a tragedy at the end of each one of their lives.

We remembered a picture of mankind in the hunter age, chasing hares down the mountains; O me miserable!

Yet sheep and oxen are but larger squirrels, whose hides are saved and meat is salted, whose souls perchance are not so large in proportion to their bodies.

There should always be some flowering and maturing of the fruits of nature in the cooking process. Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.

What could it tell of stagnant pools and reeds and dank night-fogs! It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye.

Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

I have seen these birds stand by the half-dozen together in the shallower water along the shore, with their bills thrust into the mud at the bottom, probing for food, the whole head being concealed, while the neck and body formed an arch above the …

If it had been evening we should have been glad to camp there. Not long after, one or two more were passed. The boatmen told us that the current had recently made important changes here.

An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe.

I have a fancy for building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me.

the rocky shells of whirlpools. As if by force of example and sympathy after so many lessons, the rocks, the hardest material, had been endeavoring to whirl or flow into the forms of the most fluid.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

Not only have some of these basins been forming for countless ages, but others exist which must have been completed in a former geological period.

The periods of Hindu and Chinese history, though they reach back to the time when the race of mortals is confounded with the race of gods, are as nothing compared with the periods which these stones have inscribed.

That which commenced a rock when time was young, shall conclude a pebble in the unequal contest.

With such expense of time and natural forces are our very paving-stones produced. They teach us lessons, these dumb workers; verily there are “sermons in stones, and books in the running streams.” In these very holes the Indians hid their provisions;

Still hangs her wrinkled trophy. And here too the poet’s eye may still detect the brazen nails which fastened Time’s inscriptions, and if he has the gift, decipher them by this clue.

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

Here may be heard the din of rivers, and ancient winds which have long since lost their names sough through our woods;—the first faint sounds of spring, older than the summer of Athenian glory, the titmouse lisping in the wood, the jay’s scream, and bluebird’s …

Carnac and Luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand, and at length a wave of the Mediterranean Sea are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur.

Carnac! Carnac! here is Carnac for me. I behold the columns of a larger and purer temple.

This is my Carnac, whose unmeasured dome Shelters the measuring art and measurer’s home.

In the most civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine. Consider the deference which is everywhere paid to a doctor’s opinion.

Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine.

Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. Priests and physicians should never look one another in the face.

When the one comes, the other goes. They could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one’s profession is a satire on the other’s, and either’s success would be the other’s failure.

It is wonderful that the physician should ever die, and that the priest should ever live.

Why is it that the priest is never called to consult with the physician? Is it because men believe practically that matter is independent of spirit. But what is quackery?

Men know that something is good. One says that it is yellow-dock, another that it is bittersweet, another that it is slippery-elm bark, burdock, catnip, calamint, elicampane, thoroughwort, or pennyroyal.

A man may esteem himself happy when that which is his food is also his medicine.

There is no kind of herb, but somebody or other says that it is good. I am very glad to hear it. It reminds me of the first chapter of Genesis. But how should they know that it is good?

In my experience, persons, when they are made the subject of conversation, though with a Friend, are commonly the most prosaic and trivial of facts.

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the character of individuals.

Our discourse all runs to slander, and our limits grow narrower as we advance. How is it that we are impelled to treat our old Friends so ill when we obtain new ones? The housekeeper says:

It takes place, like vegetation in so many materials, because there is such a law, but always without permanent form, though ancient and familiar as the sun and moon, and as sure to come again.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

They silently gather as by magic, these never failing, never quite deceiving visions, like the bright and fleecy clouds in the calmest and clearest days. The Friend is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas.

Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner’s compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them.

We are no nearer than Plato was.

The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and as it were in a straight line.

Who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns of Tadmor of the desert?

There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims.

It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.

Of what use the friendliest dispositions even, if there are no hours given to Friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties and relations?

Friendship is first, Friendship last.

But it is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company.

Friendship is first, Friendship last. But it is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal.

When they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company.

How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins. I would that I were worthy to be any man’s Friend.

When they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.

I would that I were worthy to be any man’s Friend.

What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, love their Friends greatly.

All the abuses which are the object of reform with the philanthropist, the statesman, and the housekeeper are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of Friends.

A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.

It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and another to hear. How can one treat with magnanimity mere wood and stone? If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.

The State does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice; and so do the neighborhood and the family.

What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

But sometimes we are said to love another, that is, to stand in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from, him. Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love;

The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him.

They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.

Though the poet says, “ ’Tis the preeminence of Friendship to impute excellence,” yet we can never praise our Friend, nor esteem him praiseworthy, nor let him think that he can please us by any behavior, or ever treat us well enough.

Let me never have to tell thee what I have not to tell. Let our intercourse be wholly above ourselves, and draw us up to it.

The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.

It is an intelligence above language. One imagines endless conversations with his Friend, in which the tongue shall be loosed, and thoughts be spoken without hesitancy or end; but the experience is commonly far otherwise.

for though its foundations are private, it is, in effect, a public affair and a public advantage, and the Friend, more than the father of a family, deserves well of the state.

The only danger in Friendship is that it will end.

It is a delicate plant, though a native. The least unworthiness, even if it be unknown to one’s self, vitiates it. Let the Friend know that those faults which he observes in his Friend his own faults attract.

To the highest communications we only lend a silent ear. Our finest relations are not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive depth of silence never to be revealed. It may be that we are not even yet acquainted.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Then there can never be an explanation. What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse. What sort of companions are they who are presuming always that their silence is more expressive than yours?

Yet, as an Oriental philosopher has said, “Although Friendship between good men is interrupted, their principles remain unaltered. The stalk of the lotus may be broken, and the fibers remain connected.”

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

There may be courtesy, there may be even temper, and wit, and talent, and sparkling conversation, there may be goodwill even—and yet the humanest and divinest faculties pine for exercise. Our life without love is like coke and ashes.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without. There may be courtesy, there may be even temper, and wit, and talent, and sparkling conversation, there may be goodwill even—and yet the humanest and divinest faculties pine for exercise.

Our life without love is like coke and ashes.

Men may be pure as alabaster and Parian marble, elegant as a Tuscan villa, sublime as Niagara, and yet if there is no milk mingled with the wine at their entertainments, better is the hospitality of Goths and Vandals.

… influences of nature survive during the term of our natural life, so surely my Friend shall forever be my Friend, and reflect a ray of God to me, and time shall foster and adorn and consecrate our Friendship, no less than the ruins of temples.

As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend.

But all that can be said of Friendship is like botany to flowers. How can the understanding take account of its friendliness?

As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend.

But all that can be said of Friendship is like botany to flowers.

How can the understanding take account of its friendliness?

… trenchers, which one while stands at the head of the table, and at another is a milking-stool, and at another a seat for children, and finally goes down to its grave not unadorned with honorable scars, and does not die till it is worn out.

Nothing can shock a brave man but dullness.

Think how many rebuffs every man has experienced in his day; perhaps has fallen into a horsepond, eaten freshwater clams, or worn one shirt for a week without washing.

Ah, my dear Strangers and Enemies, I would not forget you. I can well afford to welcome you. Let me subscribe myself “Yours ever and truly—your much obliged servant.”

We have nothing to fear from our foes; God keeps a standing army for that service; but we have no ally against our Friends, those ruthless Vandals.

Once more to one and all,

Men are by birth equal in this, that given Themselves and their condition, they are even.

I am astonished at the singular pertinacity and endurance of our lives.

The miracle is, that what is is, when it is so difficult, if not impossible, for anything else to be; that we walk on in our particular paths so far, before we fall on death and fate, merely because we must walk in some path;

Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness.

But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever-wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft, A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft, Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.

We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting it, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp …

But we found that the frontiers were not this way any longer.

This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises.

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. We cannot now have the pleasure of erecting the last house;

Undoubtedly, as a Western orator said, “Men generally live over about the same surface; some live long and narrow, and others live broad and short”; but it is all superficial living.

A worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler.

With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane;

but it is all superficial living. A worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer.

We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

I have observed that the afterlife of those who have travelled much is very pathetic.

True and sincere travelling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the grave, or any part of the human journey, and it requires a long probation to be broken into it.

I do not speak of those that travel sitting, the sedentary travellers whose legs hang dangling the while, mere idle symbols of the fact, any more than when we speak of sitting hens we mean those that sit standing, but I mean those to whom …

… the least vestige of truth, and it is the weight of the whole body still which stamps the faintest trace, an eternity will not suffice to extol it, while no evil is so huge, but you grudge to bestow on it a moment of hate.

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

Horace would not have written satire so well if he had not been inspired by it, as by a passion, and fondly cherished his vein.

Universally, the innocent man will come forth from the sharpest inquisition and lecturing, the combined din of reproof and commendation, with a faint sound of eulogy in his ears.

Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.

Falsehood never attains to the dignity of entire falseness, but is only an inferior sort of truth; if it were more thoroughly false, it would incur danger of becoming true.

Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.

Falsehood never attains to the dignity of entire falseness, but is only an inferior sort of truth; if it were more thoroughly false, it would incur danger of becoming true.

Securus quo pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivit,

The utmost thrift and industry of thinking give no man any stock in life; his credit with the inner world is no better, his capital no larger. He must try his fortune again today as yesterday. All questions rely on the present for their solution.

Time measures nothing but itself.

The word that is written may be postponed, but not that on the lip. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it. All the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket.

Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.

Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense.

A perfect work of man’s art would also be wild or natural in a good sense. Man tames Nature only that he may at last make her more free even than he found her, though he may never yet have succeeded.

The swaying soft, Made by the delicate wave parted in front, As through the gentle element we move Like shadows gliding through untroubled dreams.

The forms of beauty fall naturally around the path of him who is in the performance of his proper work; as the curled shavings drop from the plane, and borings cluster round the auger.

Undulation is the gentlest and most ideal of motions, produced by one fluid falling on another. Rippling is a more graceful flight. From a hilltop you may detect in it the wings of birds endlessly repeated.

… a grove assumes the exact form of a canoe, broader or narrower, and higher or lower at the ends, as more or fewer persons are in it, and it rolls in the air with the motion of the body, like a canoe in the water.

Our art leaves its shavings and its dust about; her art exhibits itself even in the shavings and the dust which we make.

She has perfected herself by an eternity of practice. The world is well kept; no rubbish accumulates; the morning air is clear even at this day, and no dust has settled on the grass.

Our art leaves its shavings and its dust about; her art exhibits itself even in the shavings and the dust which we make. She has perfected herself by an eternity of practice.

The world is well kept; no rubbish accumulates; the morning air is clear even at this day, and no dust has settled on the grass.

Behold how the evening now steals over the fields, the shadows of the trees creeping farther and farther into the meadow, and erelong the stars will come to bathe in these retired waters. Her undertakings are secure and never fail.

We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance.

To write a true work of fiction even, is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even, is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

Though I am not much acquainted with the works of Goethe, I should say that it was one of his chief excellences as a writer that he was satisfied with giving an exact description of things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon …

The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. There has been no man of pure Genius; as there has been none wholly destitute of Genius.

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

The expressions of the poet cannot be analyzed; his sentence is one word, whose syllables are words. There are indeed no words quite worthy to be set to his music.

Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it.

It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

The work we choose should be our own, God lets alone.

The work we choose should be our own, God lets alone.

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their foundation below the frost.

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their foundation below the frost.

What is produced by a free stroke charms us, like the forms of lichens and leaves. There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain.

What is produced by a free stroke charms us, like the forms of lichens and leaves.

There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain.

Draw a blunt quill filled with ink over a sheet of paper, and fold the paper before the ink is dry, transversely to this line, and a delicately shaded and regular figure will be produced, in some respects more pleasing than an elaborate drawing.

Draw a blunt quill filled with ink over a sheet of paper, and fold the paper before the ink is dry, transversely to this line, and a delicately shaded and regular figure will be produced, in some respects more pleasing than an elaborate drawing.

The talent of composition is very dangerous⁠—the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp.

I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.

The talent of composition is very dangerous—the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp.

I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.

On his journey from Brenner to Verona, Goethe writes: “The Tees flows now more gently, and makes in many places broad sands.

There were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and this portion of time was but the current hour.

Let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are central still.

If we look into the heavens they are concave, and if we were to look into a gulf as bottomless, it would be concave also. The sky is curved downward to the earth in the horizon, because we stand on the plain.

for though we made it a rule to set down all our experiences therein, yet such a resolution is very hard to keep, for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such obligations, and so indifferent things get recorded, while that is frequently neglected.

It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us.

Whenever we awoke in the night, still eking out our dreams with half-awakened thoughts, it was not till after an interval, when the wind breathed harder than usual, flapping the curtains of the tent, and causing its cords to vibrate, that we remembered that we …

He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. That night was the turning-point in the season.

We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.

We found our boat in the dawn just as we had left it, and as if waiting for us, there on the shore, in autumn, all cool and dripping with dew, and our tracks still fresh in the wet sand around it, the fairies all …

Already the cattle were heard to low wildly in the pastures and along the highways, restlessly running to and fro, as if in apprehension of the withering of the grass and of the approach of winter.

Our thoughts, too, began to rustle.

As I pass along the streets of our village of Concord on the day of our annual Cattle-Show, when it usually happens that the leaves of the elms and buttonwoods begin first to strew the ground under the breath of the October wind, the lively …

From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.

I love these sons of earth every mother’s son of them, with their great hearty hearts rushing tumultuously in herds from spectacle to spectacle, as if fearful lest there should not be time between sun and sun to see them all, and the sun does not wait more than in haying-time.

Wise Nature’s darlings, they live in the world Perplexing not themselves how it is hurled.

The Corybantes, the Bacchantes, the rude primitive tragedians with their procession and goat-song, and the whole paraphernalia of the Panathenaea, which appear so antiquated and peculiar, have their parallel now.

The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.

The farmers crowd to the fair today in obedience to the same ancient law, which Solon or Lycurgus did not enact, as naturally as bees swarm and follow their queen.

to be where some men are drunk, some horses race, some cockerels fight; anxious to be shaking props under a table, and above all to see the “striped pig.” He especially is the creature of the occasion.

He empties both his pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a day. He dearly loves the social slush.

There is no reserve of soberness in him.

The current of our thoughts made as sudden bends as the river, which was continually opening new prospects to the east or south, but we are aware that rivers flow most rapidly and shallowest at these points.

The steadfast shores never once turned aside for us, but still trended as they were made; why then should we always turn aside for them?

A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. It requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate. These winged thoughts are like birds, and will not be handled; even hens will not let you touch them like quadrupeds.

A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. It requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate. These winged thoughts are like birds, and will not be handled; even hens will not let you touch them like quadrupeds.

Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts.

To the rarest genius it is the most expensive to succumb and conform to the ways of the world. Genius is the worst of lumber, if the poet would float upon the breeze of popularity.

To the rarest genius it is the most expensive to succumb and conform to the ways of the world. Genius is the worst of lumber, if the poet would float upon the breeze of popularity.

The bird of paradise is obliged constantly to fly against the wind, lest its gay trappings, pressing close to its body, impede its free movements.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defence, but the toughest son of earth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him.

It is the worshippers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.

The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer.

The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too.

He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer.

He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.

and happily I am reminded of what poetry is—I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall.

Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

His material is pliant in his hands. When the poet is most inspired, is stimulated by an aura which never even colors the afternoons of common men, then his talent is all gone, and he is no longer a poet.

The gods do not grant him any skill more than another. They never put their gifts into his hands, but they encompass and sustain him with their breath.

To say that God has given a man many and great talents, frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands.

The poet’s body even is not fed like other men’s, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives a divine life. By the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age.

Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread.

The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives.

Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought.

The poet often only makes an irruption, like a Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman, and settled colonies.

The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work.

The weak will find his bow in the dwelling, The feeble will attempt to bend it.

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury.

But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet.

It is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the east.

Yet the universe is a sphere whose center is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man.

Upon an isolated hilltop, in an open country, we seem to ourselves to be standing on the boss of an immense shield, the immediate landscape being apparently depressed below the more remote, and rising gradually to the horizon, which is the rim of the shield, …

How fortunate were we who did not own an acre of these shores, who had not renounced our title to the whole.

One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is what he has bought. What I see is mine.

I am a large owner in the Merrimack intervals.

Men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend, Who yet no partial store appropriate, Who no armed ship into the Indies send, To rob me of my orient estate.

He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruits of riches, who summer and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts. Buy a farm! What have I to pay for a farm which a farmer will take?

When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.

When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well.

The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.

There is a pleasant tract on the bank of the Concord, called Conantum, which I have in my mind;—the old deserted farmhouse, the desolate pasture with its bleak cliff, the open wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in the midst, and the moss-grown wild-apple orchard—places …

When my thoughts are sensible of change, I love to see and sit on rocks which I have known, and pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so established. I not yet gray on rocks forever gray, I no longer green under the evergreens.

There is something even in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself.

As we have said, it proved a cool as well as breezy day, and by the time we reached Penichook Brook we were obliged to sit muffled in our cloaks, while the wind and current carried us along.

At any rate, our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon eclipsed.

There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.

Shadows, referred to the source of light, are pyramids whose bases are never greater than those of the substances which cast them, but light is a spherical congeries of pyramids, whose very apexes are the sun itself, and hence the system shines with uninterrupted light.

The shadows chased one another swiftly over wood and meadow, and their alternation harmonized with our mood. We could distinguish the clouds which cast each one, though never so high in the heavens.

When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul, where is the substance?

Probably, if we were wise enough, we should see to what virtue we are indebted for any happier moment we enjoy. No doubt we have earned it at some time; for the gifts of Heaven are never quite gratuitous.

The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth. The wood which we now mature, when it becomes virgin mould, determines the character of our second growth, whether that be oaks or pines.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit.

This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve.

If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveller always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view.

The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.

There are things there written with such fine and subtle tinctures, paler than the juice of limes, that to the diurnal eye they leave no trace, and only the chemistry of night reveals them.

If we see the reality in things, of what moment is the superficial and apparent longer? What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

While I sit here listening to the waves which ripple and break on this shore, I am absolved from all obligation to the past, and the council of nations may reconsider its votes. The grating of a pebble annuls them.

Still occasionally in my dreams I remember that rippling water.

They were great and current motions, the flowing sail, the running stream, the waving tree, the roving wind.

The north-wind stepped readily into the harness which we had provided, and pulled us along with good will.

Sometimes we sailed as gently and steadily as the clouds overhead, watching the receding shores and the motions of our sail;

It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.

Behind every man’s busyness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.

The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one. Few detect the morality in the former, or the science in the latter.

Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics, that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist.

The purest science is still biographical.

Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee, and he professes another religion than it teaches, and worships at a foreign shrine.

I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience.

How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another’s experience only by his own.

We read that Newton discovered the law of gravitation, but how many who have heard of his famous discovery have recognized the same truth that he did? It may be not one.

… that they were then in a higher southern latitude than had been attained by that enterprising seaman, the late Captain James Weddel, and therefore higher than all their predecessors, an extra allowance of grog was issued to the crews as a reward for their perseverance.”

Let not us sailors of late centuries take upon ourselves any airs on account of our Newtons and our Cuviers; we deserve an extra allowance of grog only.

We endeavored in vain to persuade the wind to blow through the long corridor of the canal, which is here cut straight through the woods, and were obliged to resort to our old expedient of drawing by a cord.

Perhaps he is the youthfullest of them all. We return to him as to the purest well, the fountain farthest removed from the highway of desultory life.

He is so natural and cheerful, compared with later poets, that we might almost regard him as a personification of spring.

To the faithful reader his muse has even given an aspect to his times, and when he is fresh from perusing him, they seem related to the golden age. It is still the poetry of youth and life, rather than of thought;

Before the earnest gaze of the reader, the rust and moss of time gradually drop off, and the original green life is revealed. He was a homely and domestic man, and did breathe quite as modern men do.

There is no wisdom that can take place of humanity, and we find that in Chaucer.

We can expand at last in his breadth, and we think that we could have been that man’s acquaintance.

For first the thing is thought within the hart, Er any word out from the mouth astart.

And so new was all his theme in those days, that he did not have to invent, but only to tell.

We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit. The easy height he speaks from in his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, as if he were equal to any of the company there assembled, is as good as any particular excellence in it.

If Nature is our mother, then God is our father. There is less love and simple, practical trust in Shakespeare and Milton. How rarely in our English tongue do we find expressed any affection for God.

Certainly, there is no sentiment so rare as the love of God.

Herbert almost alone expresses it, “Ah, my dear God!” Our poet uses similar words with propriety; and whenever he sees a beautiful person, or other object, prides himself on the “maistry” of his God. He even recommends Dido to be his bride—

Surely fate has enshrined it in these circumstances for some end.

Nature strews her nuts and flowers broadcast, and never collects them into heaps.

This was the soil it grew in, and this the hour it bloomed in; if sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and expand the flower, shall not we come here to pluck it?

Most have beauty of outline merely, and are striking as the form and bearing of a stranger; but true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very breath of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and fragrance.

Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.

It is only an unusual precision and elasticity of speech, as if its author had taken, not an intoxicating draught, but an electuary. It has the distinct outline of sculpture, and chronicles an early hour.

It is only an unusual precision and elasticity of speech, as if its author had taken, not an intoxicating draught, but an electuary. It has the distinct outline of sculpture, and chronicles an early hour.

Under the influence of passion all men speak thus distinctly, but wrath is not always divine.

There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art—one seeks food for nutriment, the other for flavor; one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate. There are two kinds of writing, both great and rare: