Essays quotes

“Of what significance the things you can forget?

A little thought is sexton to all the world.

”

So stands his life to heaven, as some fair sunlit tree against the western horizon, and by sunrise is planted on some eastern hill, to glisten in the first rays of the dawn.

The brave man braves nothing, nor knows he of his bravery.

He is that sixth champion against Thebes, whom, when the proud devices of the rest have been recorded, the poet describes as “bearing a full-orbed shield of solid brass,”

So is the profanity of his companion as a flash across the face of his sky, which lights up and reveals its serene depths.

Earth cannot shock the heavens, but its dull vapor and foul smoke make a bright cloud spot in the ether, and anon the sun, like a cunning artificer, will cut and paint it, and set it for a jewel in the breast of the sky.

His greatness is not measurable; not such a greatness as when we would erect a stupendous piece of art, and send far and near for materials, intending to lay the foundations deeper, and rear the structure higher than ever;

and from so small and ill-defined a curvature, you can calculate no centre whatever; but their mean is no better than meanness, nor their medium than mediocrity.

The coward wants resolution, which the brave man can do without.

He recognizes no faith but a creed, thinking this straw, by which he is moored, does him good service, because his sheet-anchor does not drag. “The house-roof fights with the rain; he who is under shelter does not know it.”

The grand and majestic have always somewhat of the undulatoriness of the sphere. It is the secret of majesty in the rolling gait of the elephant, and of all grace in action and in art.

Always the line of beauty is a curve.

When with pomp a huge sphere is drawn along the streets, by the efforts of a hundred men, I seem to discover each striving to imitate its gait, and keep step with it—if possible to swell to its own diameter.

The man of fortitude, whom the Latins called fortis is no other than that lucky person whom fors favors, or vir summae fortis. If we will, every bark may “carry Caesar and Caesar’s fortune.”

For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself; he was no artist, but an artisan, who first made shields of brass.

For armor of proof, mea virtute me involvo—I wrap myself in my virtue;

No man’s shadow is as large as his body, if the rays make a right angle with the reflecting surface. Let our lives be passed under the equator, with the sun in the meridian.

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

Overcome evil with good. Practice no such narrow economy as they, whose bravery amounts to no more light than a farthing candle, before which most objects cast a shadow wider than themselves.

What first suggested that necessity was grim, and made fate to be so fatal?

The strongest is always the least violent.

Necessity is my eastern cushion on which I recline. My eye revels in its prospect as in the summer haze. I ask no more but to be left alone with it. It is the bosom of time and the lap of eternity.

All things thus echo back his own spirit, and thus the hostile territory is preoccupied for him. He is no longer insulated, but infinitely related and familiar. The roll-call musters for him all the forces of Nature.

There is as much music in the world as virtue.

In a world of peace and love music would be the universal language, and men greet each other in the fields in such accents as a Beethoven now utters at rare intervals from a distance. All things obey music as they obey virtue.

The universe needed only to hear a divine melody, that every star might fall into its proper place, and assume its true sphericity. It entails a surpassing affluence on the meanest thing; riding over the heads of sages, and soothing the din of philosophy.

When we listen to it we are so wise that we need not to know.

All sounds, and more than all, silence, do fife and drum for us. The least creaking doth whet all our senses, and emit a tremulous light, like the aurora borealis, over things.

… 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.”

A sudden burst from a horn startles us, as if one had rashly provoked a wild beast.

We admire his boldness; he dares wake the echoes which he cannot put to rest. The sound of a bugle in the stillness of the night sends forth its voice to the farthest stars, and marshals them in new order and harmony.

A sudden burst from a horn startles us, as if one had rashly provoked a wild beast.

We admire his boldness; he dares wake the echoes which he cannot put to rest.

The sound of a bugle in the stillness of the night sends forth its voice to the farthest stars, and marshals them in new order and harmony. Instantly it finds a fit sounding-board in the heavens.

If his pulse does not beat in unison with the musician’s quips and turns, it accords with the pulse-beat of the ages.

A man’s life should be a stately march to an unheard music; and when to his fellows it may seem irregular and inharmonious, he will be stepping to a livelier measure, which only his nicer ear can detect.

There will be no halt, ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the deeper melody is no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being.

… a circumstance to themselves, instead of causing the universe to stand around, the mute witness of their manhood, and the stars to forget their sphere music and chant an elegiac strain, that heroism should have departed out of their ranks and gone over to humanity.

It is not enough that our life is an easy one; we must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward with ardor to the strenuous sortie of the morrow.

“Sit not down in the popular seats and common level of virtues, but endeavor to make them heroical. Offer not only peace-offerings but holocausts unto God.” To the brave soldier the rust and leisure of peace are harder than the fatigues of war.

… is not such a piece of day-labor, that a man must be thinking what he shall do next for a livelihood—but such, that as it began in endeavor, so will it end only when no more in heaven or on earth remains to be endeavored.

Effort is the prerogative of virtue.

Let not death be the sole task of life—the moment when we are rescued from death to life, and set to work—if indeed that can be called a task which all things do but alleviate.

What were Godfrey and Gonsalvo unless we breathed a life into them and enacted their exploits as a prelude to our own?

The Past is the canvas on which our idea is painted⁠—the dim prospectus of our future field.

We are dreaming of what we are to do. Methinks I hear the clarion sound, and clang of corselet and buckler, from many a silent hamlet of the soul. The signal gun has long since sounded, and we are not yet on our posts.

We are dreaming of what we are to do. Methinks I hear the clarion sound, and clang of corselet and buckler, from many a silent hamlet of the soul.

The signal gun has long since sounded, and we are not yet on our posts.

Let us make such haste as the morning, and such delay as the evening.

We are dreaming of what we are to do. Methinks I hear the clarion sound, and clang of corselet and buckler, from many a silent hamlet of the soul. The signal gun has long since sounded, and we are not yet on our posts.

Let us make such haste as the morning, and such delay as the evening.

… 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.

… neglectful even of that silence which is consistent with true modesty, but by its independence of all confidence in its disclosures, makes that which it imparts so private to the hearer, that it becomes the care of the whole world that modesty be not infringed.

To the man who cherishes a secret in his breast, there is a still greater secret unexplored.

Our most indifferent acts may be matter for secrecy, but whatever we do with the utmost truthfulness and integrity, by virtue of its pureness, must be transparent as light.

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

Our vices lie ever 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.

is then the motto of a wise man. For first, as the subtle discernment of the language would have taught us, with all his negligence he is still secure; but the sluggard, notwithstanding his heedlessness, is insecure.

The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity that includes all time.

He is a child each moment and reflects wisdom. The far darting thought of the child’s mind tarries not for the development of manhood; it lightens itself, and needs not draw down lightning from the clouds.

All the 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 life. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it.

All the 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 life. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it.

Every rail, every farmhouse, seen dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of peace and purity, and we moved happily along the dank roads, enjoying not such privacy as the day leaves when it withdraws, but such as it has not profaned.

It was solitude with light; which is better than darkness.

But anon, the sound of the mower’s rifle was heard in the fields, and this, too, mingled with the herd of days.

In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go and come.

The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest travelled.

Taking advantage of the early hour on a pleasant morning in July, my companion and I passed rapidly through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tributary of the Assabet, in the latter town.

So soon did we begin to learn that man’s life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.

The flowers grow more various ways than he.

But coming soon to higher land, which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we thought we had not travelled in vain, if it were only to hear a truer and wilder pronunciation of their names, from the lips of the inhabitants;

“Nevertheless,” did they seem to say, “come and study us, and learn men and manners.”

So is each one’s world but a clearing in the forest, so much open and enclosed ground.

The landlord had not yet returned from the field with his men, and the cows had yet to be milked.

But the first day the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like looking into the sky again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower heaven.

As to voyagers of an aerial Polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it.

A blue Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees, and hear the lowing of kine.

but by this slight elevation it is infinitely removed from the plain, and when we have reached it, we feel a sense of remoteness, as if we had travelled into distant regions, to Arabia Petrea, or the farthest east, so withdrawn and solitary it seems.

A robin upon a staff, was the highest object in sight, thus easily triumphing over the height of nature.

Swallows were flying about us, and the chewink and cuckoos were heard near at hand. The summit consists of a few acres, destitute of trees, covered with bare rocks, interspersed with blueberry bushes, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, moss, and a fine wiry grass.

Our eyes rested on no painted ceiling nor carpeted hall, but on skies of nature’s painting, and hills and forests of her embroidery. Before sunset, we rambled along the ridge to the north, while a hawk soared still above us.

It was a place where gods might wander, so solemn and solitary, and removed from all contagion with the plain.

As the evening came on, the haze was condensed in vapor, and the landscape became more distinctly visible, and numerous sheets of water were brought to light.

for there was the moon still above us, with Jupiter and Saturn on either hand, looking down on Wachusett, and it was a satisfaction to know that they were our fellow-travellers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny.

Truly the stars were given for a consolation to man.

We should not know but our life were fated to be always grovelling, but it is permitted to behold them, and surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. We see laws which never fail, of whose failure we never conceived;

There was little of the sublimity and grandeur which belong to mountain scenery, but an immense landscape to ponder on a summer’s day.

We could see how ample and roomy is nature.

As far as the eye could reach, there was little life in the landscape; the few birds that flitted past did not crowd. The travellers on the remote highways, which intersect the country on every side, had no fellow-travellers for miles, before or behind.

how they are guided, too, in their course by the rivers and valleys, and who knows but by the stars, as well as the mountain ranges, and not by the petty landmarks which we use?

The bird whose eye takes in the Green Mountains on the one side, and the ocean on the other, need not be at a loss to find its way.

At noon we descended the mountain, and having returned to the abodes of men, turned our faces to the east again; measuring our progress, from time to time, by the more ethereal hues which the mountain assumed.

… the very hillsides were enjoying the scene, and we passed slowly along, looking back over the country we had traversed, and listening to the evening song of the robin, we could not help contrasting the equanimity of nature with the bustle and impatience of man.

His words and actions presume always a crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

We rested that night at Harvard, and the next morning, while one bent his steps to the nearer village of Groton, the other took his separate and solitary way to the peaceful meadows of Concord;

First published in The Dial, Vol. 2 No. 1, July, 1842.

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading.

I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the ricebird;

Is not heaven made up of these cheap summer glories? There is a singular health in those words, Labrador and East Main, which no desponding creed recognizes. How much more than federal are these states.

If there were no other vicissitudes than the seasons, our interest would never tire.

Much more is adoing than Congress wots of. What journal do the persimmon and the buckeye keep, and the sharp-shinned hawk? What is transpiring from summer to winter in the Carolinas, and the Great Pine Forest, and the Valley of the Mohawk?

There is a singular health in those words, Labrador and East Main, which no desponding creed recognizes. How much more than federal are these states. If there were no other vicissitudes than the seasons, our interest would never tire.

Much more is adoing than Congress wots of.

What journal do the persimmon and the buckeye keep, and the sharp-shinned hawk? What is transpiring from summer to winter in the Carolinas, and the Great Pine Forest, and the Valley of the Mohawk? The merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering;

I am singularly refreshed in winter when I hear of serviceberries, pokeweed, juniper.

Is not heaven made up of these cheap summer glories?

There is a singular health in those words, Labrador and East Main, which no desponding creed recognizes. How much more than federal are these states. If there were no other vicissitudes than the seasons, our interest would never tire.

I see but Bunker Hill and Sing-Sing, the District of Columbia and Sullivan’s Island, with a few avenues connecting them. But paltry are they all beside one blast of the east or the south wind which blows over them.

In society you will not find health, but in nature.

Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so.

In it the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men tire me when I am not constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of sparkling streams.

Surely joy is the condition of life.

Think of the young fry that leap in ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in …

Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances.

The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair.

Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Eskimo sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern night, the hunter does not give over to follow the …

The quiet bravery of the man is admirable. His eye is to take in fish, flower, and bird, quadruped and biped.

Science is always brave, for to know, is to know good; doubt and danger quail before her eye.

What the coward overlooks in his hurry, she calmly scrutinizes, breaking ground like a pioneer for the array of arts that follow in her train. But cowardice is unscientific; for there cannot be a science of ignorance.

Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details.

Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made.

It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

She has no interstices; every part is full of life.

I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest fly?

In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all the land, and as in summer they are heard chiefly at nightfall, so then by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year.

Nor can all the vanities that vex the world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen.

Every pulse-beat is in exact time with the cricket’s chant and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall. Alternate with these if you can.

… to thrust its bill into the water, and suck up as much as it could hold, then raising its head, it pumped it out again with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it two or three feet, and making the sound each time.

At length the summer’s eternity is ushered in by the cackle of the flicker among the oaks on the hillside, and a new dynasty begins with calm security.

In May and June the woodland choir is in full tune, and given the immense spaces of hollow air, and this curious human ear, one does not see how the void could be better filled.

When I see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the sunshine along the ridge of a hill, I give up to him sun and earth as to their true proprietor.

He does not go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it.

Sometimes, when the snow lies light, and but five or six inches deep, you may give chase and come up with one on foot.

In such a case he will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction, though he may lose ground by it.

Notwithstanding his fright, he will take no step which is not beautiful.

His pace is a sort of leopard canter, as if he were in nowise impeded by the snow, but were husbanding his strength all the while.

When the ground is uneven, the course is a series of graceful curves, conforming to the shape of the surface.

He runs as though there were not a bone in his back.

Occasionally dropping his muzzle to the ground for a rod or two, and then tossing his head aloft, when satisfied of his course. When he comes to a declivity, he will put his forefeet together, and slide swiftly down it, shoving the snow before him.

and almost nothing is known of their habits. Only their names and residence make one love fishes. I would know even the number of their fin-rays, and how many scales compose the lateral line.

I am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook.

Methinks I have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a degree.

that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain. The revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them.

At length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again.

Early in the spring, after the ice has melted, is the time for spearing fish.

In the brooks is heard the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice, floating with various speed, full of content and promise, and where the water gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty rafts hold conversation in an undertone.

Every rill is a channel for the juices of the meadow.

In the ponds the ice cracks with a merry and inspiriting din, and down the larger streams is whirled grating hoarsely, and crashing its way along, which was so lately a highway for the woodman’s team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the …

It will catch fish by daylight, as a toad catches flies, and is said to emit a transparent fluid from its mouth to attract them.

Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.

Consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me;

In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances.

They do not wait as man does, but now is the golden age of the sapling.

Earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough; they were no better in primeval centuries. The “winter of their discontent” never comes. Witness the buds of the native poplar standing gayly out to the frost on the sides of its bare switches.

They are our little vegetable redeemers. Methinks our virtue will hold out till they come again. They are worthy to have had a greater than Minerva or Ceres for their inventor. Who was the benignant goddess that bestowed them on mankind?

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and extravagance of genius.

She has her luxurious and florid style as well as art.

Every tree, shrub, and spire of grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was covered with a dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its summer dress.

Even the fences had put forth leaves in the night.

The centre, diverging, and more minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the edges regularly indented.

But, after all, it is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off! It has been well said that “the attitude of inspection is prone.”

Wisdom does not inspect, but behold.

We must look a long time before we can see. Slow are the beginnings of philosophy. He has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts.

But, after all, it is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off! It has been well said that “the attitude of inspection is prone.” Wisdom does not inspect, but behold.

We must look a long time before we can see.

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy. He has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts. We can imagine a time when—“Water runs down hill”—may have been taught in the schools.

But, after all, it is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off! It has been well said that “the attitude of inspection is prone.” Wisdom does not inspect, but behold. We must look a long time before we can see.

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy.

He has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts. We can imagine a time when—“Water runs down hill”—may have been taught in the schools. The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization;

But the ground was comparatively unbroken, and we will not complain of the pioneer, if he raises no flowers with his first crop.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written. Men are knowing enough after their fashion.

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.

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 that was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.

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 that was confided to them; 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 reseacher is more memorable than the researched.

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.

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 eye and the sun from the first.

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.

We see the roofs stand under their snow burden. From the eaves and fences hang stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites covering some concealed core.

The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see fantastic forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man’s art.

Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step abroad to face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, and a dull, leaden mist skirts the horizon.

… that you hear—the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, the chopping of wood, the lowing of kine, all seem to come from Pluto’s barnyard and beyond the Styx;—not for any melancholy they suggest, but their twilight bustle is too solemn and mysterious for earth.

The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow.

Opening the gate, we tread briskly along the lone country road, crunching the dry and crisped snow under our feet, or aroused by the sharp clear creak of the wood-sled, just starting for the distant market, from the early farmer’s door, where it has lain …

They come clear and bell-like, and from a greater distance in the horizon, as if there were fewer impediments than in summer to make them faint and ragged.

The ground is sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural sounds are melodious, and the jingling of the ice on the trees is sweet and liquid.

There is the least possible moisture in the atmosphere, all being dried up, or congealed, and it is of such extreme tenuity and elasticity, that it becomes a source of delight.

The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact. Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow.

In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives.

In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it;

How important is their evergreen to the winter, that portion of the summer which does not face, the permanent year, the unwithered grass. Thus simply, and with little expense of altitude, is the surface of the earth diversified.

What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?

From the tops of mountains they appear like smooth shaven lanes, yet whither shall we walk but in this taller grass?

What would human life be without forests, those natural cities? From the tops of mountains they appear like smooth shaven lanes, yet whither shall we walk but in this taller grass?

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.

It finally melts the great snow, and in January or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner covering. In the coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts around every tree.

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man’s breast, for in the coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveller cherishes a warmer fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth.

A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.

There is the south. Thither have all birds and insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark.

Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, and the triangular tracks of the rabbit.

A pure elastic heaven hangs over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk by the chaste winter’s cold, had been winnowed from the heavens upon the earth.

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night.

The winter is an arctic summer.

How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise.

Down yonder little glen the shrubs are drooping under their burden, and the red alder-berries contrast with the white ground. Here are the marks of a myriad feet which have already been abroad.

The sun rises as proudly over such a glen, as over the valley of the Seine or the Tiber, and it seems the residence of a pure and self-subsistent valor, such as they never witnessed; which never knew defeat nor fear.

Here reign the simplicity and purity of a primitive age, and a health and hope far remote from towns and cities.

and, from the flexure of the splinters, we may know which way it fell.

This one chip contains inscribed on it the whole history of the woodchopper and of the world.

On this scrap of paper, which held his sugar or salt, perchance, or was the wadding of his gun, sitting on a log in the forest, with what interest we read the tattle of cities, of those larger huts, empty and to let, like this, …

From the remote interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by one gentle inclined plane, to the sea.

Thus by an early and constant yielding to the inequalities of the ground, it secures itself the easiest passage.

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times, and now we draw near to the empire of the fishes.

following the winding of the stream, now flowing amid hills, now spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a myriad coves and bays where the pine and hemlock overarch.

The river flows in the rear of the towns, and we see all things from a new and wilder side.

The fields and gardens come down to it with a frankness, and freedom from pretension, which they do not wear on the highway. It is the outside and edge of the earth. Our eyes are not offended by violent contrasts.

but their volume is not diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surface. The thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing still. The issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they go to swell the deep reservoirs.

Nature’s wells are below the frost.

The summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with that alone.

… is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed, and the tracks of men and beasts are lost.

With so little effort does nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men.

Hear how Homer has described the same. “The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a winter’s day.

The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the traveller. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness.

In winter we lead a more inward life.

Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.

The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the traveller. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness. In winter we lead a more inward life.

Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.

The imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky through the chimney top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be had in a …

and standing at his open door from morning till night, would fain see more and more of them come along the highway, and is never satiated.

To him the sun and moon are but travellers, the one by day and the other by night; and they too patronize his house.

To his imagination all things travel save his signpost and himself; and though you may be his neighbor for years, he will show you only the civilities of the road.

… bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone—goodbye—farewell.

But the landlord can afford to live without privacy.

He entertains no private thought, he cherishes no solitary hour, no Sabbath day, but thinks—enough to assert the dignity of reason—and talks, and reads the newspaper. What he does not tell to one traveller, he tells to another.

“Heigho!” exclaims the traveller. Them’s my sentiments, thinks mine host, and stands ready for what may come next, expressing the purest sympathy by his demeanor. “Hot as blazes!” says the other—“Hard weather, sir—not much stirring nowadays,” says he.

He is wiser than to contradict his guest in any case; he lets him go on, he lets him travel.

The latest sitter leaves him standing far in the night, prepared to live right on, while suns rise and set, and his “good night” has as brisk a sound as his “good morning,” and the earliest riser finds him tasting his liquors in the bar …

To conclude, the tavern will compare favorably with the church.

The church is the place where prayers and sermons are delivered, but the tavern is where they are to take effect, and if the former are good, the latter cannot be bad.

While one scours the heavens, the other sweeps the earth. One says he will reform himself, and then nature and circumstances will be right.

Let us not obstruct ourselves, for that is the greatest friction.

It is of little importance though a cloud obstruct the view of the astronomer compared with his own blindness. The other will reform nature and circumstances, and then man will be right.

We will marshal the clouds and restrain the tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations, we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up; and give vent to the dangerous gases; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out.

We will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth.

We will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. It is time we had looked into these things.

Might we not treat with magnanimity the shark and the tiger, not descend to meet there on their own level, with spears of sharks’ teeth and bucklers of tiger’s skin?

We slander the hyena; man is the fiercest and cruelest animal.

Ah! he is of little faith; even the erring comets and meteors would thank him, and return his kindness in their kind.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference.

It is like directing the sunbeams.

All nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. There are Hymettus and Hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside? There is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds—their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads.

… that the fittest locality for a human dwelling was on the edge of the land, that there the constant lesson and impression of the sea might sink deep into the life and character of the landsman, and perhaps impart a marine tint to his imagination.

It is a noble word, that mariner⁠—one who is conversant with the sea.

There should be more of what it signifies in each of us. It is a worthy country to belong to—we look to see him not disgrace it.

Here is power enough, one would think, to accomplish somewhat. These are the powers below. Oh ye millwrights, ye engineers, ye operatives and speculators of every class, never again complain of a want of power; it is the grossest form of infidelity.

The question is not how we shall execute, but what.

Let us not use in a niggardly manner what is thus generously offered.

Do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as Columbus did?

Let us not despair nor mutiny.

“The dwellings also ought to be very different from what is known, if the full benefit of our means is to be enjoyed. They are to be of a structure for which we have no name yet.

not. But there is a certain divine energy in every man, but sparingly employed as yet, which may be called the crank within—the crank after all—the prime mover in all machinery—quite indispensable to all work. Would that we might get our hands on its handle!

In fact no work can be shirked.

It may be postponed indefinitely, but not infinitely. Nor can any really important work be made easier by cooperation or machinery. Not one particle of labor now threatening any man can be routed without being performed.

He expects no income, but our outgoes; so soon as we begin to count the cost the cost begins. And as for advice, the information floating in the atmosphere of society is as evanescent and unserviceable to him as gossamer for clubs of Hercules.

There is absolutely no common sense; it is common nonsense.

If we are to risk a cent or a drop of our blood, who then shall advise us? For ourselves, we are too young for experience. Who is old enough? We are older by faith than by experience.

There is absolutely no common sense; it is common nonsense. If we are to risk a cent or a drop of our blood, who then shall advise us? For ourselves, we are too young for experience. Who is old enough?

We are older by faith than by experience.

In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.

But this fault is by no means peculiar to Mr. Etzler’s schemes. There is far too much hurry and bustle, and too little patience and privacy, in all our methods, as if something were to be accomplished in centuries.

The true reformer does not want time, nor money, nor cooperation, nor advice.

What is time but the stuff delay is made of? And depend upon it, our virtue will not live on the interest of our money. He expects no income, but our outgoes; so soon as we begin to count the cost the cost begins.

Etzler’s schemes. There is far too much hurry and bustle, and too little patience and privacy, in all our methods, as if something were to be accomplished in centuries. The true reformer does not want time, nor money, nor cooperation, nor advice.

What is time but the stuff delay is made of?

And depend upon it, our virtue will not live on the interest of our money. He expects no income, but our outgoes; so soon as we begin to count the cost the cost begins.

Nothing can be effected but by one man. He who wants help wants everything. True, this is the condition of our weakness, but it can never be the means of our recovery.

We must first succeed alone, that we may enjoy our success together.

We trust that the social movements which we witness indicate an aspiration not to be thus cheaply satisfied. In this matter of reforming the world, we have little faith in corporations; not thus was it first formed.

Alas! this is the crying sin of the age, this want of faith in the prevalence of a man.

Nothing can be effected but by one man.

He who wants help wants everything. True, this is the condition of our weakness, but it can never be the means of our recovery. We must first succeed alone, that we may enjoy our success together.

We see how past ages have loitered and erred. “Is perhaps our generation free from irrationality and error? Have we perhaps reached now the summit of human wisdom, and need no more to look out for mental or physical improvement?”

Undoubtedly, we are never so visionary as to be prepared for what the next hour may bring forth.

Μέλλει τὸ θεῖον δ’ ἔστι τοιοῦτον φύσει.

It is true his dreams are not thrilling nor bright enough, and he leaves off to dream where he who dreams just before the dawn begins.

His castles in the air fall to the ground, because they are not built lofty enough; they should be secured to heaven’s roof.

After all, the theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny execution. It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so called practical. How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us.

His castles in the air fall to the ground, because they are not built lofty enough; they should be secured to heaven’s roof.

After all, the theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny execution.

It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so called practical. How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.

Surely a good man need not be at the labor to level a hill for the sake of a prospect, or raise fruits and flowers, and construct floating islands, for the sake of a paradise. He enjoys better prospects than lie behind any hill.

Where an angel travels it will be paradise all the way, but where Satan travels it will be burning marl and cinders.

What says Veeshnoo Sarma? “He whose mind is at ease is possessed of all riches. Is it not the same to one whose foot is enclosed in a shoe, as if the whole surface of the earth were covered with leather?”

Lumen est umbra Dei, Deus est Lumen Luminis. Light is the shadow of God’s brightness, who is the light of light,” and, we may add, the heat of heat.

Love is the wind, the tide, the waves, the sunshine.

Its power is incalculable; it is many horsepower. It never ceases, it never slacks; it can move the globe without a resting-place; it can warm without fire; it can feed without meat; it can clothe without garments; it can shelter without roof;

No doubt we are well aware of this force; figures would not increase our respect for it; the sunshine is equal to but one ray of its heat.

The light of the sun is but the shadow of love.

“The souls of men loving and fearing God,” says Raleigh, “receive influence from that divine light itself, whereof the sun’s clarity, and that of the stars, is by Plato called but a shadow. Lumen est umbra Dei, Deus est Lumen Luminis.

Extracts from a lecture on poetry, read before the Concord Lyceum, November 29, 1843. First published in The Dial, Vol. 4, No. 3, January, 1844.

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.

He presents to us the simplest pictures of human life, so that childhood itself can understand them, and the man must not think twice to appreciate his naturalness. Each reader discovers for himself, that succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.

His more memorable passages are as naturally bright, as gleams of sunlight in misty weather.

Nature furnishes him not only with words, but with sterotyped lines and sentences from her mint.

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?

It is the simplest relation of phenomena, and describes the commonest sensations with more truth than science does, and the latter at a distance slowly mimics its style and methods.

The poet sings how the blood flows in his veins.

He performs his functions, and is so well that he needs such stimulus to sing only as plants to put forth leaves and blossoms.

and all with brass He shone, like to the lightning of aegis-bearing Zeus.”

He conveys the least information, even the hour of the day, with such magnificence, and vast expense of natural imagery, as if it were a message from the gods.

“While it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing, For that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the people fell;

The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which ever 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.

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

But 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.

we see the circles of stone, and the upright shaft alone. The phenomena of life acquire almost an unreal and gigantic size seen through his mists. Like all older and grander poetry, it is distinguished by the few elements in the lives of its heroes.

They stand on the heath, between the stars and the earth, shrunk to the bones and sinews.

The earth is a boundless plain for their deeds. They lead such a simple, dry, and everlasting life, as hardly needs depart with the flest, but is transmitted entire from age to age.

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 makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor.

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 makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.

It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin.

Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor.

We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.

But when we come to Chaucer we are relieved of many a load.

He is fresh and modern still, and no dust settles on his true passages.

It lightens along the line, and we are reminded that flowers have bloomed, and birds sung, and hearts beaten, in England. Before the earnest gaze of the reader the rust and moss of time gradually drop off, and the original green life is revealed.

He is fresh and modern still, and no dust settles on his true passages. It lightens along the line, and we are reminded that flowers have bloomed, and birds sung, and hearts beaten, in England.

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. Only one trait, one little incident of human biography needs to be truly recorded, that all the world may think the author fit to wear the laurel crown.

In the earth we have described, and at this distance of time, the bare processes of living read like poetry, for all of human good or ill, heroic or vulgar, lies very near to them.

All that is truly great and interesting to men, runs thus as level a course, and is as unaspiring, as the plough in the furrow.

There is no wisdom which can take place of humanity, and we find that in Chaucer. We can expand in his breadth and think we could be that man’s acquaintance.

It is for the most part translation or imitation merely, with only an occasional and slight tinge of poetry, and oftentimes the falsehood and exaggeration of fable, without its imagination to redeem it.

It is astonishing to how few thoughts so many sincere efforts give utterance.

But as they never sprang out of nature, so they will never root themselves in nature.

All that is truly great and interesting to men, runs thus as level a course, and is as unaspiring, as the plough in the furrow.

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

We can expand in his breadth and think we could be that man’s acquaintance.

And 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?

Even the clown has taste, whose dictates, though he disregards them, are higher and purer than those which the artist obeys; and some natures, which are rude and ill-developed, have yet a higher standard of perfection, than others which are refined and well-balanced.

Though the peasant’s cot is dark, it has the evening star for taper, while the nobleman’s saloon is meanly lighted.

If we have to wander through many dull and prosaic passages in Chaucer, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that it is not an artificial dullness, but too easily matched by many passages in life, and it is, perhaps more pleasing, after all, …

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 kernel of all friendliness, and envelope 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.

There are two kinds of writing, both great and rare; one that of genius, or the inspired, the other of intellect and taste, in the intervals of inspiration. The former is above criticism, always correct, giving the law to criticism.

It vibrates and pulsates with life forever.

It is sacred, and to be read with reverence, as the works of nature are studied. There are few instances of a sustained style of this kind; perhaps every man has spoken words, but the speaker is then careless of the record.

perhaps every man has spoken words, but the speaker is then careless of the record. Such a style removes us out of personal relations with its author, we do not take his words on our lips, but his sense into our hearts.

It is the stream of inspiration, which bubbles out, now here, now there, now in this man, now in that.

It matters not through what ice-crystals it is seen, now a fountain, now the ocean stream running under ground. It is in Shakespeare, Alpheus, in Burns, Arethuse; but ever the same. The other is self-possessed and wise.

We are a people who live in a bright light, in houses of pearl and porcelain, and drink only light wines, whose teeth are easily set on edge by the least natural sour.

If we had been consulted, the backbone of the earth would have been made, not of granite, but of Bristol spar.

A modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age. But the poet is something more than a scald, “a smoother and polisher of language”;

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet’s work, but never yea to his hope.

It invites him to adorn his deformities, and not to caste them off by expansion, as the tree its bark.

They are rude and massive in their proportions, rather than smooth and delicate in their finish. The workers in stone polish only their chimney ornaments, but their pyramids are roughly done.

There is a soberness in a rough aspect, as of unhewn granite, which addresses a depth in us, but a polished surface hits only the ball of the eye.

The true finish is the work of time and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids. Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.

The workers in stone polish only their chimney ornaments, but their pyramids are roughly done. There is a soberness in a rough aspect, as of unhewn granite, which addresses a depth in us, but a polished surface hits only the ball of the eye.

The true finish is the work of time and the use to which a thing is put.

The elements are still polishing the pyramids. Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.

A work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it anticipates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which stil appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its substance.

Its beauty is at the same time its strength, and it breaks with a lustre.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

But to speak of his composition. It is a genuine Yankee style, without fiction—real guessing and calculating to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, Thomas Carlyle.

It has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood.

But like those same mountain-torrents, there is rather too much slope to his channel, and the rainbow sprays and evaporations go double-quick-time to heaven, while the body of his water falls headlong to the plain.

Somebody’s administration, merely; but he already belongs to literature, and depends neither on the favor of reviewers, nor the honesty of booksellers, nor the pleasure of readers for his success.

He has more to impart than to receive from his generation.

He is another such a strong and finished workman in his craft as Samuel Johnson was, and, like him, makes the literary class respectable.

while biscuit and pork make headway, and sailors cry heave-yo! it must part company, if it open a seam. It is not quite safe to send out a venture in this kind, unless yourself go supercargo.

Where a man goes, there he is; but the slightest virtue is immovable⁠—it is real estate, not personal; who would keep it, must consent to be bought and sold with it.

However, we need not dwell on this charge of a German extraction, it being generally admitted, by this time, that Carlyle is English, and an inhabitant of London.

… in composition, that the written answer to the spoken word, and the spoken word to a fresh and pertinent thought in the mind, as well as to the half thoughts, the tumultuary misgivings and expectancies, this author is, perhaps, not to be matched in literature.

In the streets men laugh and cry, but in books, never; they “whine, put finter i’ the eye, and sob” only.

One wuld think that all books of late had adopted the falling inflection. “A mother, if she wishes to sing her child to sleep,” say the musical men, “will always adopt the falling inflection.”

they “whine, put finter i’ the eye, and sob” only. One wuld think that all books of late had adopted the falling inflection. “A mother, if she wishes to sing her child to sleep,” say the musical men, “will always adopt the falling inflection.”

Would they but choose the rising inflection, and wake the child up for once.

He is no mystic, either, more than Newton or Arkwright or Davy—and tolerates none. Not one obscure line, or half line, did he ever write. His meaning lies plain as the daylight, and he who runs may read;

It is not in man to determine what his style shall be.

He might as well determine what his thoughts shall be.

We would not have had him write always as in the chapter on Burns, and the Life of Schiller, and elsewhere. No; his thoughts were ever irregular and impetuous. Perhaps as he grows older and writes more he acquires a truer expression;

… very originality of style, and that posterity will have reason to thank him for emancipating the language, in some measure, from the fetters which a merely conservative, aimless, and pedantic literary class had imposed upon it, and setting an example of greater freedom and naturalness.

No man’s thoughts are new, but the style of their expression is the never-failing novelty which cheers and refreshes men.

If we were to answer the question, whether the mass of men, as we know them, talk as the standard authors and reviewers write, or rather as this man writes, we should say that he alone begins to write their language at all, and that …

but in proportion as the writer’s position is high above his fellows, the range of his humor is extended. To the thinker, all the institutions of men, as all imperfection, viewed from the point of equanimity, are legitimate subjects of humor.

Whatever is not necessary, no matter how sad or personal, or universal a grievance, is, indeed, a jest more or less sublime.

Carlyle’s humor is vigorous and titanic, and has more sense in it than the sober philosophy of many another. It is not to be disposed of by laughter and smiles merely;

The more quiet the more profound it is.

Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man seems sometimes to be the sport.

But, after all, we could sometimes dispense with the humor, though unquestionably incorporated in the blood, if it were replaced by this author’s gravity. We should not apply to himself, without qualification, his remarks on the humor of Richter.

We know not but we shall immigrate soon, and would fain take with us all the treasures of the East; and all kinds of dry, portable soups, in small tin canisters, which contain whole herds of English beeves, boiled down, will be acceptable.

The difference between this flashing, fitful writing and pure philosophy is the difference between flame and light.

The flame, indeed, yields light; but when we are so near as to observe the flame, we are apt to be incommoded by the heat and smoke.

It is one advantage enjoyed by men of science, that they use only formulas which are universal.

The common language and the common sense of mankind, it is most uncommon to meet with in the individual.

Yet liberty of thought and speech is only a liberty to think the universal thought, and speak the universal language of men, instead of being enslaved to a particular mode. Of this universal speech there is very little. It is equable and sure;

The first impression is the truest and the deepest, and there is no reprint, no double entendre, so to speak, for the alert reader. Yet they are in some degree true natural products in this respect.

All things are but once, and never repeated.

The first faint blushes of the morning, gilding the mountain tops, the pale phosphor and saffron-colored clous do verily transport us to the morning of creation: but what avails it to travel eastward or look again there an hour hence?

These things are sometimes hinted at, but they deserve a notice more in proportion to their importance.

We want not only a background to the picture, but a ground under the feet also.

We remark, too, occasionally, an unphilosophical habit, common enough elsewhere, in Alison’s History of Modern Europe, for instance, of saying, undoubtedly with effect, that if a straw had not fallen this way or that, why then—but, of course, it is as easy in philosophy to …

The old adage is as true for our purpose, which says that a miss is as good as a mile.

Who shall say how near the man came to being killed who was not killed?

If an apple had not fallen then we had never heard of Newton and the law of gravitation; as if they could not have contrived to let fall a pear as well.

He never goes after the cows, nor stretches in the sun, nor plays with the children. Pray give him a longer rope, ye gods, or let him go at large, and never taste raw meat more.

The poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disappointments.

He is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives. Philosophia practica est eruditionis meta, philosophy practiced is the goal of learning;

develop, perhaps, his reserved and dumb reverence for Christ, not speaking to a London or Church of England audience merely. Let not “sacred silence meditate that sacred matter” forever, but let us have sacred speech and sacred scripture thereon.

True reverence is not necessarily dumb, but ofttimes prattling and hilarious as children in the spring.

Every man will include in his list of worthies those whom he himself best represents. Carlyle, and our countryman Emerson, whose place and influence must erelong obtain a more distinct recognition, are, to a certain extent, the complement of each other.

No system but such as is the man himself; and, indeed, he stands compactly enough. No progress beyond the first assertion and challenge, as it were, with trumpet blast.

One thing is certain, that we had best be doing something in good earnest henceforth forever; that’s an indispensable philosophy.

The before impossible precept, “know thyself,” he translates into the partially possible one, “know what thou canst work at.”

The wisest and most practical men of recent history, to whom this epithet has been hastily applied, ahve lived comparatively meagre lives, of conformity and tradition, such as their fathers transmitted to them.

But a man may live in what style he can. Between earth and heaven, there is room for all kinds.

If he take counsel of fear and prudence, he has already failed. One who believed, by his very constitution, some truth which a few words express, would make a revolution never to be forgotten in this world;

But a man may live in what style he can. Between earth and heaven, there is room for all kinds.

If he take counsel of fear and prudence, he has already failed.

One who believed, by his very constitution, some truth which a few words express, would make a revolution never to be forgotten in this world; for it needs but a fraction of truth to found houses and empires on.

We want to know more about that which he wants to know as well. If any luminous star or undissolvable nebula is visible from his station which is not visible from ours, the interests of science require that the fact be communicated to us.

The universe expects every man to do his duty in his parallel of latitude.

We want to hear more of his inmost life; his hymn and prayer, more; his elegy and eulogy, less; that he should speak more from his character, and less from his talent; communicate centrally with his readers, and not by a side;

By an immense exaggeration we appreciate our Greek poetry and philosophy, and Egyptian ruins; our Shakespeares and Miltons, our Liberty and Christianity. We give importance to this hour over all other hours.

We do not live by justice, but by grace.

As the sort of justice which concerns us in our daily intercourse is not that administered by the judge, so the historical justice which we prize is not arrived at by nicely balancing the evidence.

The great danger is not of excessive partiality or sympathy with one, but of a shallow justice to many, in which, after all, none gets his deserts.

Who has not experienced that praise is truer than naked justice?

As if man were to be the judge of his fellows, and should repress his rising sympathy with the prisoner at the bar, considering the many honest men abroad, whom he had never countenanced.

was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually to speak of?

We live by exaggeration, what else is it to anticipate more than we enjoy?

The lightning is an exaggeration of the light. Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater is an exaggeration. He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.

Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually to speak of? We live by exaggeration, what else is it to anticipate more than we enjoy?

The lightning is an exaggeration of the light.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater is an exaggeration. He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.

We live by exaggeration, what else is it to anticipate more than we enjoy? The lightning is an exaggeration of the light. Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.

No truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, so that for the time there seemed to be no other.

Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—“That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government.

It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it.

Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way;

This American government—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?

It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves; and, if ever they should use it in earnest as a real one against each other, it will surely split. But it is not the less necessary for this;

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems …

The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, aye, against their …

Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable?

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just;

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corse to the ramparts we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O’er the grave where our hero we buried.”

The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones;

Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.

A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least:

“I am too high-born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.

all machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it.

But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.

In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it …

Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may.

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.

The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency.

The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated.

Thus, under the name of order and civil government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness.

After the first blush of sin, comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur.

he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico—see if I would go”;

Do not they stand in same relation to the State, that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union, which have prevented them from resisting the State?

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?

Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved?

but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again.

Action from principle⁠—the perception and the performance of right⁠—changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was.

It not only divided states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divided states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil.

but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to.

They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.

It is not my business to be petitioning the governor or the legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and, if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way:

I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one.

Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year, no more, in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it;

… I could name—if ten honest men only—aye, if one honest man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission.

Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.

If my esteemed neighbor, the State’s ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which …

… that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister—though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her—the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject of the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their …

… the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person.

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet.

The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the “means” are increased.

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. Christ answered the Herodians according to their condition.

But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard.

This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects.

It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon.

It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon.

You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.

A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government. Confucius said—“If a State is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame;

They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.

I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous.

As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog.

I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way.

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.

I did nor for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax.

… an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other.

If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirtsleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailer said, “Come, boys, it is time to lock up”;

Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.

Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves.

They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?

When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money?

It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it.

It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it.

I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer.

I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows …

However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it.

It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world.

If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.

Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency, or a consistent expediency.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrongdoing.

He well deserves to be called, as he has been called, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no blows to be given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a follower. His leaders are the men of ’87.

but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects content me as little as any. Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it.

They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it.

They may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits.

to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.

Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government?

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire.

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government?

Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?

There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor;

… were not distinctively great yet gave to virtues a current stamp and value as it were by the very grace and loftiness with which he carried them;—one of nature’s noblemen who possessed those requisites to true nobility without which no heraldry nor blood can avail.

Among savages he would still have been chief.

He seems to have had, not a profounder or grander but, so to speak, more nature than other men—a great, irregular, luxuriant nature, fit to be the darling of a people.

The fathers of his age were Calvin and Knox, and Cranmer, and Pizarro, and Garcilaso; and its immediate forefathers were Luther and Raphael, and Bayard and Angelo, and Ariosto, and Copernicus, and Machiavel, and Erasmus, and Cabot, and Ximenes, and Columbus.

Its device might have been an anchor, a sword, and a quill.

The Pizarro laid by his sword at intervals and took to his letters. The Columbus set sail for newer worlds still, by voyages which needed not the patronage of princes.

None of the worthies of that age can be duly appreciated if we neglect to consider them in their relation to the New World.

The stirring spirits stood with but one foot on the land.

There were Drake, Hawkins, Hudson, Frobisher, and many others, and their worthy companion was Raleigh.

Acting on this presumption, and with the best intentions toward his country, and only his usual jealousy of Spain, he undertook to make good his engagements to himself and the world.

It is not easy for us at this day to realize what extravagant expectations Europe had formed respecting the wealth of the New World.

We might suppose two whole continents, with their adjacent seas and oceans, equal to the known globe, stretching from pole to pole, and possessing every variety of soil, climate, and productions, lying unexplored today—what would now be the speculations of Broadway and State Street?

Its mineral wealth was reported to be as in exhaustible as the cupidity of its discoverers was unbounded.

The very surface of the ground was said to be resplendent with gold, and the men went covered with gold-dust, as Hottentots with grease.

Raleigh was informed while at Trinidad, by the Spanish governor, who was his prisoner, that one Juan Martinez had at length penetrated into this country;

… deceived, and that too by the strength and candor no less than the weakness of his nature, for, generally speaking, such things are not to be disbelieved as task our imaginations to conceive of, but such rather as are too easily embraced by the understanding.

It is easy to see that he was tempted, not so much by the lustre of the gold, as by the splendor of the enterprise itself.

It was the best move that peace allowed.

the steady purpose with which he set about fighting his battles, prosecuting his discoveries, and gathering his laurels, with the pen, if he might no longer with regiments and fleets—is itself an exploit.

In writing the History of the World he was indeed at liberty; for he who contemplates truth and universal laws is free, whatever walls immure his body, though to our brave prisoner thus employed, mankind may have seemed but his poor fellow-prisoners still.

Though this remarkable work interests us more, on the whole, as a part of the history of Raleigh than as the History of the World, yet it was done like himself, and with no small success.

Poetry is always impartial and unbiased evidence.

The whole life of a man may safely be referred to a few deep experiences.

When he only sings a more musical line than usual, all his actions have to be retried by a newer and higher standard than before.

Poetry is always impartial and unbiased evidence. The whole life of a man may safely be referred to a few deep experiences.

When he only sings a more musical line than usual, all his actions have to be retried by a newer and higher standard than before.

The pleasing poem entitled “A Description of the Country’s Recreations,” also printed among the poems of Sir Henry Wotton, is well known. The following, which bears evident marks of his pen, we will quote, from its secure and continent rhythm:

… period possess a greater vigor and naturalness than the more modern, and when we read a quotation from one of them in the midst of a modern authority, we seem to have come suddenly upon a greener ground and greater depth and strength of soil.

It is as if a green bough were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as if by the sight of fresh grass in midwinter or early spring.

You have constantly the warrant of life and experience in all you read. The little that is said is supplied by implication of the much that was done.

The sentences are verdurous and blooming as evergreen and flowers, because they are rooted in fact and experience; but our false and florid sentences have only the tints of flowers without their sap or roots.

Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a standard man?

The word which is best said came very near not being spoken at all; for it is cousin to a deed which would have been better done.

and so will the stroke of that scholar’s pen, when at evening this records the story of the day, ring soberly on the ear of the reader long after the echoes of his axe have died away.

The scholar may be sure he writes the tougher truths for the calluses on his palms.

They give firmness to the sentence. We are often astonished at the force and precision of style to which hardworking men unpractised in writing easily attain, when required to make the effort;

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.

We like that 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 labor to give an impetus to his thought; he will learn to grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectually as an axe or sword.

Can this be a stalwart man’s work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon Achilles in his heel? They who set up Stonehenge did somewhat, if they only laid out their strength for once, and stretched themselves.

Yet after all the truly efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task, surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure, and then do but what he likes best.

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

Yet after all the truly efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task, surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure, and then do but what he likes best.

He is anxious only about the kernels of time.

Though the hen should set all day she could lay only one egg, and besides, she would not have picked up the materials for another.

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

A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.

But 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.

A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare. But 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.

The most attractive sentences are perhaps not the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

They are spoken firmly and conclusively, as if the author had a right to know what he says; and if not wise, they have at least been well learned.

and it is somewhat to begin to live on cornbread solely, for one who has before lived on bolted wheat;—but of this sort surely are not the deeds to be sung. These are not the Arthurs that inflame the imaginations of men.

All fair action is the product of enthusiasm, and nature herself does nothing in the prose mood, though sometimes grimly with poetic fury, and at others humorously.

There is enthusiasm in the sunrise and the summer, and we imagine that the shells on the shore take new layers from year to year with such rapture as the bard writes his poems.

which is as serene and as well pleased with the issue as the heavens which look down upon the field of battle.

It is but a lower height of heroism when the hero wears a sour face.

We fear that much of the heroism which we praise nowadays is dyspeptic. When we consider the vast Xerxean army of reformers in these days, we cannot doubt that many a grim soul goes silent, the hero of some small intestine war;

We have considered a fair specimen of an Englishman in the sixteenth century; but it behoves us to be fairer specimens of American men in the nineteenth.

The gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly.

How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble! We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave—but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest;

We have considered a fair specimen of an Englishman in the sixteenth century; but it behoves us to be fairer specimens of American men in the nineteenth. The gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly.

How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble!

We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave—but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest;

but I was surprised and disappointed to find that what had called my townsmen together was the destiny of Nebraska, and not of Massachusetts, and that what I had to say would be entirely out of order.

I had thought that the house was on fire, and not the prairie; but though several of the citizens of Massachusetts are now in prison for attempting to rescue a slave from her own clutches, not one of the speakers at that meeting expressed regret for it, not one even referred to it.

It was only the disposition of some wild lands a thousand miles off, which appeared to concern them.

But this is not the reason why an iniquitous law should be repealed.

The fact which the politician faces is merely, that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves.

As I had no opportunity to express my thoughts at that meeting, will you allow me to do so here?

We may be tempted to ask from whom he received his commission, and who he is that received it; what novel statutes he obeys, and what precedents are to him of authority. Such an arbiter’s very existence is an impertinence.

We do not ask him to make up his mind, but to make up his pack.

I listen to hear the voice of a governor, Commander-in-Chief of the forces of Massachusetts. I hear only the creaking of crickets and the hum of insects which now fill the summer air. The governor’s exploit is to review the troops on muster days.

I think that I could manage to get along without one. If he is not of the least use to prevent my being kidnapped, pray of what important use is he likely to be to me?

When freedom is most endangered, he dwells in the deepest obscurity.

A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman, because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.

The worst and the most I chance to know of him is, that he did not improve that opportunity to make himself known, and worthily known.

He could at least have resigned himself into fame.

It appeared to be forgotten that there was such a man or such an office. Yet no doubt he was endeavoring to fill the gubernatorial chair all the while. He was no governor of mine. He did not govern me.

As if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three millions others.

Nowadays, men wear a fool’s cap, and call it a liberty cap.

I do not know but there are some, who, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could but get one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their liberty.

There was a prior case on the docket, which they, as judges appointed by God, had no right to skip; which having been justly settled, they would have been saved from this humiliation. It was the case of the murderer himself.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

They are the lovers of law and order, who observe the law when the government breaks it.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

They are the lovers of law and order, who observe the law when the government breaks it.

Among human beings, the judge whose words seal the fate of a man furthest into eternity is not he who merely pronounces the verdict of the law, but he, whoever he may be, who, from a love of truth, and unprejudiced by any custom or …

It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters. My sympathies in this case are wholly with the accused, and wholly against their accusers and judges.

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

The judge still sits grinding at his organ, but it yields no music, and we hear only the sound of the handle. He believes that all the music resides in the handle, and the crowd toss him their coppers the same as before.

I have lived for the last month—and I think that every man in Massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar experience—with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know at first what ailed me.

At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country.

I had never respected the government near to which I lived, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it.

Art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man’s proper pursuits. It is not an era of repose.

We have used up all our inherited freedom.

If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.

Art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man’s proper pursuits. It is not an era of repose. We have used up all our inherited freedom.

If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.

I walk toward one of our ponds; but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them.

It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri Compromise.

I scent no compromise in the fragrance of the water-lily.

It is not a Nympaea Douglassii. In it, the sweet, and pure, and innocent are wholly sundered from the obscene and baleful. I do not scent in this the timeserving irresolution of a Massachusetts governor, nor of a Boston mayor.

for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet.

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.

Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life: they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils.

I think I have plucked the first one that has opened for a mile.

What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower!

I shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men.

He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies. There was, in this sense, no truly central or centralizing thought in the lecture. I would have had him deal with his privatest experience, as the poet does.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool.

So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveller, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can.

As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath.

It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.

It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages.

What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.

I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents.

An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages.

If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business!

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

There is a coarse and boisterous moneymaking fellow in the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow.

… regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow’s undertaking, any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer to finish my education at a different school.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. For instance:

I may add, that his employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of the town, and, after passing through Chancery, has settled somewhere else, there to become once more a patron of the arts.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward.

To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.

If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render.

and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.

No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came of age I embarked.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.

You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.

You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business.

An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.

All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes.

You must get your living by loving.

But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.

So far I am successful. But I foresee, that, if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery.

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for.

I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting.

I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

In the Catholic Church, especially, they go into Chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

As for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an important difference between two, that the one is satisfied with a level success, that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but the other, however low and unsuccessful his life …

I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit.

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make, whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the loser.

The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco.

What difference does it make, whether you shake dirt or shake dice?

If you win, society is the loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard.

There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you—what though it were a sulky-gully?

At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.

Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling.

There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you—what though it were a sulky-gully? At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.

Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling.

His solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two.

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things.

The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars.

You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it. Why must we daub the heavens as well as the earth? It was an unfortunate discovery that Dr.

and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.

You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region.

We should wash ourselves clean of such news. Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement.

I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to you. Your walks were full of incidents.

We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial—considering what one’s dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry.

The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius.

It is the stalest repetition. You are often tempted to ask, why such stress is laid on a particular experience which you have had—that, after twenty-five years, you should meet Hobbins, Registrar of Deeds, again on the sidewalk. Have you not budged an inch, then?

Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and impinge on some neglected thallus, or surface of our minds, which affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth.

We should wash ourselves clean of such news.

Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement.

Its facts appear to float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and impinge on some neglected thallus, or surface of our minds, which affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. We should wash ourselves clean of such news.

Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion?

In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen! Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

By all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you.

It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember!

If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven.

By all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember!

If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers.

There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the barroom and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications.

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.

Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.

Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth.

Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth.

Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much it has been used.

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?

What is it to be born free and not to live free?

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast?

Mere country-bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance—the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their “good breeding” respects only secondary objects.

The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence.

They appear but as the fashions of past days—mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date. It is the vice, but not the excellence of manners, that they are continually being deserted by the character;

The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants. This alone draws out “the great resources” of Nature, and at last taxes her beyond her resources; for man naturally dies out of her.

When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugarplums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men⁠—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.

In short, as a snowdrift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

In short, as a snowdrift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up.

But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge;

or why not keep its castle in silence, as I do commonly? The poor President, what with preserving his popularity and doing his duty, is completely bewildered. The newspapers are the ruling power. Any other government is reduced to a few marines at Fort Independence.

If a man neglects to read the Daily Times, government will go down on its knees to him, for this is the only treason in these days.

Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation.

Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning?

I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.

They salute us with a shout from their low decks; but I understand their “Good evening” to mean, “Don’t run against me, sir.”

From the wonders of the deep we go below to yet deeper sleep.

And then the absurdity of being waked up in the night by a man who wants the job of blacking your boots! It is more inevitable than seasickness, and may have something to do with it.

It was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy.

He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly.

Near Bangor, the fence-posts, on account of the frost’s heaving them in the clayey soil, were not planted in the ground, but were mortised into a transverse horizontal beam lying on the surface.

He said that he had taken care of that little mare for a short time, a year or two before, at the Mount Kineo House, and thought she was not in as good condition as then. Every man to his trade.

I am not acquainted with a single horse in the world, not even the one that kicked me.

Already we had thought that we saw Moosehead Lake from a hilltop, where an extensive fog filled the distant lowlands, but we were mistaken.

I thought that they might as well hang at once all who need to go through such exercises in so new a country, where there is nothing to hinder their living an outdoor life.

Better omit Blair, and take the air.

The country about the south end of the lake is quite mountainous, and the road began to feel the effects of it. There is one hill which, it is calculated, it takes twenty-five minutes to ascend.

You did not expect to find such spruce trees in the wild woods, but they evidently attend to their toilets each morning even there.

Through such a front yard did we enter that wilderness.

There was a very slight rise above the lake—the country appearing like, and perhaps being, partly a swamp—and at length a gradual descent to the Penobscot, which I was surprised to find here a large stream, from twelve to fifteen rods wide, flowing from west …

Again and again Joe called the moose, placing the canoe close by some favorable point of meadow for them to come out on, but listened in vain to hear one come rushing through the woods, and concluded that they had been hunted too much thereabouts.

We saw, many times, what to our imaginations looked like a gigantic moose, with his horns peering from out the forest edge; but we saw the forest only, and not its inhabitants, that night.

So at last we turned about. There was now a little fog on the water, though it was a fine, clear night above. There were very few sounds to break the stillness of the forest.

They were as interesting as fireworks, going up in endless, successive crowds, each after an explosion, in an eager, serpentine course, some to five or six rods above the treetops before they went out.

We do not suspect how much our chimneys have concealed; and now airtight stoves have come to conceal all the rest.

In the course of the night, I got up once or twice and put fresh logs on the fire, making my companions curl up their legs.

It reminded me of the Greek κόγχη, a conch or shell, and I amused myself with fancying that it might signify the dead sound which the trees yield when struck. All the rest of the pines had been driven off.

How far men go for the material of their houses!

The inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine boards for ordinary use.

But, pray, could not one spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than these—employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling?

For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle.

What a coarse and imperfect use Indians and hunters make of nature! No wonder that their race is so soon exterminated.

These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best?

It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most.

It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts.

It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.

We certainly leave the handsomest paint and clapboards behind in the woods, when we strip off the bark and poison ourselves with white-lead in the towns. We get but half the spoils of the forest.

For beauty, give me trees with the fur on.

This house was designed and constructed with the freedom of stroke of a forester’s axe, without other compass and square than Nature uses.

then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on the “hot bread and sweet cakes”; and the fur and lumber trade is an old story to Asia and Europe.

I doubt if men ever made a trade of heroism.

In the days of Achilles, even, they delighted in big barns, and perchance in pressed hay, and he who possessed the most valuable team was the best fellow.

After a dinner at which applesauce was the greatest luxury to me, but our moose meat was oftenest called for by the lumberers, I walked across the clearing into the forest, southward, returning along the shore.

For my dessert, I helped myself to a large slice of the Chesuncook woods, and took a hearty draught of its waters with all my senses.

The woods were as fresh and full of vegetable life as a lichen in wet weather, and contained many interesting plants;

Such were the first rude beginnings of a town. They spoke of the practicability of a winter road to the Moosehead carry, which would not cost much, and would connect them with steam and staging and all the busy world.

I almost doubted if the lake would be there⁠—the selfsame lake⁠—preserve its form and identity, when the shores should be cleared and settled; as if these lakes and streams which explorers report never awaited the advent of the citizen.

The sight of one of these frontier houses, built of these great logs, whose inhabitants have unflinchingly maintained their ground many summers and winters in the wilderness, reminds me of famous forts, like Ticonderoga or Crown Point, which have sustained memorable sieges.

On one side, they were hauling the logs up an inclined plane by waterpower; on the other, passing out the boards, planks, and sawed timber, and forming them into rafts.

The trees were literally drawn and quartered there.

In forming the rafts, they use the lower three feet of hardwood saplings, which have a crooked and knobbed butt-end, for bolts, passing them up through holes bored in the corners and sides of the rafts, and keying them.

The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder—and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man!

As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one.

We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

But Maine, perhaps, will soon be where Massachusetts is. A good part of her territory is already as bare and commonplace as much of our neighborhood, and her villages generally are not so well shaded as ours.

We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.

Consider Nahant, the resort of all the fashion of Boston—which peninsula I saw but indistinctly in the twilight, when I steamed by it, and thought that it was unchanged since the discovery.

Little as I know of Captain Brown, I would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions.

It costs us nothing to be just.

We can at least express our sympathy with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what I now propose to do.

It was no abolition lecturer that converted him. Ethan Allen and Stark, with whom he may in some respects be compared, were rangers in a lower and less important field.

They could bravely face their country’s foes, but he had the courage to face his country herself, when she was in the wrong.

A Western writer says, to account for his escape from so many perils, that he was concealed under a “rural exterior”; as if, in that prairie land, a hero should, by good rights, wear a citizen’s dress only.

Such were his humanities, and not any study of grammar.

He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at all—the Puritans. It would be in vain to kill him. He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here.

I noticed that he did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. I remember, particularly, how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas, without ever giving the least vent to his pent-up fire.

It was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue.

Also referring to the deeds of certain Border Ruffians, he said, rapidly paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier, keeping a reserve of force and meaning, “They had a perfect right to be hung.”

and hence are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of all kinds.

We are mere figureheads upon a hulk, with livers in the place of hearts.

The curse is the worship of idols, which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image himself; and the New Englander is just as much an idolater as the Hindu.

We discover why it was that we never got beyond compliments and surfaces with them before; we become aware of as many versts between us and them as there are between a wandering Tartar and a Chinese town.

The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.

Impassable seas suddenly find their level between us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. It is the difference of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and mountains, that make the true and impassable boundaries between individuals and between states.

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few.

When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

Would you have had him wait till that time came?—till you and I came over to him? The very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes.

Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics, think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken.

The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

This unlettered man’s speaking and writing are standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American; such as “It will pay.”

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed—a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it.

Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

I shall even believe that the millennium is at hand, and that the reign of justice is about to commence, when the Patent Office, or Government, begins to distribute, and the people to plant the seeds of these things.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot.

No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence, which are the capital in this profession.

It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.

Think of a man’s swinging dumbbells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them.

An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon.

Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.

I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west.

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither;

and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.

Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages.

It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arborvitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.

How near to good is what is wild!

Life consists with wildness.

The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Life consists with wildness.

The most alive is the wildest.

Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.

Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it—“Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.

The wildwood covers the virgin mould—and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds.

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages.

the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp.

I enter a swamp as a sacred place⁠—a sanctum sanctorum.

There is the strength, the marrow of nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould—and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.

He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer is armed with plough and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the Scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.

As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.

Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself—and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

Dullness is but another name for tameness.

It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the Scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing.

The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him;

I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free.

There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts …

A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods.

We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.

I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them.

A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me.

It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.

though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful⁠—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.

The highest that we can attain to is not knowledge, but sympathy with intelligence.

We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound.

Live free, child of the mist⁠—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.

The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Parana, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation:

Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it.

Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the …

In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself.

Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry.

They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra‑a‑ate thoughts, those gra‑a‑ate men you hear of!

The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present.

He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated.

The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet.

October has hardly tinged our poetry.

A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year.

But round about and within our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone.

October is the month for painted leaves.

Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting.

October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from the green to the brown state, outline it, and copy …

Higher up the hill, perchance, grow also blackberries, John’s-wort, and neglected, withered, and wiry June-grass. How fortunate that it grows in such places, and not in the midst of the rank grasses which are annually cut!

Nature thus keeps use and beauty distinct.

I know many such localities, where it does not fail to present itself annually, and paint the earth with its blush.

I had walked over those great fields so many Augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these purple companions that I had there. I had brushed against them and trodden on them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and blessed me.

Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.

Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid. Who can doubt that these grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him, find some compensation in your appreciation of them?

I had brushed against them and trodden on them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and blessed me. Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.

Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.

Who can doubt that these grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him, find some compensation in your appreciation of them?

But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year.

The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it.

They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s thickness to the depth of the soil.

The ground is all parti-colored with them. But they still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it.

They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the sapling’s first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after-years, it has become the monarch of the forest.

It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!—painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living.

They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe—with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in.

I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs. What though you own no lot at Mount Auburn? Your lot is surely cast somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has been consecrated from of old.

We will not ask them to yield us sugar in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn.

Wealth indoors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally distributed on the Common.

All children alike can revel in this golden harvest.

… we have seen, refer them, not to some natural object in our neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possibly they may find at the apothecary’s, but which probably neither they nor we ever saw?

Have we not an earth under our feet⁠—ay, and a sky over our heads?

Or is the last all ultramarine? What do we know of sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber, and the like—most of us who take these names in vain?

And poor indeed must be that New England village’s October which has not the maple in its streets.

This October festival costs no powder, nor ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are waving.

No wonder that we must have our annual Cattle-Show, and Fall Training, and perhaps Cornwallis, our September Courts, and the like. Nature herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but in every hollow and on every hillside.

“Wrought in a sad sincerity; Themselves from God they could not free; They planted better than they knew;— The conscious trees to beauty grew.”

Verily these maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which preach their half-century, and century, ay, and century-and-a-half sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering to many generations of men; and the least we can do is to supply them with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.

Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its leaves, I suspect that some scarlet-oak leaves surpass those of all other oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their outlines.

Lifted higher and higher, and sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the least possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of skyey influences.

There they dance, arm in arm with the light⁠—tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial halls.

So intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last what in the dance is leaf and what is light.

To the sailor’s eye, it is a much-indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats?

At sight of this leaf we are all mariners⁠—if not vikings, buccaneers, and filibusters.

Both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance, we think, that, if we succeed in doubling those sharp capes, we shall find deep, smooth, and secure havens in the ample bays.

I do not speak here of the small trees and shrubs, which are commonly observed, and which are now withered, but of the large trees.

Most go in and shut their doors, thinking that bleak and colorless November has already come, when some of the most brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit.

This very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now, the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark scarlet—every leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped …

… vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now, the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark scarlet—every leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet dye.

The whole tree is much like a heart in form, as well as color.

Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think, ten days ago, that that cold green tree would assume such color as this. Its leaves are still firmly attached, while those of other trees are falling around it.

So vivacious is redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season.

You see a redder tree than exists.

If you wish to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand thus on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and every one within range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be revealed.

These are my China-asters, my late garden-flowers. It costs me nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting the roots of my plants.

Only look at what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your yard.

We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole forest as a garden. The blossoming of the scarlet oak—the forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)!

It costs me nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your yard.

We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole forest as a garden.

The blossoming of the scarlet oak—the forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)! I do not know but they interest me more than the maples, they are so widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest;

The greater part of the phenomena of nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener’s garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine.

There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate⁠—not a grain more.

The actual objects which one man will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth.

The actual objects which one man will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads⁠—and then we can hardly see anything else.

In my botanical rambles, I find, that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality—no nearer than Hudson’s Bay—and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it, and expecting it, unconsciously, …

This is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants, which I could name.

A man sees only what concerns him.

A botanist absorbed in the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. He, as it were, tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most sees only their shadows.

for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look.

The greater part of the phenomena of nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives.

The gardener sees only the gardener’s garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine.

I knew a girl who, being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the quart, where no one else knew that there were any, because she was accustomed to pick them up country where she came from.

The astronomer knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind before any have seen it with a glass.

The hen scratches and finds her food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the hawk.

he must take very particular aim, and know what he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there.

And so is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons and haunts, and the color of its wing⁠—if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can anticipate it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in cornfields.

The sportsman trains himself, dresses and watches unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it.

… a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to agriculture and the gentler way of life, agree in Latin and Greek, while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are utterly alien from the Greek.”

Thus the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive.

The apple was early so important, and generally distributed, that its name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general.

The apple-tree has been celebrated by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its fruit.

Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it, dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.

The tree is mentioned in at least three places in the Old Testament, and its fruit in two or three more. Solomon sings—“As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.”

Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophrastus, says—“Of trees there are some which are altogether wild (sylvestres), some more civilized (urbaniores).” Theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and, indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees.

It is as harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as flocks and herds.

It has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is more humanized; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be no longer traceable to its wild original? It migrates with man, like the dog and horse and cow:

It has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is more humanized; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be no longer traceable to its wild original?

It migrates with man, like the dog and horse and cow: first, perchance, from Greece to Italy, thence to England, thence to America; and our Western emigrant is still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his load.

At least a million apple-trees are thus set farther westward this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider how the Blossom-Week, like the Sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the prairies;

Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell.

One is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the shops.

The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers.

A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens, especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price, and without robbing anybody.

There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold.

No mortal has ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin to taste its ambrosial qualities.

No mortal has ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin to taste its ambrosial qualities.

For nectar and ambrosia are only those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates fail to perceive⁠—just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it.

When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the other, and, to my mind, …

and there were so many poles supporting the lower ones, that they looked like pictures of banyan-trees. As an old English manuscript says, “The mo appelen the tree bereth, the more sche boweth to the folk.”

Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits.

Let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. That should be the “going” price of apples.

The fruit was hard and green, but looked as if it would be palatable in the winter. Some was dangling on the twigs, but more half-buried in the wet leaves under the tree, or rolled far down the hill amid the rocks.

The owner knows nothing of it.

The day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee.

They are more like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they contend with, than anything else.

No wonder they are prompted to grow thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes.

In their thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid.

No wonder they are prompted to grow thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes.

In their thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid.

The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to—for they maintain their ground best in a rocky field—are thickly sprinkled with these little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up …

But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case, too, lost in power—that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their pyramidal state.

The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph.

Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes.

… and the generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse the seed.

Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its hourglass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.

It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should trim young apple-trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, I think.

It was thus the Porter and the Baldwin grew.

Every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child.

It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate;

Every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child.

It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise.

What a lesson to man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate;

Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge.

The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge.

The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.

This is one, and the most remarkable way, in which the wild apple is propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and swamps, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows with comparative rapidity.

“highest plot To plant the Bergamot.”

The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of November.

They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still perhaps as beautiful as ever.

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November, I presume that the owner does not mean to gather.

They belong to children as wild as themselves⁠—to certain active boys that I know⁠—to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans after all the world⁠—and, moreover, to us walkers.

We have met with them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries, where they have learned how to live.

But it is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste.

The saunterer’s apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house.

The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with.

They must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around.

What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet.

Some of these apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”

What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet.

Some of these apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”

Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste that is up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps one-half of them must be eaten in the house, the other outdoors.

But perhaps they were only eaten in the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and clearer?

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of nature appreciated; just as the woodchopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there and dreams of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would make a student miserable.

They who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with temperatures, so with flavors; as, with cold and heat, so with sour and sweet.

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage’s preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man.

It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!

’Tis not the lasting Deuxan I require, Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request, Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife, Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife: No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life.”

So there is one thought for the field, another for the house.

I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable, if tasted in the house.

You will discover some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere.

It will have some red stains, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of nature⁠—green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a milder flavor⁠—yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair—apples not of Discord, but of Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.

It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not tax a man’s invention—no one to be named after a man, and all in the lingua vernacula?

Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples?

It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag.

Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native apple-trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out.

I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.

Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.

Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out today in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap …

According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia called Selenites, “wherein is a white, which increases and decreases with the moon.” My journal for the last year or two, has been selenitic in this sense.

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us?

Are we not tempted to explore it—to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found?

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it—to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon?

Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found?

In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile;

Are we not tempted to explore it—to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found?

In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads.

The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile that concerns us.

The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile that concerns us.

I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms from the night, if I report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy of their attention⁠—if I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep⁠—if I add to the domains of poetry.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally.

… I conquer some realms from the night, if I report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy of their attention—if I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep—if I add to the domains of poetry.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

I soon discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally. Why not walk a little way in her light?

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally.

Why not walk a little way in her light?

Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in literature or religion? But why not study this Sanskrit?

But why not study this Sanskrit? What if one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions—so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used her?

One moon gone by unnoticed?

I think it was Dr. Chalmers who said, criticising Coleridge, that for his part he wanted ideas which he could see all round, and not such as he must look at away up in the heavens.

They are moonshine, are they? Well, then, do your night-travelling when there is no moon to light you; but I will be thankful for the light that reaches me from the star of least magnitude.

Stars are lesser or greater only as they appear to us so.

I will be thankful that I see so much as one side of a celestial idea, one side of the rainbow and the sunset sky.

Stars are lesser or greater only as they appear to us so. I will be thankful that I see so much as one side of a celestial idea, one side of the rainbow and the sunset sky.

Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them⁠—as owls might talk of sunshine.

None of your sunshine!—but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand, which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it.

But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, but also by her influence on the earth and its inhabitants. “The moon gravitates toward the earth, and the earth reciprocally toward the moon.”

The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence.

I will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts from the current distractions of the day. I would warn my hearers that they must not try my thoughts by a daylight standard, but endeavor to realize that I speak out of the night.

So he whose theme is moonlight, though he may find it difficult, must, as it were, illustrate it with the light of the moon alone.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night.

It is a very different season. Take a July night, for instance. About ten o’clock—when man is asleep, and day fairly forgotten—the beauty of moonlight is seen over lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding. On all sides novelties present themselves.

On our open river terraces once cultivated by the Indian, they appear to occupy the ground like an army—their heads nodding in the breeze. Small trees and shrubs are seen in the midst, overwhelmed as by an inundation.

The shadows of rocks and trees and shrubs and hills are more conspicuous than the objects themselves.

The slightest irregularities in the ground are revealed by the shadows, and what the feet find comparatively smooth appears rough and diversified in consequence. For the same reason the whole landscape is more variegated and picturesque than by day.

“The light of the day takes refuge in their bosoms,” as the Purana says of the ocean. All white objects are more remarkable than by day. A distant cliff looks like a phosphorescent space on a hillside. The woods are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers.

You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on.

These small fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moonseed—as if the moon were sowing it in such places.

You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on. These small fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moonseed—as if the moon were sowing it in such places.

In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head.

Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now—swamp-pink in the meadow and tansy in the road;

In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head.

Other senses take the lead.

The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now—swamp-pink in the meadow and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels.

It tells of the day, of sunny noontide hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid flowers. It is an air in which work has been done—which men have breathed.

It circulates about from woodside to hillside like a dog that has lost its master, now that the sun is gone.

The rocks retain all night the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed. And so does the sand: if you dig a few inches into it you find a warm bed.

You lie on your back on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy.

The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.

A companion with whom I was sailing one very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them, though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances—that they were a kind of bread and …

It is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the earth, when she commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been abroad alone in moonlight nights.

She seems to be waging continual war with the clouds in your behalf.

Yet we fancy the clouds to be her foes also.

… squadron of her foes, and rides majestic in a clear sky unscathed, and there are no more any obstructions in her path, he cheerfully and confidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his heart, and the cricket also seems to express joy in its song.

How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and darkness did not come to restore the drooping world!

As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect.

Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter! In a mild night, when the harvest or hunter’s moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only a master.

The village street is then as wild as the forest.

New and old things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one. Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none;

The village street is then as wild as the forest. New and old things are confounded. I know not whether I am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one.

Nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor conservative.

Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!

“In such a night let me abroad remain Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again.”

Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?⁠—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul?

It is merely garish and glaring.

who does not in his thought accompany the stars to their “cavernous home,” “descending” with them “on barren mountains?”

Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black; for we see through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day, where the sunbeams are revelling.

Sometimes they were so low under the eaves that I thought they must have perforated the plate beam for another apartment, and I noticed some which were triangular, to fit that part more exactly.

The ends of the houses had thus as many muzzles as a revolver; and, if the inhabitants have the same habit of staring out the windows that some of our neighbors have, a traveller must stand a small chance with them.

Generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on the Cape looked more comfortable, as well as picturesque, than the modern and more pretending ones, which were less in harmony with the scenery, and less firmly planted.

… a string of the proper length, which should be the chord of an arc measuring his jumping ability on horizontal surfaces—assuming one leg to be a perpendicular to the plane of the horizon, which, however, may have been too bold an assumption in this case.

Nevertheless, this was a kind of geometry in the legs which it interested me to hear of.

Our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the ponds, most of which we could see from his windows, and making us repeat them after him, to see if we had got them right.

He had been a voyager, then?

Oh, he had been about the world in his day.

He once considered himself a pilot for all our coast; but now they had changed the names so, he might be bothered.

At breakfast we had eels, buttermilk cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts, and tea. The old man talked a steady stream; and when his wife told him he had better eat his breakfast, he said: “

Don’t hurry me; I have lived too long to be hurried.

” I ate of the applesauce and the doughnuts, which I thought had sustained the least detriment from the old man’s shots, but my companion refused the applesauce, and ate of the hot cake and green beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the …

This undertow, meeting the next surface-wave on the bar which itself has made, forms part of the dam over which the latter breaks, as over an upright wall.

The sea thus plays with the land, holding a sandbar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat plays with a mouse; but the fatal grip is sure to come at last.

The sea sends its rapacious east-wind to rob the land, but before the former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west-wind to recover some of its own.

They who merely keep out on the beach in a storm in the winter are sometimes rewarded by the Humane Society.

If you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland Light in Truro.

It was said in 1794 that more vessels were cast away on the east shore of Truro than anywhere in Barnstable County.

Notwithstanding this lighthouse has since been erected, after almost every storm we read of one or more vessels wrecked here, and sometimes more than a dozen wrecks are visible from this point at one time.

The inhabitants hear the crash of vessels going to pieces as they sit round their hearths, and they commonly date from some memorable shipwreck.

If the history of this beach could be written from beginning to end, it would be a thrilling page in the history of commerce.

The bottom of the sea is strown with anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable still attached—of which where is the other end?

So many unconcluded tales to be continued another time.

So, if we had diving-bells adapted to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding-ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost;

So many unconcluded tales to be continued another time. So, if we had diving-bells adapted to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding-ground.

But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find⁠—not be Chatham men, dragging for anchors.

The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld!

His successor told me that he could not keep too hot a fire in such a case. All this because the oil was poor.

A government lighting the mariners on its wintry coast with summer-strained oil, to save expense!

That were surely a summer-strained mercy!

His successor told me that he could not keep too hot a fire in such a case. All this because the oil was poor. A government lighting the mariners on its wintry coast with summer-strained oil, to save expense!

That were surely a summer-strained mercy!

This keeper’s successor, who kindly entertained me the next year, stated that one extremely cold night, when this and all the neighboring lights were burning summer oil, but he had been provident enough to reserve a little winter oil against emergencies, he was waked up …

and sometimes in the fall he had seen where a golden plover had struck the glass in the night, and left the down and the fatty part of its breast on it.

Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shining before men.

Surely the lighthouse keeper has a responsible, if an easy, office. When his lamp goes out, he goes out; or, at most, only one such accident is pardoned.

Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shining before men. Surely the lighthouse keeper has a responsible, if an easy, office.

When his lamp goes out, he goes out; or, at most, only one such accident is pardoned.

I thought it a pity that some poor student did not live there, to profit by all that light, since he would not rob the mariner. “Well,” he said, “I do sometimes come up here and read the newspaper when they are noisy down below.”

I thought it a pity that some poor student did not live there, to profit by all that light, since he would not rob the mariner. “Well,” he said, “I do sometimes come up here and read the newspaper when they are noisy down below.”

Think of fifteen argand lamps to read the newspaper by!

Government oil!—light enough, perchance, to read the Constitution by! I thought that he should read nothing less than his Bible by that light.

“Well,” he said, “I do sometimes come up here and read the newspaper when they are noisy down below.” Think of fifteen argand lamps to read the newspaper by!

Government oil!⁠—light enough, perchance, to read the Constitution by!

I thought that he should read nothing less than his Bible by that light. I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, methinks, than the University afforded.

He certainly must be a son of Aurora to whom the sun looms, when there are so many millions to whom it glooms rather, or who never see it till an hour after it has risen.

But it behooves us old stagers to keep our lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to the sun’s looming.

This keeper remarked that the centre of the flame should be exactly opposite the centre of the reflectors, and that accordingly, if he was not careful to turn down his wicks in the morning, the sun falling on the reflectors on the south side of …

… to turn down his wicks in the morning, the sun falling on the reflectors on the south side of the building would set fire to them, like a burning-glass, in the coldest day, and he would look up at noon and see them all lighted!

When your lamp is ready to give light, it is readiest to receive it, and the sun will light it.

His successor said that he had never known them to blaze in such a case, but merely to smoke.

It was a cheap way of securing comfort, as well as fame, and I wish that all new towns would take pattern from this.

It is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward.

Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liberal old men!

Show me a youth whose mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized.

I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide.

I know one such Washington city of a man, whose lots as yet are only surveyed and staked out, and except a cluster of shanties here and there, only the Capitol stands there for all structures, and any day you may see from afar his …

Those of the former which I looked at appeared tawdry. It matters little to me whether the pictures are by a neophyte of the Algonquin or the Italian tribe. But I was impressed by the quiet religious atmosphere of the place.

It was a great cave in the midst of a city; and what were the altars and the tinsel but the sparkling stalactics, into which you entered in a moment, and where the still atmosphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought?

Such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day, is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only Sundays—hardly long enough for an airing—and then filled with a bustling congregation—a church where the priest is the least part, where you do …

for what purposes would it be entered, by such baboons as we are? I think of its value not only to religion, but to philosophy and to poetry; besides a reading-room, to have a thinking-room in every city!

Perchance the time will come when every house even will have not only its sleeping-rooms, and dining-room, and talking-room or parlor, but its thinking-room also, and the architects will put it into their plans.

Let it be furnished and ornamented with whatever conduces to serious and creative thought. I should not object to the holy water, or any other simple symbol, if it were consecrated by the imagination of the worshippers.

They made on me the impression, not of many individuals, but of one vast centipede of a man, good for all sorts of pulling down; and why not then for some kinds of building up?

If men could combine thus earnestly, and patiently, and harmoniously to some really worthy end, what might they not accomplish?

They now put their hands, and partially perchance their heads, together, and the result is that they are the imperfect tools of an imperfect and tyrannical government.

I repeat these names not merely for want of more substantial facts to record, but because they sounded singularly poetic to my ears. There certainly was no lie in them. They suggested that some simple, and, perchance, heroic human life might have transpired there.

There is all the poetry in the world in a name.

It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word.

There certainly was no lie in them. They suggested that some simple, and, perchance, heroic human life might have transpired there. There is all the poetry in the world in a name.

It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read.

What is poetry in the common sense, but a string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.

There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a string of such jingling names?

I want nothing better than a good word.

The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me. Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it.

There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word.

The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.

Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it. All the world reiterating this slender truth, that aspens once grew there; and the swift inference is, that men were there to see them.

What is poetry in the common sense, but a string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.

Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it.

All the world reiterating this slender truth, that aspens once grew there; and the swift inference is, that men were there to see them. And so it would be with the names of our native and neighboring villages, if we had not profaned them.

I heard something in the night about the boat being at William Henry, Three Rivers, and in the Richelieu Rapids, but I was still where I had been when I lost sight of Pointe aux Trembles.

To hear a man who has been waked up at midnight in the cabin of a steamboat, inquiring, “Waiter, where are we now?” is, as if at any moment of the Earth’s revolution round the sun, or of the system round its centre, one were to raise himself up and inquire of one of the deck hands, “Where are we now?”

I went on deck at daybreak, when we were thirty or forty miles above Quebec. The banks were now higher and more interesting. There was an “uninterrupted succession of whitewashed cottages” on each side of the river. This is what every traveller tells.

I have no doubt that soldiers well drilled are, as a class, peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. The officers appeared like men dressed above their condition.

It is impossible to give the soldier a good education, without making him a deserter.

His natural foe is the government that drills him.

I was surprised at the regular and extensive use made of these animals for drawing, not only milk, but groceries, wood, etc. It reminded me that the dog commonly is not put to any use.

Cats catch mice; but dogs only worry the cats.

Kalm, a hundred years ago, saw sledges here for ladies to ride in, drawn by a pair of dogs. He says, “A middle-sized dog is sufficient to draw a single person, when the roads are good”;

as if you were going out to dine, when, in fact, the genuine traveller is going out to work hard, and fare harder—to eat a crust by the wayside whenever he can get it.

Honest travelling is about as dirty work as you can do, and a man needs a pair of overalls for it.

As for blacking my shoes in such a case, I should as soon think of blacking my face. I carry a piece of tallow to preserve the leather, and keep out the water; that’s all;

I should have liked to be present when the customhouse officer came aboard of him, and asked him to declare upon his honor if he had anything but wearing apparel in them.

Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys.

The perfection of travelling is to travel without baggage.

I should have liked to be present when the customhouse officer came aboard of him, and asked him to declare upon his honor if he had anything but wearing apparel in them. Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys.

The perfection of travelling is to travel without baggage.

After considerable reflection and experience, I have concluded that the best bag for the foot-traveller is made with a handkerchief, or, if he study appearances, a piece of stiff brown paper, well tied up, with a fresh piece within to put outside when the first …

for we wished to be ready to digress at any moment.

We made it our home nowhere in particular, but everywhere where our umbrella and bundle were.

It would have been an amusing circumstance, if the Mayor of one of those cities had politely asked us where we were staying. We could only have answered, that we were staying with his Honor for the time being.

it being the immediate valley of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, rising by a single or by successive terraces toward the mountains on either hand.

Though the words Canada East on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and unexplored wildernesses, the actual Canada, which might be the colored portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the river, which one of those syllables would more than cover.

The banks of the St. Lawrence are rather low from Montreal to the Richelieu Rapids, about forty miles above Quebec. Thence they rise gradually to Cape Diamond, or Quebec.

We were told that it was just six miles from one parish church to another. I thought that we saw every house in Ange Gardien.

Therefore, as it was a muddy day, we never got out of the mud, nor out of the village, unless we got over the fence; then indeed, if it was on the north side, we were out of the civilized world.

There were sometimes a few more houses near the church, it is true, but we had only to go a quarter of a mile from the road to the top of the bank to find ourselves on the verge of the uninhabited, and, for the …

it is bad walking. Sir Francis Head says that the immigrant is forward to “appreciate the happiness of living in a land in which the old country’s servile custom of touching the hat does not exist,” but he was thinking of Canada West, of course.

It would, indeed, be a serious bore to be obliged to touch your hat several times a day. A Yankee has not leisure for it.

We saw peas, and even beans, collected into heaps in the fields. The former are an important crop here, and, I suppose, are not so much infested by the weevil as with us.

At the Rivière du Sault à la Puce, which, I suppose, means the River of the Fall of the Flea, was advertised in English, as the sportsmen are English, “The best Snipe-shooting grounds,” over the door of a small public-house.

These words being English affected me as if I had been absent now ten years from my country, and for so long had not heard the sound of my native language, and every one of them was as interesting to me as if I had been a snipe-shooter, and they had been snipes.

The prunella or self-heal, in the grass here, was an old acquaintance. We frequently saw the inhabitants washing, or cooking for their pigs, and in one place hackling flax by the roadside.

Being four or five feet high it warmed the whole person as you stood by it. The stove was plainly a very important article of furniture in Canada, and was not set aside during the summer.

Its size, and the respect which was paid to it, told of the severe winters which it had seen and prevailed over.

The master of the house, in his long-pointed, red woollen cap, had a thoroughly antique physiognomy of the old Norman stamp. He might have come over with Jacques Cartier.

… delicate close-hugging lichens of various colors, kept fresh and bright by the moisture, till I viewed the first fall from the front, and looked down still deeper to where the second and third channels fell into a remarkably large circular basin worn in the stone.

The falling water seemed to jar the very rocks, and the noise to be ever increasing.

The vista downstream was through a narrow and deep cleft in the mountain, all white suds at the bottom; but a sudden angle in this gorge prevented my seeing through to the bottom of the fall.

One of the tributaries of the St. Anne is named La Rivière de la Rose; and farther east are, La Rivière de la Blondelle, and La Rivière de la Friponne.

Their very rivière meanders more than our river.

Yet the impression which this country made on me was commonly different from this.

as if it needed only a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at once.

I began to dream of Provence and the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth.

They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the woods toward Hudson’s Bay, were only as the forests of France and Germany.

I could not at once bring myself to believe that the inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me, significant names, lead as prosaic lives as we of New England.

In short, the Canada which I saw was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in and for criminals to run to.

When I asked the man to whom I have referred, if there were any falls on the Rivière au Chien—for I saw that it came over the same high bank with the Montmorenci and St. Anne—he answered that there were. How far? I inquired.

To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a village in sight, that it is St. Fereole or St. Anne, the Guardian Angel or the Holy Joseph’s; or of a mountain, that it was Bélange or St. Hyacinthe!

As soon as you leave the States, these saintly names begin.

St. John is the first town you stop at (fortunately we did not see it), and thenceforward, the names of the mountains, and streams, and villages reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication of poetry—Chambly, Longueil, Pointe aux Trembles, Bartholomy, etc., etc.;

… La Puce, the least remarkable of the four which we visited in this vicinity, we had never heard of till we came to Canada, and yet, so far as I know, there is nothing of the kind in New England to be compared with it.

Most travellers in Canada would not hear of it, though they might go so near as to hear it.

Since my return I find that in the topographical description of the country mention is made of “two or three romantic falls” on this stream, though we saw and heard of but this one.

… there is a fall on it, and they will perchance tell you of something as interesting as Bashpish or the Catskill, which no traveller has ever seen, or if they have not found it, you may possably trace up the stream and discover it yourself.

Falls there are a drug; and we became quite dissipated in respect to them. We had drank too much of them.

Beside these which I have referred to, there are a thousand other falls on the St. Lawrence and its tributaries which I have not seen nor heard of;

He said that the wood was cut off about one mile from the river. The rest was “bush,” and beyond that the “Queen’s bush.”

Old as the country is, each landholder bounds on the primitive forest, and fuel bears no price.

As I had forgotten the French for “sickle,” they went out in the evening to the barn and got one, and so clenched the certainty of our understanding one another.

First, went the coureur de bois with the eau-de-vie; then followed, if he did not precede, the heroic missionary with the eau d’immortalité.

It was freedom to hunt, and fish, and convert, not to work, that they sought.

Hontan says that the coureurs de bois lived like sailors ashore. In no part of the seventeenth century could the French be said to have had a foothold in Canada; they held only by the fur of the wild animals which they were exterminating.

There was apparently a greater equality of condition among the habitans of Montmorenci County than in New England. They are an almost exclusively agricultural, and so far independent, population, each family producing nearly all the necessaries of life for itself.

If the Canadian wants energy, perchance he possesses those virtues, social and others, which the Yankee lacks, in which case he cannot be regarded as a poor man.

After spending the night at a farmhouse in Château-Richer, about a dozen miles northeast of Quebec, we set out on our return to the city.

They went upstairs to call the master; but the crabbed old miser asked why we wanted to know, and would tell us only for some compensation. I wanted French to give him a piece of my mind.

I had got enough to talk on a pinch, but not to quarrel; so I had to come away, looking all I would have said.

This was the utmost incivility we met with in Canada.

Lawrence. Though they were the largest which I saw in Canada, I was not proportionately interested by them, probably from satiety. I did not see any peculiar propriety in the name Chaudière, or cauldron.

I saw here the most brilliant rainbow that I ever imagined.

It was just across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this tremendous fall produced; and I stood on a level with the keystone of its arch.

I saw here the most brilliant rainbow that I ever imagined. It was just across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this tremendous fall produced; and I stood on a level with the keystone of its arch.

It was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full semicircle, only four or five rods in diameter, though as wide as usual, so intently bright as to pain the eye, and apparently as substantial as an arch of stone.

It changed its position and colors as we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and the mist was so thick. Evidently a picture painted on mist for the men and animals that came to the falls to look at;

It changed its position and colors as we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and the mist was so thick.

Evidently a picture painted on mist for the men and animals that came to the falls to look at; but for what special purpose beyond this, I know not.

At the farthest point in this ride, and when most inland, unexpectedly at a turn in the road we descried the frowning citadel of Quebec in the horizon, like the beak of a bird of prey.

We returned by the river-road under the bank, which is very high, abrupt, and rocky.

When we were opposite to Quebec, I was surprised to see that in the Lower Town, under the shadow of the rock, the lamps were lit, twinkling not unlike crystals in a cavern, while the citadel high above, and we, too, on the south shore, were in broad daylight.

As we were too late for the ferryboat that night, we put up at a maison de pension at Point Levi. The usual two-story stove was here placed against an opening in the partition shaped like a fireplace, and so warmed several rooms.

When we landed at Quebec the next morning, a man lay on his back on the wharf, apparently dying, in the midst of a crowd and directly in the path of the horses, groaning, “O ma conscience!”

I thought that he pronounced his French more distinctly than any I heard, as if the dying had already acquired the accents of a universal language.

Having secured the only unengaged berths in the Lord Sydenham steamer, which was to leave Quebec before sundown, and being resolved, now that I had seen somewhat of the country, to get an idea of the city, I proceeded to walk round the Upper Town, …