The Story of My Boyhood and Youth quotes

All in vain.

In spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.

My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks with my grandfather when I was perhaps not over three years old.

How our young wondering eyes reveled in the sunny, breezy glory of the hills and the sky, every particle of us thrilling and tingling with the bees and glad birds and glad streams!

Kings may be blessed; we were glorious, we were free,—school cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature’s glad wildness.

These were my first excursions,—the beginnings of lifelong wanderings.

MUIR’S LAKE (FOUNTAIN LAKE) AND THE GARDEN MEADOW Sketched from the roof of the Bur-Oak Shanty

This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—how utterly happy it made us!

Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us.

At last, in spite of tearful protests, he was condemned and executed. Father examined the poor fellow’s stomach in search of sure evidence, and discovered the heads of eight chickens that he had devoured at his last meal.

So poor Watch was killed simply because his taste for chickens was too much like our own.

Think of the millions of squabs that preaching, praying men and women kill and eat, with all sorts of other animals great and small, young and old, while eloquently discoursing on the coming of the blessed peaceful, bloodless millennium!

My sister Sarah had heard my cry for help, and on our arrival at the house inquired what had happened. “Were you drowning, John? I heard you cry you couldna get oot.” Lawson made haste to reply,

“Oh, no! He was juist haverin (making fun).”

I was very much ashamed of myself, and at night, after calmly reviewing the affair, concluded that there had been no reasonable cause for the accident, and that I ought to punish myself for so nearly losing my life from unmanly fear.

“You confounded fishy, unfair rascal! What did you do that for? What had I done to you? Faithless, legless, long-nosed wretch!”

Intense experiences like the above bring out the humanity that is in all animals.

One touch of nature, even a cat-and-loon touch, makes all the world kin.

The muskrat is one of the most notable and widely distributed of American animals, and millions of the gentle, industrious, beaver-like creatures are shot and trapped and speared every season for their skins, worth a dime or so,—like shooting boys and girls for their garments.

Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners.

In the mean time we may just as well as not learn to live clean, innocent lives instead of slimy, bloody ones. All hale, red-blooded boys are savage, the best and boldest the savagest, fond of hunting and fishing.

The weary hammer-and-chisel-chipping went on as before, only more slowly, until ninety feet down, when at last I struck a fine, hearty gush of water.

Constant dropping wears away stone. So does constant chipping, while at the same time wearing away the chipper.

Father never spent an hour in that well. He trusted me to sink it straight and plumb, and I did, and built a fine covered top over it, and swung two iron-bound buckets in it from which we all drank for many a day.

and when I held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the kitchen I found that it was only one o’clock. I had gained five hours, almost half a day

“Five hours to myself!” I said, “five huge, solid hours!”

I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of these five frosty hours.

So when I left home to try the world I had only about fifteen dollars in my pocket.

Strange to say, father carefully taught us to consider ourselves very poor worms of the dust, conceived in sin, etc., and devoutly believed that quenching every spark of pride and self-confidence was a sacred duty, without realizing that in so doing he might at the same time be quenching everything else.

Praise he considered most venomous, and tried to assure me that when I was fairly out in the wicked world making my own way I would soon learn that although I might have thought him a hard taskmaster at times, strangers were far harder.

The grinding noise made by the wagon in turning short brought out the landlord, and the first thing that caught his eye was my strange bundle. Then he looked at me and said, “Hello, young man, what’s this?”

“Machines,” I said, “for keeping time and getting up in the morning, and so forth.”

“Well! Well! That’s a mighty queer get-up. You must be a Down-East Yankee. Where did you get the pattern for such a thing?”

A curious little fellow came running up the street, joined the crowd, stood on tiptoe to get sight of the wonder, quickly made up his mind, and shouted in crisp, confident, cock-crowing style,

“I know what that contraption’s for. It’s a machine for taking the bones out of fish.”

This was in the time of the great popular phrenology craze, when the fences and barns along the roads throughout the country were plastered with big skull-bump posters, headed, “Know Thyself,” and advising everybody to attend schoolhouse lectures to have their heads explained and be …

He had a lecture on me, discussing style, etcetera, and telling how well he remembered my arrival at the Hall in my shirt-sleeves with those mechanical wonders on my shoulder, and so forth, and so forth.

These inventions, though of little importance, opened all doors for me and made marks that have lasted many years, simply, I suppose, because they were original and promising.

I was looking around in the mean time to find out where I should go to seek my fortune.

… with its fine lawns and trees and beautiful lakes, and saw the students going and coming with their books, and occasionally practising with a theodolite in measuring distances, I thought that if I could only join them it would be the greatest joy of life.

I was desperately hungry and thirsty for knowledge and willing to endure anything to get it.

One day I chanced to meet a student who had noticed my inventions at the Fair and now recognized me. And when I said, “You are fortunate fellows to be allowed to study in this beautiful place. I wish I could join you.”

I did so and found that it tasted like the leaf of the pea.

Nature has used the same seasoning for both, though one is a straggling vine, the other a big tree.

“Now, surely you cannot imagine that all these similar characters are mere coincidences. Do they not rather go to show that the Creator in making the pea vine and locust tree had the same idea in mind, and that plants are not classified arbitrarily?

Do they not rather go to show that the Creator in making the pea vine and locust tree had the same idea in mind, and that plants are not classified arbitrarily? Man has nothing to do with their classification.

Nature has attended to all that, giving essential unity with boundless variety, so that the botanist has only to examine plants to learn the harmony of their relations.

”

When I wished to arise at any given time after sunrise, I had only to turn the pivoted frame that held the lens the requisite number of degrees or minutes.

Thus I took Emerson’s advice and hitched my dumping-wagon bed to a star.

MY DESK Made and used at the Wisconsin State University

From the top of a hill on the north side of Lake Mendota I gained a last wistful, lingering view of the beautiful University grounds and buildings where I had spent so many hungry and happy and hopeful days.

There with streaming eyes I bade my blessed Alma Mater farewell.

But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness.

There with streaming eyes I bade my blessed Alma Mater farewell.

But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness.