19th-century poets from the United States

"I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their links Were made so loose and wide, Methinks, For milder weather."

"But now I see I was not plucked for naught, And after in life's vase Of glass set while I might survive, But by a kind hand brought Alive To a strange place."

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

"Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye."

"The life that I aspire to live No man proposeth me— No trade upon the street Wears its emblazonry."

"My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read, 'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large Down in the meadow, where is richer feed, And will not mind to hit their proper targe."

"Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough, What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town, If juster battles are enacted now Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?"

"When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?"

"Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?"

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

"The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning."

"I am grateful for what I am & have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite — only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next 1000 years, & exhaust it. How sweet to think of! My extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it — for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment."

"It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?"

"Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, — returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short."

"Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on? Grade the ground first. If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him ... he will be surrounded by grandeur. He is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, — How sweet this crust is!"

"You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing."

"A gun gives you the body, not the bird."

"Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the Yoga gather in Brahmin the certain fruit of their works. Depend upon it; rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. This Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he heard wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him and he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a Yogi."

"Truth, Goodness, Beauty — those celestial thrins, Continually are born; e'en now the Universe, With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles, Its joy confesses at their recent birth."

"Sphere Music — Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music — pure, unmixed music — in which no wail mingles."

"That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess."

"Friends — They are like air bubbles on water, hastening to flow together. History tells of Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, but why should not we put to shame those old reserved worthies by a community of such? Constantly, as it were through a remote skylight, I have glimpses of a serene friendship-land, and know the better why brooks murmur and violets grow. This conjunction of souls, like waves which met and break, subsides also backward over things, and gives all a fresh aspect. I would live henceforth with some gentle soul such a life as may be conceived, double for variety, single for harmony — two, only that we might admire at our oneness — one, because indivisible. Such community to be a pledge of holy living. How could aught unworthy be admitted into our society? To listen with one ear to each summer sound, to behold with one eye each summer scene, our visual rays so to meet and mingle with the object as to be one bent and doubled; with two tongues to be wearied, and thought to spring ceaselessly from a double fountain."

"Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought."

"Aeschylus had a clear eye for the commonest things. His genius was only an enlarged common sense. He adverts with chaste severity to all natural facts. His sublimity is Greek sincerity and simpleness, naked wonder which mythology had not helped to explain... Whatever the common eye sees at all and expresses as best it may, he sees uncommonly and describes with rare completeness. The multitude that thronged the theatre could no doubt go along with him to the end... The social condition of genius is the same in all ages. Aeschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe."

"On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world."

"An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day."

"Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written. Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. this may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed."

"Who looks in the sun will see no light else; but also he will see no shadow. Our life revolves unceasingly, but the centre is ever the same, and the wise will regard only the seasons of the soul."

"We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes."

"The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison."

"It is a great art to saunter."

"A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter."

"I cannot read a sentence in the book of the Hindoos without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and seems as superior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mounts. Even at this late hour, unworn by time with a native and inherent dignity it wears the English dress as indifferently as the Sanscrit."

"We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn."

"One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors. To dwell long upon them is to add to the offense. Repentance and sorrow can only be displaced by something better, which is as free and original as if they had not been."

"And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it."

"For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it."

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."

"Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or in cold weather, by day or by night, dragging an engine at their heels, I'm astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve."

"What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through purer stratum. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far stratum in the sky."

"And now, at half-past ten o'clock, I hear the cockerels crow in Hubbard's barns, and morning is already anticipated. It is the feathered, wakeful thought in us that anticipates the following day."

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

"Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself."

"The bluebird carries the sky on his back."

"The perception of beauty is a moral test."

"The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them."

"Every poet has trembled on the verge of science."

"Fire is the most tolerable third party."

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."

"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand."

"The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth...these glorious spangles, the sweeping of heaven's floor."

"That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."

"This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature."

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves."

"If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole."

"The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one."

"You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap."

"The savage in man is never quite eradicated."

"Any fool can make a rule And every fool will mind it."

"If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."

"The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment."

"I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. 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."

"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 fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which 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. 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."

"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answered that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

"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 is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."

"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers 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. 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. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one."

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor."

"I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. 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. 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. 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 and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man."

"I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject."

"They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head."

"No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day."

"For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?"

"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."

"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."

"The rich man... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich."

"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not 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."

"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 least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen."

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

"To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity"

"The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. It is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. But what signifies it? In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn. In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun's rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere."

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

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

"I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks."

"The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine."

"It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God. If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken."

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

"I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too."

"The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer."

"Have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count three? Do you know the number of God's family? Can you put mysteries into words? Do you presume to fable of the ineffable? Pray, what geographer are you, that speak of heaven's topography? Whose friend are you that speak of God's personality? ... Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad."

"Some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word! Pythagoras says, truly enough, "A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God"; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature."

"The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor. — I think that Pilgrim's Progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this. — It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians."

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

"It would be worthy of the age to print together the collected Scriptures or Sacred Writings of the several nations, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, the Hebrews, and others, as the Scripture of mankind. The New Testament is still, perhaps, too much on the lips and in the hearts of men to be called a Scripture in this sense. Such a juxtaposition and comparison might help to liberalize the faith of men. This is a work which Time will surely edit, reserved to crown the labors of the printing-press. This would be the Bible, or Book of Books, which let the missionaries carry to the uttermost parts of the earth."

"It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. ... In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and "He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. ... There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion."

"The vessel, though her masts be firm, Beneath her copper bears a worm."

"Far from New England's blustering shore, New England's worm her hulk shall bore, And sink her in the Indian seas, Twine, wine, and hides, and China teas."

"Most books belong to the house and streets only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin."

"While we are reading these sentences, this fair modern world seems only a reprint of the Laws of Menu with the gloss of Culluca. Tried by a New England eye, or the mere practical wisdom of modern times, they are the oracles of a race already in its dotage, but held up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incorruptible ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, and I am assured that they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by."

"It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green."

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

"It takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear."

"Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard."

"This world is but canvas to our imaginations."

"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters."

"Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us."

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

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

"Poetry is the mysticism of mankind."

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

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

"The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God."

"As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere."

"What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?"

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

"The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind."

"My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."

"Men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life."

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at."

"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life."

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever.""

"Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized."

"Simplify, simplify."

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours ... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness."

"A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

"Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul."

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

"None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty."

"I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will... The really diligent student... is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome."

"I do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but I feel forced myself. 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."

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

"The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army — is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice."

"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. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the benefit of his fellow-man."

"It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others."

"I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me."

"I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharp's rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp's rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them."

"I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character — his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light."

"In wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The city imports it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind."

"Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him."

"Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open."

"There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented."

"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. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy."

"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."

"I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere, — for I have had a little experience in that business, — that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country, — and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent."

"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."

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

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man."

"As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct."

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

"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."

"Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. 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. 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."

"Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity of friends, or a government-pension, — provided you continue to breathe, — by whatever fine synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse."

"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."

"The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men? — if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?"

"The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society!"

"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."

"Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful."

"Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: — "He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was 'the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.' At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out." I think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget."

"It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men."

"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."

"You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world."

"I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, — that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things."

"In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about."

"To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten."

"While there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other."

"When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; 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."

"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. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day."

"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."

"We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up."

"Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, — the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish, — to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, — an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect."

"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 bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality."

"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. 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. How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate, whether we had better know them, — had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest shore of eternity! Have we no culture, no refinement, — but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil? — to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions be like those chestnut-burs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers?"

"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? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free."

"With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan, — mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards, — because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth, — because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end."

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

"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; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but, as I love literature, and, to some extent, the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much."

"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. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called."

"Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but States, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. 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."

"Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds?"

"The South may keep her pine-apples, and we will be content with our strawberries, which are, as it were, pine-apples with "going a-strawberrying" stirred into them, infinitely enhancing their flavor."

"A man fits out a ship at a great expense and sends it to the West Indies with a crew of men and boys, and after six months or a year, it comes back with a load of pine-apples; now, if no more gets accomplished than the speculator commonly aims at, if it simply turns out what is called a successful venture, I am less interested in this expedition than in some child’s first excursions a-huckleberrying, in which it is introduced into a new world, experiences a new development, though it brings home only a gill of berries in its basket."

"When the husk gets separated from the kernel, almost all men run after the husk and pay their respects to that. It is only the husk of Christianity that is so bruited and wide spread in this world; the kernel is still the very least and rarest of all things. There is not a single church founded on it."

"The heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high."

"Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art."

"We are not that we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for that we are capable of being."

"The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather."

"We do not directly go about the execution of the purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors behind us, and ramble with prepared minds, as if the half were already done. Our resolution is taking root or hold on the earth then, as seeds first send a shoot downward, which is fed by their own albumen, ere they send one upwards to the light."

"Enthusiasm is supernatural serenity."

"The language of excitement is at best but picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles."

"Even the best things are not equal to their fame."

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

"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes."

"The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. When it is durable, it is serene and equable. Even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be."

"Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love."

"It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains."

"There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages."

"Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion; as if the short spring days were an eternity."

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."

"The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect."

"Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men."

"If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see."

"Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys."

"There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect."

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

"It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. The hero will then know how to wait, as well as to make haste. All good abides with him who waiteth wisely."

"My life is like a stroll upon the beach, As near the ocean's edge as I can go."

"Whate'er we leave to God, God does And blesses us."

"I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, New earths and skies and seas around, And in my day the sun doth pale his light."

"She with one breath attunes the spheres, And also my poor human heart."

"Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climes and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I am at it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night."

"I would say to the readers of the Scriptures, if they wish for a good book, read the Bhagavad-Gita...translated by Charles Wilkins. It deserves to be read with reverence even by yankees...Besides the Bhagvat-Geeta, our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green...Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light it is destined to derive thence."

"The Vedas contain a sensible account of God." "The veneration in which the Vedas are held is itself a remarkable feat. Their code embraced the whole moral life of the Hindus and in such a case there is no other truth than sincerity. Truth is such by reference to the heart of man within, not to any standard without."

"The Hindoos are most serenely and thoughtfully religious than the Hebrews. They have perhaps a purer, more independent and impersonal knowledge of God. Their religious books describe the first inquisitive and contemplative access to God; the Hebrew bible a conscientious return, a grosser and more personal repentance. Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God. A wise man will dispense with repentance. It is shocking and passionate. God prefers that you approach him thoughtful, not penitent, though you are chief of sinners. It is only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to him. The calmness and gentleness with which the Hindoo philosophers approach and discourse on forbidden themes is admirable."

"In the Hindoo scripture the idea of man is quite illimitable and sublime. There is nowhere a loftier conception of his destiny. He is at length lost in Brahma himself 'the divine male.' ... there is no grandeur conception of creation anywhere .... The very indistinctness of its theogeny implies a sublime truth."

"The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a bigger, purer or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita's sanity and sublimity have impressed the minds of even soldiers and merchants."

"The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of Vedic culture."

"The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation: he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and, united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals even I am a yogi."

"One may discover the root of a Hindoo religion in his own private history, when, in the silent intervals of the day or night, he does sometimes inflict on himself like austerities with a stern satisfaction."

"'Instead of noble men, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, round a little there and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us'"

"What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen."

"Truths and roses have thorns about them."

"None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm."

"Wealth is the ability to fully experience life."

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

"Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder."

"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals."

"The tradition of John Burroughs, which you seek to keep alive through these awards, is a long and honorable one. It is a tradition that had its beginnings in even earlier writings. On the other side of the Atlantic it flowered most fully in the works of Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson; and in this country the pen of Thoreau - as that of John Burroughs himself-most truly represented the contemplative observer of the world about us. These four, I think, were the great masters. To those of us who have come later, there can scarcely be any greater honor than to be compared to one of them. Yet if we are true to the spirit of John Burroughs, or of Jefferies or Hudson or Thoreau, we are not imitators of them but-as they themselves were - we are pioneers in new areas of thought and knowledge. If we are true to them, we are the creators of a new type of literature as representative of our own day as was their own."

"Thoreau believed that one of the arts of life was to make the most of it. He loved the multum in parvo, or pot-luck; to boil up the little into the big. Thus, he was in the habit of saying, — Give me healthy senses, let me be thoroughly alive, and breathe freely in the very flood-tide of the living world. But this should have availed him little, if he had not been at the same time copiously endowed with the power of recording what he imbibed. His senses truly lived twice."

"His words also were as distinct and true to the ear as those of a great singer, and he had Tennyson's splendid gift in this, that he never went back on his tracks to pick up the fallen loops of a sentence as commonplace talkers do. He would hesitate for an instant now and then, waiting for the right word, or would pause with a pathetic patience to master the trouble in his chest, but when he was through the sentence was perfect and entire, lacking nothing, and the word was so purely one with the man that when I read his books now and then I do not hear my own voice within my reading but the voice I heard that day."

"For Thoreau, the fact that it took him a day to walk or ride into Boston was a benefit—part of living deliberately. But his was the point of view of a rich guy, or at least of a guy without a family to care for, and for whom Ralph Waldo Emerson's second wife, Lidian Jackson, was willing to bake pies."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it...Opposition to the Mexican War came from writers who were active abolitionists such as Thoreau, Whittier, and Lowell. They believed the war was a plot of southern slave owners to extend slavery, punishing Mexico for having outlawed slavery when it became independent from Spain."

"He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself. In his travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much country as was unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of miles, avoiding taverns, buying a lodging in farmers' and fishermen's houses, as cheaper, and more agreeable to him, and because there he could better find the men and the information he wanted. There was somewhat military in his nature not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise."

"Idealist as he was, standing for abolition of slavery, abolition of tariffs, almost for abolition of government, it is needless to say he found himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, but almost equally opposed to every class of reformers."

"Before the first friendly word had been spoken for Captain John Brown, he sent notices to most houses in Concord, that he would speak in a public ball on the condition and character of John Brown, on Sunday evening, and invited all people to come. The Republican Committee, the Abolitionist Committee, sent him word that it was premature and not advisable. He replied,—"I did not send to you for advice, but to announce that I am to speak.""

"I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. He expressed it once in this wise: — "I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world.""

"Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought. Of course, the same isolation which belonged to his original thinking and living detached him from the social religious forms. This is neither to be censured nor regretted. Aristotle long ago explained it, when he said, "One who surpasses his fellow-citizens in virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their law is not for him, since he is a law to himself." Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative experience which refused to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in mind."

"In reading Henry Thoreau's Journal, I am very sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked or worked or surveyed wood lots, the same unhesitating hand with which a field-laborer accosts a piece of work which I should shun as a waste of strength, Henry shows in his literary task. He has muscle, & ventures on & performs tasks which I am forced to decline. In reading him, I find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, & illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality. 'Tis as if I went into a gymnasium, & saw youths leap, climb, & swing with a force unapproachable, — though their feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings & jumps."

"Henry Thoreau is like the woodgod who solicits the wandering poet & draws him into antres [sic] vast & desarts [sic] idle, & bereaves him of his memory. & leaves him naked, plaiting vines & with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the End is want and madness."

"Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American Engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party."

"...Thoreau gives me in flesh & blood & pertinacious Saxon belief, my own ethics. He is far more real, & daily practicing obeying them, than I; and fortifies my memory at all times with an affirmative experience which refuses to be set aside."

"It is curious that Thoreau goes to a house to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers it in lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it, &, when he has finished his report, departs with precipitation."

"Henry avoids all commonplace, & talks birch bark to all comers, & reduces them all to the same insignificance."

"The whole world has given heroic figures to humanity, who in the face of persecution and obloquy have lived and fought for their right and the right of mankind to free and unstinted expression. America has the distinction of having contributed a large quota of native-born children who have most assuredly not lagged behind. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre...Moses Harman...Horace Traubel...and quite an array of other brave souls have expressed themselves in keeping with their vision of a new social order based on freedom from every form of coercion. True, the price they had to pay was high. They were deprived of most of the comforts society offers to ability and talent, but denies when they will not be subservient. But whatever the price, their lives were enriched beyond the common lot."

"Numerous American heroes-such as Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and Henry David Thoreau-led rebellious acts to reconcile the government's actions with the country's promise of liberty for all its citizens."

"Truly, Nature absorbed his attention, but I don't think he cared much for what is called the beauties of nature; it was her way of working, her mystery, her economy in extravagance; he delighted to trace her footsteps toward their source .... He liked to feel that the pursuit was endless, with mystery at both ends of it ...."

"He is a singular character — a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty. He was educated, I believe, at Cambridge, and formerly kept school in this town; but for two or three years back, he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men — an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood. ... Mr. Thoreau is a keen and delicate observer of nature — a genuine observer — which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness."

"I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me."

"A line from Walden hangs over one of my desks: "I love a broad margin to my life.""

"Among American writers Thoreau was the pioneer of nature-study. Audubon had preceded him but he worked mainly with the brush; to multitudes Thoreau opened the gate to the secrets of our natural environment. The subtle delicacy of the grass-blade, the crystals of the snowflake, the icicle, the marvel of the weird lines traced by the flocks of wild geese athwart the heavens as they migrated, these he watched and recorded with loving accuracy and sensitive poetic feeling as no one in our land before had done. I have thrown a stone upon the cairn at Walden Pond which has now grown so high through the tributes of his grateful admirers. I shall throw still others in grateful admiration if the opportunity comes to me."

"behind them (The Masses staff) still throbbed the tradition of nineteenth-century American radicalism, the un-ambiguous nay-saying of Thoreau and the Abolitionists. This tradition implied that the individual person was still able to square off against the authority of the state; it signified a stance-one could not quite speak of it as a politics-of individual defiance and rectitude, little concerned because little involved with the complexities of society. The radicalism of nineteenth-century New England had been a radicalism of individual declaration far more than of collective action; and while Max Eastman and his friends were indeed connected with a movement, the Socialist party of Debs, in essential spirit they were intellectual freebooters, more concerned with speaking out than speaking to. They swore by Marx, but behind them could still be heard the voices of Thoreau and Wendell Phillips-and it was a good thing."

"I don't know Thoreau very well. You have to be a New Englander to really read Thoreau."

"When I went to Morehouse as a freshman in 1944, my concern for racial and economic justice was already substantial. During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience" for the first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice."

"As I thought further, I came to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our support from the bus company. The bus company, being an external expression of the system, would naturally suffer, but the basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with evil. At this point I began to think about Thoreau's "Essay on Civil Disobedience." I became convinced that what we were preparing to do in Montgomery was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, "We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system." From this moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive noncooperation. From then on I rarely used the word "boycott.""

"Thoreau was an American philosopher who, among other things too complex to be explained in a newspaper column, wrote much that could help us live our lives in a more intelligent, more effective, more enjoyable, less anxious way...He wanted us to do what we want to we want to do now...he said this powerful thing that fills us with courage: "Why not let the torrent in, why not open the floodgates and all our gears in motion?" I only have to think about following his advice to feel vitality coursing through my veins. Now, my friends, is happening at this very moment."

"Most major religions and spiritual philosophies going back thousands of years have warned their adherents not to give too much power to wealth. Their wisdom and traditions teach that the obsessive drive for gold, money, and profit is a formidable deviation from other more important spiritual practices that strive to center community on non-market values such as love, generosity, kindness, cooperation, and non-violence. In our own country, American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau made this point throughout his writings, especially in "Life Without Principle" where he says "the world is a place of business" and that "the ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward." Thoreau saw where the nation was and where it was going."

"Suppose Jonathan Edwards had been born a woman; suppose William James, for that matter, had been born a woman? (The invalid seclusion of his sister Alice is suggestive.) Even from men, New England took its psychic toll; many of its geniuses seemed peculiar in one way or another, particularly along the lines of social intercourse...Thoreau insisted on the values both of solitude and of geographical restriction, boasting that "I have traveled much in Concord." Emily Dickinson-viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as "partially cracked," by the twentieth century as fey or pathological-has increasingly struck me as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices."

"Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharpened to a point. "He was bred to no profession," says Emerson; "he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, 'the nearest.'" So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and there we see the prig stand public and confessed."

"A man who must separate himself from his neighbours' habits in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the world, do a man's work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment of existence."

"...every idea I've had is there. I needn't have bothered thinking."

"He sounds, as it were, the fatal bottom of our organic existence, and yet claims not merely to accept the universe, as another Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, put it, but to rejoice in it. ... To the dark immensity of material Nature's indifference we can oppose only the brief light, like a lamp in a cabin, of our consciousness; the invigorating benison of Walden is to make us feel that the contest is equal, and fair. It has emerged over time as one of the great testaments of American individualism, assuring the New World, traditional reassurances failing, of the value, power, and beauty of the unfettered self."

"Thoreau's disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won't live in your world. I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it."

"Every sin is the result of a collaboration."

"Unwind my riddle. Cruel as hawks the hours fly; Wounded men seldom come home to die; The hard waves see an arm flung high; Scorn hits strong because of a lie; Yet there exists a mystic tie. Unwind my riddle."

"The word is clear only to the kind who on peak or plain, from dark northern ice-fields to the hot wet jungles, through all wine and want, through lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, are governed by the unknown gods, and though each man knows the law, no man may give tongue to it."

"None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks."

"A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats."

"It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common. The hurt captain, lying against the water-jar in the bow, spoke always in a low voice and calmly, but he could never command a more ready and swiftly obedient crew than the motley three of the dingey. It was more than a mere recognition of what was best for the common safety. There was surely in it a quality that was personal and heartfelt. And after this devotion to the commander of the boat there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life. But no one said that it was so. No one mentioned it."

"When one exchanged the rowing-seat for a place in the bottom of the boat, he suffered a bodily depression that caused him to be careless of everything save an obligation to wiggle one finger. There was cold sea-water swashing to and fro in the boat, and he lay in it. His head, pillowed on a thwart, was within an inch of the swirl of a wave crest, and sometimes a particularly obstreperous sea came in-board and drenched him once more. But these matters did not annoy him. It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure it was a great soft mattress."

"If I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?"

"When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers. Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself." A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation."

"When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters."

"The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors."

"The line, broken into moving fragments by the ground, went calmly on through fields and woods. The youth looked at the men nearest him, and saw, for the most part, expressions of deep interest, as if they were investigating something that had fascinated them. One or two stepped with overvaliant airs as if they were already plunged into war. Others walked as upon thin ice. The greater part of the untested men appeared quiet and absorbed. They were going to look at war, the red animal — war, the blood-swollen god. And they were deeply engrossed in this march."

"It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment."

"At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage."

"The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer."

"He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion."

"He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man."

"It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace. Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds."

"In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, "Is it good, friend?" "It is bitter—bitter," he answered; "But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.""

"Should the wide world roll away Leaving black terror Limitless night, Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential If thou and thy white arms were there And the fall to doom a long way."

"If there is a witness to my little life, To my tiny throes and struggles, He sees a fool; And it is not fine for gods to menace fools."

"I saw a man pursuing the horizon; Round and round they sped. I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man. "It is futile," I said, "You can never—""You lie," he cried, And ran on."

""Truth," said a traveller, "Is a rock, a mighty fortress; "Often have I been to it, "Even to its highest tower, "From whence the world looks black.""Truth," said a traveller, "Is a breath, a wind, "A shadow, a phantom; "Long have I pursued it, "But never have I touched "The hem of its garment."And I believed the second traveller; For truth was to me A breath, a wind, A shadow, a phantom, And never had I touched The hem of its garment."

"Many red devils ran from my heart And out upon the page, They were so tiny The pen could mash them. And many struggled in the ink. It was strange To write in this red muck Of things from my heart."

"Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep. War is kind."

"Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom — A field where a thousand corpses lie."

"Do not weep, babe, for war is kind. Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches, Raged at his breast, gulped and died, Do not weep. War is kind."

"Swift blazing flag of the regiment, Eagle with crest of red and gold, These men were born to drill and die. Point for them the virtue of slaughter, Make plain to them the excellence of killing And a field where a thousand corpses lie."

"The wayfarer, Perceiving the pathway to truth, Was struck with astonishment. It was thickly grown with weeds. "Ha," he said, "I see that none has passed here In a long time." Later he saw that each weed Was a singular knife. "Well," he mumbled at last, "Doubtless there are other roads.""

"A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.""

"You cannot choose your battlefield, God does that for you; But you can plant a standard Where a standard never flew."

"This young man has the power to feel. He knows nothing of war, yet he is drenched in blood. Most beginners who deal with this subject spatter themselves merely with ink."

"It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill'd with luxuries, and embellish'd with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy'd by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory. I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty."

"Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell'd. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs — of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history — deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude."

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured . . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches . . . . and shall master all attachment."

"In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing "base", a certain game of ball ... Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms ... the game of ball is glorious."

"I have just this moment heard from the front — there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen. O Mother, to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times, the awful loads and trains and boatloads of poor, bloody, and pale and wounded young men again — for that is what we certainly will, and before very long. I see all the little signs, getting ready in the hospitals, etc.; it is dreadful when one thinks about it. I sometimes think over the sights I have myself seen: the arrival of the wounded after a battle, and the scenes on the field, too, and I can hardly believe my own recollections. What an awful thing war is! Mother, it seems not men but a lot of devils and butchers butchering each other."

"Looking over my scraps, I find I wrote the following during 1864. The happening to our America, abroad as well as at home, these years, is indeed most strange. The democratic republic has paid her to-day the terrible and resplendent compliment of the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell'd to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires ordinarily great. There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember'd by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared. [...] Are we indignant? alarm'd? Do we feel jeopardized? No; help'd, braced, concentrated, rather. We are all too prone to wander from ourselves, to affect Europe, and watch her frowns and smiles. We need this hot lesson of general hatred, and henceforth must never forget it. Never again will we trust the moral sense nor abstract friendliness of a single government of the old world."

"We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake."

"Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated."

"There was a kind of labor agitator here today—a socialist, or something like that: young, a rather beautiful boy — full of enthusiasms: the finest type of the man in earnest about himself and about life. I was sorry to see him come: I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation: but I was more sorry to see him go than come. Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated. ... Cheer! cheer! Is there anything better in this world anywhere than cheer — just cheer? Any religion better? — any art? Just cheer!"

"I find I'm a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was: maybe not technically, politically, so, but intrinsically, in my meanings."

"I said: "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!" He was hilarious: "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.""

"If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too."

"I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love."

"I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion."

"I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake."

"None has begun to think how divine he himself is and how certain the future is."

"Nothing can happen more beautiful than death."

"I loafe and invite my soul."

"I have no mockings or arguments; I witness and wait."

"In the faces of men and women I see God."

"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

"I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people, "Do not weep for me, This is not my true country, I have lived banished from my true country—I now go back there, I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn.""

"Each of us inevitable; Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth."

"The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman."

"In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection."

"All, all for immortality, Love like the light silently wrapping all."

"Youth, large, lusty, loving—Youth, full of grace, force, fascination! Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace, force, fascination?"

"Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead."

"Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!"

"O Banner! Not houses of peace are you, nor any nor all of their prosperity; if need be you shall have every one of those houses to destroy them; You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full of comfort, built with money; May they stand fast then? Not an hour, unless you, above them and all, stand fast."

"Over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded with the eternal stars."

"Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling!"

"Lo! the moon ascending! Up from the East, the silvery round moon; Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon; Immense and silent moon."

"Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world."

"When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed, And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring."

"Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate death."

"Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy and for objects and knowledge curious; And for love, sweet love—But praise! O praise and praise For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death."

"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done! The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting."

"Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs."

"Peace is always beautiful."

"What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior?"

"To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle."

"I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited; I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes."

"I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death."

"I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!"

"The paths to the house I seek to make, But leave to those to come the house itself."

"Society waits unformed and is between things ended and things begun."

"Now obey thy cherished secret wish, Embrace thy friends—leave all in order; To port and hawser's tie no more returning, Depart upon thy endless cruise, old Sailor!"

"I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed; I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation."

"Be curious, not judgmental."

"I see great things in baseball, It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism, tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be a blessing to us."

"Yes, Mexico must be thoroughly chastised! Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, American knows how to crush, as well as expand!"

"Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"I rank Muriel Rukeyser with Walt Whitman, the essential American poet, democratic at the level of hope."

"When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself."

"Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man."

"the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today."

"Whitman...a man full-blooded and brotherly, unselfconscious in his democracy and genuinely at ease with all kinds and classes."

"The populist poet of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman, sang the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super race that had been steeled through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the US war against Mexico in 1846, Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand US troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime change there "whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country [Mexico] will find its way."2 Whitman explicitly grounded this prescription in racism: "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.... A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." The whole world would benefit from US expansion: "We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico... to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?" In September 1846, when General Zachary Taylor's troops captured Monterrey, Whitman hailed it as "another clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon character" Whitman's sentiments reflected the established US origin myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the Native peoples as historical destiny, adding his own theoretical twist of what would later be called social Darwinism."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored of the violent Indian- and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whitman saw the war as bolstering US self-respect and believed that a "true American" would be unable to resist "this pride in our victorious armies.""

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging..."

"The whole world has given heroic figures to humanity, who in the face of persecution and obloquy have lived and fought for their right and the right of mankind to free and unstinted expression. America has the distinction of having contributed a large quota of native-born children who have most assuredly not lagged behind. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre...Moses Harman...Horace Traubel...and quite an array of other brave souls have expressed themselves in keeping with their vision of a new social order based on freedom from every form of coercion. True, the price they had to pay was high. They were deprived of most of the comforts society offers to ability and talent, but denies when they will not be subservient. But whatever the price, their lives were enriched beyond the common lot."

"I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me."

"I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession."

"One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world."

"Walt Whitman; I love his poetry."

"I know the formal element in Walt Whitman's poetry found and enormous echo throughout the world. Yet Walt Whitman's significance lies elsewhere. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization which are apparently either contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: "Living is the little that is left over from dying." so he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature. When the war between the Northern and Southern States in America, which first really set in motion the power of our present machine world, first broke out, Walt Whitman became a medical orderly. He did what all of us ought to do, particularly today. He helped the weak, the sick and the defeated. He was a Christian and–with a close affinity to us Jews–he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity."

"I mean to carry on in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Whitman says, "I sing the body electric" and "I sing the body from top to toe." He writes about his goal of celebrating the modern man as he calls it, and he sings the American self."

"I felt some really exciting things were happening with the language in the Sixties because people were finding that vocabulary for psychedelic states or visions or social action. But as I was working with that language, I saw too how it had its roots a hundred years ago in Whitman. So if it goes back a hundred years to Whitman, then it goes back thirty more to Poe. I feel very much in that tradition, showing people how 1960 was using language of the 1860s. Because we don't remember. Walt Whitman said, "Look to the East, that's also your motherland." He already had that idea that our myths are not just from Europe, but from Asia. So I'm saying, "Look at Asia," because we already know that we come from Europe. For a long time when we say classical, we meant Greek and Roman. And I'm saying, "Look, there's more classics, more.""

"I like the freedom that Walt Whitman was using to play with and shape the American language. Especially in writing Tripmaster Monkey-I just lifted lines from Leaves of Grass. You would think they were modern Sixties' slang-"Trippers and Askers" and "Linguists and Contenders Surround Me"-all of that-"Song of the Open Road," "Song of Occupations"-I just took those for title headings for my book. I like the rhythm of his language and the freedom and the wildness of it. It's so American. And also his vision of a new kind of human being that was going to be formed in this country-although he never specifically said Chinese-ethnic Chinese also I'd like to think he meant all kinds of people. And also I love that throughout Leaves of Grass he always says "men and women," "male and female." He's so different from other writers of his time, and even of this time. Even a hundred years ago he always included women and he always used [those phrases], "men and women," "male and female.""

"Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child. Averse to culture, strange to humankind, He never knew the pleasures of the mind. Scorning the pure, the delicate, the clean, His joys were sordid, and his morals mean. Thro' his gross thoughts a native vigour ran, From which he deem'd himself the perfect man: But want of decency his rank decreas'd, And sunk him to the level of the beast. Would that his Muse had dy'd before her birth, Nor spread such foul corruption o'er the earth."

"Walt was always working on the same book/First edition did not/have his name on cover/He reviewed himself in newspapers anonymously/quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson/without permission/on the spine/Emerson was not thrilled/Take a breath/Full breath/That's what I call a poet"

"Anyone can visit Walt Whitman's birthing corner on/Long Island./The guide points and says, There, right there, he was/born./Some visitors can't move on quickly/to the next room./They are hypnotized./What if Walt had never left this corner or stepped out/into the streets/to do and say all he did?/Then who would we be?"

"When Whitman in Song of Myself wrote "Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man, and "What I assume you shall assume," he articulated an abiding impulse latent within all poetry. The women's poetry movement today is a carrier of that same impulse and makes it possible for us to "assume" more than we did before."

"I read a lot. In poetry, I liked W. H. Auden more than anyone. I loved British writers and the novels I grew up with, Twain, Dickens, and so on. I was not influenced say by Walt Whitman or anyone like that. His freedom was not my freedom, and so it didn’t affect me."

"I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman — I have detested you long enough."

"Whitman’s masterpiece, his whole vision, is exactly about this: life as a quest for truth, love, beauty, goodness, and freedom; life as the art of becoming human through the cultivation of the human soul."

"Whitman is a "bad influence"; that is, he cannot be imitated."

"Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone's life. ... When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn't believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn't have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along."

"I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner."

"With Whitman, the exhilarations are specifically aimed at the pioneer; I don't see any obstructions. I don't see the Indians coming in the opposite direction. I don't see Indian massacres. I don't see brutalities, scalpings, and burning and torturing. It's a sanitized version of infinite wheat fields. I think a great poet has a deeper sense of evil, a wickedness of malice and malignity."

"When I read the poetry of Walt Whitman, I could understand why he answered the question, “Do I contradict myself?" with "Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.""

"It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has. Some cognizance of the fact must be taken in your teaching."

"Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense."

"A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words."

"My Sorrow, when she's here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane."

"Her pleasure will not let me stay. She talks and I am fain to list: She's glad the birds are gone away, She's glad her simple worsted gray Is silver now with clinging mist."

"The desolate, deserted trees, The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees, She thinks I have no eye for these, And vexes me for reason why."

"Not yesterday I learned to know The love of bare November days Before the coming of the snow, But it were vain to tell her so, And they are better for her praise."

"I do not see why I should e'er turn back, Or those should not set forth upon my track To overtake me, who should miss me here And long to know if still I held them dear. They would not find me changed from him they knew — Only more sure of all I thought was true."

"The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows."

"There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground."

"Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?"

"Men work together," I told him from the heart, "Whether they work together or apart."

"Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast."

"My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours.""

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down."

"He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”"

"He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again. He spoke Advancing toward her: "What is it you see From up there always?—for I want to know.""

"She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see, Blind creature; and awhile he didn't see. But at last he murmured, "Oh," and again, "Oh.""

"The little graveyard where my people are! So small the window frames the whole of it."

"He said twice over before he knew himself: "Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?" 'Not you!'—'Oh, where's my hat? Oh, I don't need it! I must get out of here. I must get air.'— I don't know rightly whether any man can.'"

"'My words are nearly always an offense. I don't know how to speak of anything So as to please you. But I might be taught, I should suppose. I can't say I see how.'"

"A man must partly give up being a man With womenfolk. We could have some arrangement By which I'd bind myself to keep hands off Anything special you're a-mind to name. Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love. Two that don't love can't live together without them. But two that do can't live together with them." She moved the latch a little. "Don't — don't go. Don't carry it to someone else this time. Tell me about it if it's something human. Let me into your grief. I'm not so much Unlike other folks as your standing there Apart would make me out. Give me my chance."

"'I can repeat the very words you were saying: "Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build." Think of it, talk like that at such a time! What had how long it takes a birch to rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor? You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all."

"I'm going out to clean the pasture spring; I'll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha'n't be gone long. — You come too."

"And nothing to look backward to with pride, And nothing to look forward to with hope."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."

"The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all. No, from the time when one is sick to death, One is alone, and he dies more alone. Friends make pretence of following to the grave, But before one is in it, their minds are turned And making the best of their way back to life And living people, and things they understand."

"Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor."

"I've broken Anne of gathering bouquets. It's not fair to the child. It can't be helped though: Pressed into service means pressed out of shape."

"My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still. And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now."

"Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it's like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep."

"By good rights I ought not to have so much Put on me, but there seems no other way. Len says one steady pull more ought to do it. He says the best way out is always through. And I agree to that, or in so far As that I can see no way out but through — Leastways for me — and then they’ll be convinced."

"I always have felt strange when we came home To the dark house after so long an absence, And the key rattled loudly into place Seemed to warn someone to be getting out At one door as we entered at another."

"To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay."

"I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

"The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it."

""Don't let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!" So. But the hand was gone already."

"Her crop was a miscellany When all was said and done, A little bit of everything, A great deal of none."

"But he sent her Good-by, And said to be good, And wear her red hood, And look for skunk tracks In the snow with an ax — And do everything!"

"Something inspires the only cow of late To make no more of a wall than an open gate, And think no more of wall-builders than fools."

"There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing."

"The Hyla breed That shouted in the mist a month ago, Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow."

"We love the things we love for what they are."

"“My dear, It’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe, For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings—there are no such things. There are only middles."

"I’d like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better."

"I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

"I shall set forth for somewhere, I shall make the reckless choice Some day when they are in voice And tossing so as to scare The white clouds over them on. I shall have less to say, But I shall be gone."

"All out of doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, That gathers on the pane in empty rooms."

"I own any form of humor shows fear and inferiority. Irony is simply a kind of guardedness. So is a twinkle. It keeps the reader from criticism. Whittier, when he shows any style at all is probably a greater person than Longfellow as he is lifted priestlike above consideration of the scornful. Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt, above paying its respects to anybody's doubt whatsoever. At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions: to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to this side of the standing argument. Humor is the most engaging cowardice."

"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it."

"Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing. A least lyric alone may have a hard time, but it can make a beginning, and lyric will be piled on lyric till all are easily heard as sung or spoken by a person in a scene — in character, in a setting. By whom, where and when is the question."

"A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic."

"If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving."

"We've looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night tonight And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different from the way it ever stood?"

"Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of."

"The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight; New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil."

"Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay."

"The snake stood up for evil in the Garden."

"Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue."

"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice."

"The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued."

"And then we saw him bolt. We heard the miniature thunder where he fled, And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray, Like a shadow across instead of behind the flakes."

"Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear; And once that seemed too much; I lived on air"

"Now no joy but lacks salt, That is not dashed with pain And weariness and fault; I crave the stain Of tears, the aftermark Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove."

"How often already you've had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below. I have to be gone for a season or so."

"The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in, Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh From too much dwelling on what has been."

"Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow."

"My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year."

"He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake."

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep."

"Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths – and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something."

"Let me be the one To do what is done."

"I turned to speak to God About the world's despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn't there. God turned to speak to me (Don't anybody laugh) God found I wasn't there At least not over half."

"And be all plunderers curst. 'The best way to hate is the worst. 'Tis to find what the hated need, Never mind of what actual worth, And wipe that out of the earth. Let them die of unsatisfied greed, Of unsatisfied love of display, Of unsatisfied love of the high, Unvulgar, unsoiled, and ideal. Let their trappings be taken away. Let them suffer starvation and die Of being brought down to the real."

"Dust always blowing about the town, Except when sea-fog laid it down, And I was one of the children told Some of the blowing dust was gold."

"All the dust the wind blew high Appeared like god in the sunset sky, But I was one of the children told Some of the dust was really gold."

"Such was life in the Golden Gate: Gold dusted all we drank and ate, And I was one of the children told, 'We all must eat our peck of gold.'"

"You could not tell, and yet it looked as if The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff, The cliff in being backed by continent; It looked as if a night of dark intent Was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage. There would be more than ocean-water broken Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken."

"Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me."

"That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather."

"One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night."

"If, as they say, some dust thrown in my eyes Will keep my talk from getting overwise, I'm not the one for putting off the proof. Let it be overwhelming, off a roof And round a corner, blizzard snow for dust, And blind me to a standstill if it must."

"It must be the brook Can trust itself to go by contraries The way I can with you — and you with me — Because we're — we're — I don't know What we are."

"Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun."

"The world has room to make a bear feel free; The universe seems cramped to you and me."

"Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct."

"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."

"Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second. My mouth is sealed for the duration of my stay here. I'm not even going to write letters around to explain to collectors my not having had any Christmas card this year. I'm not going to explain anything personal any more."

"When I see young men doing so wonderfully well in athletics, I don't feel angry at them. I feel jealous of them. I wish that some of my boys in writing would do the same thing. ... You must have form — performance. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports — and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both. As I said, the person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism — for the New Republic."

"You see the beauty of my proposal is It needn’t wait on general revolution. I bid you to a one-man revolution— The only revolution that is coming."

"Don't join too many gangs. Join few if any. Join the United States and join the family — But not much in between, unless a college."

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You´re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, A wind comes off a frozen peak, And you´re two months back in the middle of March."

"But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For heaven and the future´s sakes."

"The land may vary more; But wherever the truth may be — The water comes ashore, And the people look at the sea."

"Never ask of money spent Where the spender thinks it went. Nobody was ever meant To remember or invent What he did with every cent."

"Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wave, But carries no cry of what is hoped to be. There may be little or much beyond the grave, But the strong are saying nothing until they see."

"Two such as you with such a master speed Cannot be parted nor be swept away From one another once you are agreed That life is only life forevermore Together wing to wing and oar to oar."

"No memory of having starred Atones for later disregard, Or keeps the end from being hard. Better to go down dignified With boughten friendship at your side Than none at all. Provide, provide!"

"The old dog barks backward without getting up; I can remember when he was a pup."

"Who said it mattered What monkeys did or didn't understand? They might not understand the burning-glass. They might not understand the sun itself. It's knowing what to do with things that counts."

"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars — on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places."

"I never dared be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old."

"It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may Want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days."

"Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."

"Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields."

"O Star (the fairest one in sight) We grant your loftiness the right To some obscurity of cloud — It will not do to say of night, Since dark is what brings out your light. Some mystery becomes the proud. But to be wholly taciturn In your reserve is not allowed. Say something to us that we can learn By heart and when alone repeat. Say something! And it says "I burn.""

"It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height. So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may take something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid."

"We disparage reason. But all the time it's what we're most concerned with. There's will as motor and there's will as brakes. Reason is, I suppose, the steering gear."

"Deliver us from committees."

"The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them."

"Courage is of the heart by derivation, And great it is. But fear is of the soul."

"The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people."

"Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become."

"'Twas Age imposed on poems Their gather-roses burden To warn against the danger That overtaken lovers From being overflooded With happiness should have it And yet not know they have it."

"She is as in a field a silken tent At midday when the sunny summer breeze Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, So that in guys it gently sways at ease."

"But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To every thing on earth the compass round, And only by one's going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware."

"Happiness Makes Up In Height For What It Lacks In Length"

"Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went — Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament. But no, I was out for stars; I would not come in. I meant not even if asked; And I hadn't been."

"She drew back; he was calm "It is this that had the power," And he lashed his open palm With the tender-headed flower."

"He would declare and could himself believe That the birds there in all the garden round From having heard the daylong voice of Eve Had added to their own an oversound, Her tone of meaning but without the words."

"We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

"If this uncertain age in which we dwell Were really as dark as I hear sages tell, And I convinced that they were really sages, I should not curse myself with it to hell"

"They've tried to grasp with too much social fact Too large a situation. You and I Would be afraid if we should comprehend And get outside of too much bad statistics, Our muscles never could again contract: We never could recover human shape, But must live lives out mentally agape Or die of philosophical distention. That's how we feel — and we're no special mystics."

"We can't appraise the time in which we act. But for the folly of it, let's pretend We know enough to know it for adverse."

"I may have wept that any should have died Or missed their chance, or not have been their best, Or been their riches, fame, or love denied; On me as much as any is the jest. I take my incompleteness with the rest. God bless himself can no one else be blessed. I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori. And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

"Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on."

"Have I not walked without an upward look Of caution under stars that very well Might not have missed me when they shot and fell? It was a risk I had to take — and took."

"I stopped my song and almost heart, For any eye is an evil eye That looks in onto a mood apart."

"All those who try to go it sole alone, Too proud to be beholden for relief, Are absolutely sure to come to grief."

"Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry – Great monolithic knees the former town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. And there's a story in a book about it."

"As for the woods' excitement over you That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, Charge that to upstart inexperience. Where were they all not twenty years ago? They think too much of having shaded out A few old pecker-fretted apple trees."

"The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you're lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up to all but me."

"First there's the children's house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad."

"This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny's A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)"

"I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't. (I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."

"You are all probably taking literature classes in which the professors teach how to get behind authors' words to determine their deeper meanings. In my case, they teach that the crow shaking snow from a hemlock tree means that evil, black, stands in contrast to the pure white good of the snow around it, like in life. They are wrong. I saw the crow, and the tree, and the snow. It was beautiful. I stopped to enjoy it. Period."

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."

"A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair."

"People are inexterminable — like flies and bed-bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices — that's us."

"How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint."

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on."

"The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended — and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended."

"Asked...whether he would define poetry as "escape" he answered hardily: "No. Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.""

"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."

"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."

"Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with."

"The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise."

"You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular.... The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat."

"You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more."

"Summoning artists to participate In the august occasions of the state Seems something artists ought to celebrate."

"Today is for my cause a day of days. And his be poetry's old-fashioned praise Who was the first to think of such a thing. This verse that in acknowledgement I bring Goes back to the beginning of the end Of what had been for centuries the trend; A turning point in modern history."

"Colonial had been the thing to be As long as the great issue was to see What country'd be the one to dominate By character, by tongue, by native trait, The new world Christopher Columbus found. The French, the Spanish, and the Dutch were downed And counted out. Heroic deeds were done. Elizabeth the First and England won. Now came on a new order of the ages That in the Latin of our founding sages (Is it not written on the dollar bill We carry in our purse and pocket still?)"

"So much those heroes knew and understood, I mean the great four, Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison So much they saw as consecrated seers They must have seen ahead what not appears, They would bring empires down about our ears And by the example of our Declaration Make everybody want to be a nation."

"And this is no aristocratic joke At the expense of negligible folk. We see how seriously the races swarm In their attempts at sovereignty and form. They are our wards we think to some extent For the time being and with their consent, To teach them how Democracy is meant."

""New order of the ages" did they say? If it looks none too orderly today, 'Tis a confusion it was ours to start So in it have to take courageous part. No one of honest feeling would approve A ruler who pretended not to love A turbulence he had the better of."

"Everyone knows the glory of the twain Who gave America the aeroplane To ride the whirlwind and the hurricane. Some poor fool has been saying in his heart Glory is out of date in life and art. Our venture in revolution and outlawry Has justified itself in freedom's story Right down to now in glory upon glory."

"Come fresh from an election like the last, The greatest vote a people ever cast, So close yet sure to be abided by, It is no miracle our mood is high."

"Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs Better than all the stalemate an's and ifs."

"There was the book of profile tales declaring For the emboldened politicians daring To break with followers when in the wrong, A healthy independence of the throng, A democratic form of right divine To rule first answerable to high design. There is a call to life a little sterner, And braver for the earner, learner, yearner. Less criticism of the field and court And more preoccupation with the sport."

"It makes the prophet in us all presage The glory of a next Augustan age Of a power leading from its strength and pride, Of young ambition eager to be tried, Firm in our free beliefs without dismay, In any game the nations want to play. A golden age of poetry and power Of which this noonday's the beginning hour."

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."

"I am assured at any rate Man's practically inexterminate. Someday I must go into that. There's always been an Ararat Where someone someone else begat To start the world all over at."

"It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling."

"Till we came to be There was not a trace Of a thinking race Anywhere in space."

"Unless I'm wrong I but obey The urge of a song: I'm—bound—away! And I may return If dissatisfied With what I learn From having died."

"It is the future that creates his present. All is an interminable chain of longing."

"“Well, who begun it?” That's what at the end of a war We always say not who won it, Or what it was foughten for."

"Every artist must have two fears -- the fear of God and the fear of man -- fear of God that his creation will ultimately be found unworthy and the fear of man that he will be misunderstood by his fellows."

"If poetry isn't understanding all, the whole word, then it isn't worth anything. Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as well as the emotions. Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in."

"It is hard to believe that he chops nearly as much wood as he pretends to, or that cows, hens, and barnyards are his chief loves. He has been known to enjoy the tea life of social England and is at present a professor of poetry in a college."

"This day devoted to the memory of Robert Frost offers an opportunity for reflection which is prized by politicians as well as by others, and even by poets, for Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things: an artist and an American. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers. In America, our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments. But today this college and country honors a man whose contribution was not to our size but to our spirit, not to our political beliefs but to our insight, not to our self-esteem, but to our self-comprehension. In honoring Robert Frost, we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us."

"Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been" he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."

"Robert Frost was often skeptical about projects for human improvement, yet I do not think he would disdain this hope. As he wrote during the uncertain days of the Second War: Take human nature altogether since time began ... And it must be a little more in favor of man, Say a fraction of one percent at the very least ... Our hold on this planet wouldn't have so increased. Because of Mr. Frost's life and work, because of the life and work of this college, our hold on this planet has increased."

"Translators, again-the most abused and patient lot of folk on earth-are helpful in making us better acquainted; though we hope the time will soon come when citizens of the twenty-one republics will no longer need translators. There is no reason for our not speaking each other's language...Ernesto Montenegro, on the other hand, has introduced Sandburg, Frost, Robinson, Masters, and many other North American poets to the Spanish reading public."

"Muna Lee "Cultural Interchanges between the Americas" (1929) in A Pan-American Life: Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee, edited and with biography by Jonathan Cohen (2004)"

"What I'm trying to do is something defined by Robert Frost: when he said "a poem is a momentary stay against confusion." When you write a poem you have a moment in which all confusion ceases and you understand one thing perfectly."

""But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep." Taken from a popular poem by Robert Frost, these two lines could serve as an anthem for Mexican women in the Southwest, women who, as a social and economic group, still find themselves at or near the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder."

"The poet stands in relation to Nature; this does not mean landscape, as Robert Frost points out, but "the whole Goddamn machinery.""

"The warriors that fought for their country, and bled, Have sunk to their rest; the damp earth is their bed; No stone tells the place where their ashes repose, Nor points out the spot from the graves of their foes. They died in their glory, surrounded by fame, And Victory's loud trump their death did proclaim; They are dead; but they live in each Patriot's breast, And their names are engraven on honor's bright crest."

"Music is the universal language of mankind — poetry their universal pastime and delight."

"Stars of the summer night! Far in yon azure deeps, Hide, hide your golden light! She sleeps! My lady sleeps!"

"Dreams of the summer night! Tell her, her lover keeps Watch! while in slumbers light She sleeps."

"She floats upon the river of his thoughts."

"Never here, forever there, Where all parting, pain, and care, And death, and time shall disappear,— Forever there, but never here! The horologe of Eternity Sayeth this incessantly,— "Forever — never! Never — forever!""

"I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where."

"And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend."

"In the valley of the Pegnitz, where, across broad meadow-lands, Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremburg, the ancient, stands.Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song, Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that round them throng."

"Emigravit is the inscription on the tomb-stone where he lies; Dead he is not, but departed, — for the artist never dies."

"Where'er a noble deed is wrought, Where'er is spoken a noble thought, Our hearts in glad surprise To higher levels rise."

"St. Augustine! well hast thou said, That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame!"

"The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night."

"The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath, While underneath such leafy tents they keep The long, mysterious Exodus of Death."

"A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

"A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood."

"Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead."

"Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupation, That is known as the Children's Hour."

"I hear in the chamber above me The patter of little feet, The sound of a door that is opened, And voices soft and sweet."

"Build on, and make thy castles high and fair, Rising and reaching upward to the skies; Listen to voices in the upper air, Nor lose thy simple faith in mysteries."

"He speaketh not; and yet there lies A conversation in his eyes."

"In the long, sleepless watches of the night, A gentle face — the face of one long dead — Looks at me from the wall, where round its head The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light."

"Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending; Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse."

"There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid."

"O Bells of San Blas in vain Ye call back the Past again; The Past is deaf to your prayer! Out of the shadows of night The world rolls into light; It is daybreak everywhere."

"He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce."

"Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody."

"Books are sepulchres of thought."

"This is the place. Stand still, my steed,— Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been."

"The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark."

"The surest pledge of a deathless name Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken."

"He has singed the beard of the king of Spain."

"Look, then, into thine heart, and write!"

"I heard the trailing garments of the Night Sweep through her marble halls! I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light From the celestial walls!"

"There is a Reaper, whose name is Death, And, with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between."

"Oh, not in cruelty, not in wrath, The Reaper came that day; 'Twas an angel visited the green earth, And took the flowers away."

"The star of the unconquered will."

"Oh, fear not in a world like this, And thou shalt know erelong,— Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong."

"Spake full well, in language quaint and olden, One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine, When he called the flowers, so blue and golden, Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine."

"The hooded clouds, like friars, Tell their beads in drops of rain."

"Tell me not, in mournful numbers, "Life is but an empty dream!" For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem."

"Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul."

"Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Finds us further than to-day."

"Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave."

"Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, act in the living present! Heart within, and God o'erhead!"

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;"

"Footprints, that perhaps another, Travelling o'er life's solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again."

"Let us, then, be up and doing. With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait."

"Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate, Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours Weeping upon his bed has sate, He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers."

"Something the heart must have to cherish, Must love and joy and sorrow learn; Something with passion clasp, or perish And in itself to ashes burn."

"Ah! this beautiful world!" said Flemming, with a smile. "Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and Heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly; and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad."

"In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer."

"Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart."

"Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number."

"I know a maiden fair to see, Take care! She can both false and friendly be, Beware! Beware! Trust her not, She is fooling thee."

"Thus, seamed with many scars Bursting these prison bars, Up to its native stars My soul ascended! There from the flowing bowl Deep drinks the warrior's soul, Skoal! to the Northland! skoal! —Thus the tale ended."

"No one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate, But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own."

"Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary."

"I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls The burial-ground God's-Acre! It is just; It consecrates each grave within its walls, And breathes a benison o'er the sleeping dust."

"Standing, with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet, Womanhood and childhood fleet!"

"O thou child of many prayers! Life hath quicksands; life hath snares!"

"The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, A banner with the strange device, Excelsior!"

"In happy homes he saw the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright."

"Try not the Pass!" the old man said; "Dark lowers the tempest overhead."

"O stay," the maiden said, "and rest Thy weary head upon this breast!"

"Beware the pine tree's withered branch! Beware the awful avalanche!"

"A traveller, by the faithful hound, Half-buried in the snow was found."

"For Time will teach thee soon the truth, There are no birds in last year's nest!"

"The prayer of Ajax was for light."

"O suffering, sad humanity! O ye afflicted ones, who lie Steeped to the lips in misery, Longing, yet afraid to die, Patient, though sorely tried!"

"Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands."

"His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate'er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man."

"Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, Onward through life he goes; Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night's repose."

"It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughter, To bear him company."

""O father! I see a gleaming light. Oh say, what may it be?" But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he."

"And fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost the vessel swept Toward the reef of Norman's Woe."

"Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!"

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals and forts."

"I stood on the bridge at midnight, As the clocks were striking the hour, And the moon rose o'er the city, Behind the dark church-tower."

"The day is done, and the darkness Falls from the wings of Night, As a feather is wafted downward From an eagle in his flight."

"A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain."

"Come, read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day."

"Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time."

"Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start."

"And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away."

"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms."

"Alike were they free from Fear, that reigns with the tyrant, and envy, the vice of republics. Neither locks had they to their doors, nor bars to their windows; But their dwellings were open as day and the hearts of their owners; There the richest was poor, and the poorest lived in abundance."

"When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music."

"Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels."

"Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted; If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment; That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain."

"Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike."

"And as she looked around, she saw how Death the consoler, Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever."

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."

"Ah, how wonderful is the advent of spring! — the great annual miracle of the blossoming of Aaron's rod, repeated on myriads and myriads of branches! — the gentle progression and growth of herbs, flowers, trees, — gentle and yet irrepressible, — which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous and the perpetual exercise of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be."

"I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it. I stand in awe of my own opinion. The secret demerits of which we alone, perhaps, are conscious, are often more difficult to bear than those which have been publicly censured in us, and thus in some degree atoned for."

"Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think."

"Hold the fleet angel fast until he bless thee."

"All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time."

"Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best; And what seems but idle show Strengthens and supports the rest."

"In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the gods see everywhere."

"God sent his Singers upon earth With songs of sadness and of mirth, That they might touch the hearts of men, And bring them back to heaven again."

"But the great Master said, "I see No best in kind, but in degree; I gave a various gift to each, To charm, to strengthen, and to teach."

"O holy trust! O endless sense of rest! Like the beloved John To lay his head upon the Saviour's breast, And thus to journey on!"

"My soul is full of longing For the secret of the Sea, And the heart of the great ocean Sends a thrilling pulse through me."

"There is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb is there! There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, But has one vacant chair!"

"The air is full of farewells to the dying, And mournings for the dead."

"But oftentimes celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise."

"What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps."

"There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death."

"Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives whom we call dead."

"Build me straight, O worthy Master! Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel, That shall laugh at all disaster, And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!"

"For his heart was in his work, and the heart Giveth grace unto every Art."

"And see! she stirs! She starts,—she moves,—she seems to feel The thrill of life along her keel, And, spurning with her foot the ground, With one exulting, joyous bound, She leaps into the ocean's arms!"

"Sail forth into the sea of life, O gentle, loving, trusting wife, And safe from all adversity Upon the bosom of that sea Thy comings and thy goings be! For gentleness and love and trust Prevail o'er angry wave and gust; And in the wreck of noble lives Something immortal still survives."

"And in the wreck of noble lives Something immortal still survives."

"Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"

"Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee,—are all with thee!"

"Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations."

"Ah, the souls of those that die Are but sunbeams lifted higher."

"The grave itself is but a covered bridge, Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!"

"I think I have proved, by profound researches, The error of all those doctrines so vicious Of the old Areopagite Dyonisius, That are making such terrible work in the churches, By Michael the Stammerer sent from the East, And done into Latin by that Scottish beast, Erigena Johannes, who dares to maintain, In the face of the truth, the error infernal, That the universe is and must be eternal; At first laying down, as a fact fundamental, That nothing with God can be accidental; Then asserting that God before the creation Could not have existed, because it is plain That, had he existed, he would have created; Which is begging the question that should be debated, And moveth me less to anger than laughter. All nature, he holds, is a respiration Of the Spirit of God, who, in breathing hereafter Will inhale it into his bosom again, So that nothing but God alone will remain."

"Thus departed Hiawatha, Hiawatha the Beloved, In the glory of the sunset, In the purple mists of evening, To the regions of the home-wind, Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin, To the Islands of the Blessed, To the Kingdom of Ponemah, To the Land of the Hereafter!"

"Don Quixote thought he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry. Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions."

"A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child."

"Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work, rather than its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture."

"We often excuse our own want of philanthropy by giving the name of fanaticism to the more ardent zeal of others."

"Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, — but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite."

"As turning the logs will make a dull fire burn, so change of studies a dull brain."

"The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature, — were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature."

"Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be, — a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, "Providence"."

""Let us build such a church, that those who come after us shall take us for madmen," said the old canon of Seville, when the great cathedral was planned. Perhaps through every mind passes some such thought, when it first entertains the design of a great and seemingly impossible action, the end of which it dimly foresees. This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings."

"I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and short-comings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self-assertion of youth."

"Authors have a greater right than any copyright, though it is generally unacknowledged or disregarded. They have a right to the reader's civility. There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it, and to these the author has a claim. Yet many people think that when they buy a book they buy with it the right to abuse the author."

"Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple."

"When we reflect that all the aspects of Nature, all the emotions of the soul, and all the events of life, have been the subjects of poetry for hundreds and thousands of years, we can hardly wonder that there should be so many resemblances and coincidences of expression among poets, but rather that they are not more numerous and more striking."

"The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness, — the taste and stain from the lees of the vat."

"The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made."

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."

"If the great Captain of Plymouth is so very eager to wed me, Why does he not come himself, and take the trouble to woo me? If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning!"

"Singing the Hundredth Psalm, the grand old Puritan anthem."

"But as he warmed and glowed, in his simple and eloquent language, Quite forgetful of self, and full of the praise of his rival, Archly the maiden smiled, and, with eyes over-running with laughter, Said, in a tremulous voice, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?""

"God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting."

"Into a world unknown,—the corner-stone of a nation."

"It is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence."

"He is a little chimney and heated hot in a moment."

"Thinking the deed, and not the creed, Would help us in our utmost need."

"Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year."

"One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm For the country folk to be up and to arm."

"And yet, through the gloom and the light, The fate of a nation was riding that night."

"All things come round to him who will but wait."

"At all feasts where ale was strongest Sat the merry monarch longest, First to come and last to go."

"And suddenly through the drifting brume The blare of the horns began to ring."

"Stronger than steel is the sword of the Spirit; Swifter than arrows, the light of the truth; Greater than anger is love that subdueth."

"A town that boasts inhabitants like me Can have no lack of good society."

"His form was ponderous, and his step was slow; There never was so wise a man before; He seemed the incarnate "Well, I told you so!""

"Our ingress into the world Was naked and bare; Our progress through the world Is trouble and care; Our egress from the world Will be nobody knows where; But if we do well here We shall do well there; And I could tell you no more, Should I preach a whole year!"

"Moons waxed and waned, the lilacs bloomed and died, In the broad river ebbed and flowed the tide, Ships went to sea, and ships came home from sea, And the slow years sailed by and ceased to be."

"Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence."

"Let him not boast who puts his armor on As he who puts it off, the battle done. Study yourselves; and most of all note well Wherein kind Nature meant you to excel. Not every blossom ripens into fruit."

"And now, my classmates; ye remaining few That number not the half of those we knew, Ye, against whose familiar names not yet The fatal asterisk of death is set, Ye I salute!"

"The scholar and the world! The endless strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books; The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!"

"Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate."

"For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day."

"And dimly seen, a tangled mass Of Walls and woods of light and shade Stands beckoning up the Stelvio pass Varenna, with its white cascade. I ask myself, Is this a dream? Will it all vanish into air? Is there a land of such supreme And perfect beauty anywhere!"

": Much must he toil who serves the Immortal Gods."

": With useless endeavour Forever, forever, Is Sisyphus rolling His stone up the mountain!"

": [waking] I am alone. These faces in the mirrors Are but the shadows and phantoms of myself; They cannot help nor hinder. No one sees me, Save the all-seeing Gods... She lifts the lid. A dense mist rises from the chest and fills the room. Pandora falls senseless on the floor. Storm without. : Fever of the heart and brain, Sorrow, pestilence, and pain, Moans of anguish, maniac laughter, All the evils that hereafter Shall afflict and vex mankind, All into the air have risen From the chambers of their prison; Only Hope remains behind."

": Never by lapse of time The soul defaced by crime Into its former self returns again; For every guilty deed Holds in itself the seed Of retribution and undying pain.Never shall be the loss Restored, till Hath purified them with his heavenly fires; Then what was lost is won, And the new life begun, Kindled with nobler passions and desires."

"Turn, turn, my wheel! All things must change To something new, to something strange; Nothing that is can pause or stay; The moon will wax, the moon will wane, The mist and cloud will turn to rain, The rain to mist and cloud again, To-morrow be to-day."

"Thine was the prophet's vision, thine The exaltation, the divine Insanity of noble minds, That never falters nor abates, But labors and endures and waits, Till all that it foresees it finds Or what it can not find creates."

"Art is the child of Nature; yes, Her darling child, in whom we trace The features of the mother's face, Her aspect and her attitude, All her majestic loveliness Chastened and softened and subdued Into a more attractive grace, And with a human sense imbued. He is the greatest artist, then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who follows Nature."

"What land is this? Yon pretty town Is Delft, with all its wares displayed: The pride, the market-place, the crown And centre of the Potter's trade."

"She knew the life-long martyrdom, The weariness, the endless pain Of waiting for some one to come Who nevermore would come again."

"Three Silences there are: the first of speech, The second of desire, the third of thought; This is the lore a Spanish monk, distraught With dreams and visions, was the first to teach."

"The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart, When the full river of feeling overflows."

"Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest On this Field of the Grounded Arms, Where foes no more molest, Nor sentry’s shot alarms!"

"Ye have slept on the ground before, And started to your feet At the cannon’s sudden roar, Or the drum’s redoubling beat. But in this camp of Death No sound your slumber breaks; Here is no fevered breath, No wound that bleeds and aches."

"All is repose and peace, Untrampled lies the sod; The shouts of battle cease, It is the Truce of God! Rest, comrades, rest and sleep! The thoughts of men shall be As sentinels to keep Your rest from danger free. Your silent tents of green We deck with fragrant flowers; Yours has the suffering been, The memory shall be ours."

"Hospitality sitting with Gladness."

"There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery."

"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all."

"I would like to ask you if you have ever read what I consider the greatest of poems of the United States—that is, Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha ... And then through that poem you have descriptions of Indian life and Indian legends which to me are of inexpressible beauty; and I do not hesitate to say, as far as my reading has led me to judge, that that is a poem that deserves to live, and will live; and at this moment it is the finest poem of any length that has been produced by any writer of the United States."

"I wish I had known you, Longfellow, but truly I did, as a small reader with a book cracked wide, speaking aloud on the old wooden stairs of my grandparents' home, saying your words, between the daylight and the dark, swinging them like small lanterns which have brought me to this place by your bed on a late day in June, in your yellow house by the giant linden tree, still wondering at words and the length of a mattress."

"Another poem that appeals to all bold, courageous souls in "The Warning," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who, some critics aver, won more English hearts over to the anti-slavery cause than did the "Quaker Poet."

"On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact."

"Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said."

"Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good."

"[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development."

"Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."

"That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions."

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."

"The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice."

"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."

"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."

"Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate."

"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean."

"What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art."

"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

"In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas."

"Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them."

"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."

"Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion."

"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."

"Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor."

"To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation."

"The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests."

"Art like life should be free, since both are experimental."

"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."

"When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country."

"Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal."

"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome."

"Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself."

"Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood."

"The Bible is literature, not dogma."

"To covet truth is a very distinguished passion."

"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."

"No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. ** p. 49"

"Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand."

"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic."

"In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge."

"The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him."

"Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind."

"Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism."

"Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world—and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?—are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another."

"No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves."

"Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things."

"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."

"England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors."

"Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master."

"The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be."

"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

"To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together."

"Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts."

"Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs."

"It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;"

"Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels."

"I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty."

"Only the dead have seen the end of war."

"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests."

"The living have never shown me how to live."

"Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are."

"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots."

"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness."

"[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing."

"Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise."

"The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit."

"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool."

"All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."

"Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace."

"American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."

"All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg."

"At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first."

"... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw."

"Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age."

"In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war."

"I was still “at the church door”. Yet in belief, in the clarification of my philosophy, I had taken an important step. I no longer wavered between alternative views of the world, to be put on or taken off like alternative plays at the theatre. I now saw that there was only one possible play, the actual history of nature and of mankind, although there might well be ghosts among the characters and soliloquies among the speeches. Religions, all religions, and idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the soliloquies and the ghosts. They might be eloquent and profound. Like Hamlet's soliloquy they might be excellent reflective criticisms of the play as a whole. Nevertheless they were only parts of it, and their value as criticisms lay entirely in their fidelity to the facts, and to the sentiments which those facts aroused in the critic."

"O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art."

"In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour."

"Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void."

"There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable."

"They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life."

"Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily."

"I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me."

"The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity."

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."

"Religions are not true or false, but better or worse."

"The earth has music for those who listen."

"The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought."

"The famous George Santayana quote: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” That's the thing, though. None of us have forgotten. Darned if we're not repeating it anyway..."

"Books are “imaginative rehearsals for living,” stated novelist George Santayana. They are also a great equalizer in a diverse society. Book reading helps prepare a child for mental liberation from ignorance, fear, and falsehood."

"The writer-philosopher George Santayana is credited with the phrase: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet here we are, repeating that of just 52 years ago. Let us pray that come 2072, Americans then have at last heeded Santayana's warning and Dr. King’s dream is no longer words in a speech but reality being lived."

"I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young George Santayana."

"But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy!"

"In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not."

""There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Often, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana's philosophy."

"Santayana, indeed, is the Moses of the new naturalism, who discerned the promised land from afar but still wanders himself in the desert realms of being."

"Well, no offense: Thar ain't no sense In gittin' riled."

"Howbeit, though no scholar, I am not one of those who misuse the English speech, and, being foolishly led by the hasty custom of scriveners and printers to write the letters "T" and "H" joined together, which resembleth a "Y," do incontinently jump to the conclusion the THE is pronounced "Ye,"--the like of which I never heard in all England."

"Later, when we were forced to accept the fact that finding gold was really the primary object of a gold-mining company, we still remained there"

"And then, for an old man like me, it's not exactly right, This kind o' playing soldier with no enemy in sight."

"And he says that the mountains are fairer For once being held in your thought;"

"Don't be too quick To break bad habits: better stick, Like the Mission folk, to your arsenic."

"There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is Death,"

"But, when the goddess' work is done, The woman's still remains."

"Each lost day has its patron saint!"

"Virtue always meets reward, But quicker when it wears a sword;"

"Ah Sin was his name."

"With the smile that was childlike and bland."

"We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor."

"Which I wish to remark,— And my language is plain,— That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar."

"All things that are on earth shall wholly pass away, Except the love of God, which shall live and last for aye."

"There is a day of sunny rest For every dark and troubled night; And a grief may bid, and evening guest, Bot joy shall come with early light"

"Vainly the fowler's eye Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, As, darkly painted on the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along."

"He who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright."

"Thine eyes are springs in whose serene And silent waters heaven is seen; Their lashes are the herbs that look On their young figures in the brook."

"Here the free spirit of mankind, at length, Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place A limit to the giant's unchained strength, Or curb his swiftness in the forward race!"

"Oh, sun! that o'er the western mountains now Goest down in glory! ever beautiful And blessed is thy radiance, whether thou Colourest the eastern heaven and night-mist cool, Till the bright day-star vanish, or on high Climbest and streamest thy white splendours from mid-sky."

"The little wind-flower, whose just opened eye Is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at."

"The groves were God's first temples."

"Ah, why Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore Only among the crowd and under roofs That our frail hands have raised?"

"They talk of short-lived pleasures—be it so— pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go. The fiercest agonies have shortest reign; And after dreams of horror, comes again The welcome morning with its rays of peace."

"Remorse is virtue's root; its fair increase Are fruits of innocence and blessedness."

"Weep not that the world changes—did it keep A stable, changeless state, 'twere cause indeed to weep."

"And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze, Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last."

"Loveliest of lovely things are they, On earth, that soonest pass away. The rose that lives its little hour Is prized beyond the sculptured flower."

"Thou unrelenting Past! Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain, And fetters, sure and fast, Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign."

"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere."

"The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore, And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more."

"Maidens hearts are always soft: Would that men's were truer!"

"These are the gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name— The Prairies."

"The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by, As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky."

"Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine - 'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine."

"When April winds Grew soft, the maple burst into a flush Of scarlet flowers. The tulip tree, high up, Opened in airs of June her multitude Of golden chalices to humming-birds And silken-wing'd insects of the sky."

"The victory of endurance born."

"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers."

"I would make Reason my guide, but she should sometimes sit Patiently by the way-side, while I traced The mazes of the pleasant wilderness Around me. She should be my counsellor, But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs Impulses from a deeper source than hers, And there are motions, in the mind of man, That she must look upon with awe. I bow Reverently to her dictates, but not less Hold to the fair illusions of old time — lllusions that shed brightness over life, And glory over nature."

"These struggling tides of life that seem In wayward, aimless course to tend, Are eddies of the mighty stream That rolls to its appointed end."

"And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, And the year smiles as it draws near its death."

"Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson, Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green. Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen."

"The rugged trees are mingling Their flowery sprays in love; The ivy climbs the laurel To clasp the boughs above."

"Wild was the day; the wintry sea Moaned sadly on New England's strand, When first the thoughtful and the free, Our fathers, trod the desert land."

"The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine and animadvert upon all political institutions, is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact to their existence, that without it we must fall at once into depression or anarchy. To say that he who holds unpopular opinions must hold them at the peril of his life, and that, if he expresses them in public, he has only himself to blame if they who disagree with him should rise and put him to death, is to strike at all rights, all liberties, all protection of the laws, and to justify and extenuate all crimes."

"To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language."

"Go forth under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings."

"The hills, Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun."

"Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste."

"All that tread, The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom."

"So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."

"There is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying Truth crushed to earth will rise again."

"[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on."

"The stormy March has come at last, With winds and clouds and changing skies; I hear the rushing of the blast That through the snowy valley flies."

"But ’neath yon crimson tree Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame, Nor mark, within its roseate canopy, Her blush of maiden shame."

"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

"It was six men of Hindustan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind) That each by observation Might satisfy the mind."

"And so these men of Hindustan Disputed loud and long, Each in his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right And all were in the wrong. So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!"

"Again I hear the creaking step! — He's rapping at the door! — Too well I know the boding sound That ushers in a bore."

"In vain I speak of urgent tasks; In vain I scowl and pout; A frown is no extinguisher — It does not put him out!"

"He takes the strangest liberties — But never takes his leave!"

"Young men! it 's a critical thing to go Exactly right with a lady in tow; But when you are in the proper track, Just go ahead, and never look back!"

"Don't use strong drink, — pray let me advise, — It 's bad for the stomach, and ruins the eyes;"

"INGLORIOUS friend! most confident I am Thy life is one of very little ease; Albeit men mock thee with their similes And prate of being "happy as a clam!""

""God bless the man who first invented sleep!" So Sancho Panza said, and so say I."

"But blast the man, with curses loud and deep, Whate'er the rascal's name, or age, or station, Who first invented, and went round advising, That artificial cut-off, — Early Rising!"

"I like the lad who, when his father thought To clip his morning nap by hackneyed phrase Of vagrant worm by early songster caught, Cried, "Served him right! — it's not at all surprising; The worm was punished, sir, for early rising!""

""Once more, my gallant boys!" he cried: "Three times! — you know the fable, — (I'll make it thirty," muttered he, "But I will lay the cable!")"

"NAY, weep not, dearest, though the child be dead; He lives again in Heaven's unclouded life,"

"What Lowely meant she didn't know For she always avoided "everything low,""

"I'm growing fonder of my staff; I'm growing dimmer in the eyes; I'm growing fainter in my laugh; I'm growing deeper in my sighs; I'm growing careless of my dress; I'm growing frugal of my gold; I'm growing wise; I'm growing — yes, — I'm growing old!"

"I asked of Echo 't other day (Whose words are few and often funny), What to a novice she could say Of courtship, love, and matrimony. Quoth Echo, plainly, — "Matter-o'-money.""

"'T is wise to learn; 't is God-like to create."

"A youth would marry a maiden, For fair and fond was she; But she was rich, and he was poor, And so it might not be."

"A youth would marry a maiden, For fair and fond was she; But he was high and she was low, And so it might not be."

"A youth would marry a maiden, For fair and fond was she; But their sires disputed about the Mass, And so it might not be."

"Bless me! this is pleasant Riding on the Rail."

"The Poet's License! — 't is the right, Within the rule of duty, To look on all delightful things Throughout the world of beauty. To gaze with rapture at the stars That in the skies are glowing; To see the gems of perfect dye That in the woods are growing, — And more than sage astronomer, And more than learned florist, To read the glorious homilies Of Firmament and Forest."

"When Nature gives a gorgeous rose, Or yields the simplest fern, She writes this motto on the leaves, — "To whom it may concern!" And so it is the poet comes And revels in her bowers, And, — though another hold the land, Is owner of the flowers."

"In battle or business, whatever the game, In law or in love, it is ever the same; In the struggle for power, or the scramble for pelf, Let this be your motto, — Rely on yourself! For, whether the prize be a ribbon or throne, The victor is he who can go it alone!"

"A dark unfathom'd tide Of interminable pride — A mystery, and a dream, Should my early life seem."

"O, human love! thou spirit given, On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!"

"The happiest day — the happiest hour My sear'd and blighted heart hath known, The highest hope of pride and power, I feel hath flown."

"Sound loves to revel in a summer night."

"Years of love have been forgot In the hatred of a minute."

"From childhood's hour I have not been As others were — I have not seen As others saw — I could not bring My passions from a common spring — From the same source I have not taken My sorrow — I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone — And all I lov'd — I lov'd alone —"

"And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view."

"Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?"

"It is with literature as with law or empire — an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession."

"Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness."

"Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore.On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome."

"Yes, Heaven is thine; but this Is a world of sweets and sours; Our flowers are merely—flowers."

"If I could dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody, While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky."

"Come! let the burial rite be read — the funeral song be sung! — An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young — A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young."

"Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld! Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night! I feel ye now — I feel ye in your strength."

"Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine — A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine."

"And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy grey eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams — In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams."

"Convinced myself, I seek not to convince."

"And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been."

"There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind."

"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

"In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace — Radiant palace — reared its head."

"This—all this—was in the olden Time long ago."

"While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh — but smile no more."

"A carpet is the soul of an apartment."

"Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve."

"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

"Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen —; although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature."

"The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind."

"To observe attentively is to remember distinctly."

"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

"While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man", And its hero the Conqueror Worm."

"Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man."

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?"

"By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule — From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE — out of TIME."

"With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind."

"Thou wouldst be loved? — then let thy heart From its present pathway part not! Being everything which now thou art, Be nothing which thou art not. So with the world thy gentle ways, Thy grace, thy more than beauty, Shall be an endless theme of praise, And love — a simple duty."

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely settled — but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong."

"For the love of God Montresor!"

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

"Can it be fancied that Deity ever vindictively Made in his image a mannikin merely to madden it?"

"There is no oath which seems to me so sacred as that sworn by the all-divine love I bear you. — By this love, then, and by the God who reigns in Heaven, I swear to you that my soul is incapable of dishonor — that, with the exception of occasional follies and excesses which I bitterly lament, but to which I have been driven by intolerable sorrow, and which are hourly committed by others without attracting any notice whatever — I can call to mind no act of my life which would bring a blush to my cheek — or to yours. If I have erred at all, in this regard, it has been on the side of what the world would call a Quixotic sense of the honorable — of the chivalrous."

"Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path."

"Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado."

"Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied, — "If you seek for Eldorado!"

"You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream."

"O God! Can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?"

"Thank Heaven! the crisis — The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last — And the fever called "Living" Is conquered at last."

"Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells."

"Hear the mellow wedding bells Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight!"

"As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester — and this is my last jest."

"I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result."

"These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities — of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a reflecting intellect (like mine," I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) "to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these 'odd accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the 'singular' about it."

"Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see."

"When I think of the long twenty-one years that I have called you father, and you have called me son, I cry like a child to think that it should all end in this."

"Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest."

"So blend the turrets and shadows there That all seem pendulous in air, While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down."

"And when, amid no earthly moans, Down, down that town shall settle hence, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, Shall do it reverence."

"In this boat we were in the habit of going on some of the maddest freaks in the world."

"I now feel it impossible to realize the full extent of the misery which I endured."

"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality."

"In no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty, even from the most simple data."

"– a narrative, let me here say, which, in its latter portions, will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason so far beyond the limits of human credulity, that I proceed in utter hopelessness of obtaining credence for all that I shall tell, yet confidently trusting in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of my statements."

"My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown."

"A large mirror,—so at first it seemed to me in my confusion—now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait."

"Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist—it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment—not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!"

"It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:"

"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."

"TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?"

"Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever."

"And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? -- now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage."

"If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs."

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! — tear up the planks! — here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!"

"For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul."

"There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man."

"I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence."

"One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!"

"Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?"

"Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates — the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers."

"It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night — and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul!"

"For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"

"If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered."

"After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment."

"A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this — that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made, not to understand, but to feel, as crime."

"If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize at one effort the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own — the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — "My Heart Laid Bare." But — this little book must be true to its title."

"How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!"

"In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own."

"I have sometimes amused myself by endeavouring to fancy what would be the fate of an individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race. Of course he would be conscious of his superiority; nor could he (if otherwise constituted as man is) help manifesting his consciousness. Thus he would make himself enemies at all points. And since his opinions and speculations would widely differ from those of all mankind — that he would be considered a madman is evident. How horribly painful such a condition! Hell could invent no greater torture than that of being charged with abnormal weakness on account of being abnormally strong.In like manner, nothing can be clearer than that a very generous spirit — truly feeling what all merely profess — must inevitably find itself misconceived in every direction — its motives misinterpreted. Just as extremeness of intelligence would be thought fatuity, so excess of chivalry could not fail of being looked upon as meanness in the last degree — and so on with other virtues. This subject is a painful one indeed. That individuals have so soared above the plane of their race is scarcely to be questioned; but, in looking back through history for traces of their existence, we should pass over all the biographies of the "good and the great," while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows."

"Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist"."

"I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it."

"That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward."

"The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information, by throwing in the reader's way piles of lumber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter, peradventure interspersed."

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."

"Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor."

"Sorrow for the lost Lenore — For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore — Nameless here for evermore."

"And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before."

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."

"Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,— Perched, and sat, and nothing more."

"Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore — Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

""Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil!"

"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door."

"And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted — nevermore!"

"since the interest of an analysis or reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analysed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works was put together."

"Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem."

"Now the object Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable to a certain extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose."

"The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover."

"The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere — The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year."

"Here once, through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul — Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul."

"Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom."

"It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; — And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me."

"I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love — I and my Annabel Lee — With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me."

"But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we — Of many far wiser than we — And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee"

"And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride, In her sepulcher there by the sea — In her tomb by the sounding sea."

"A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul."

"I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms. I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length."

"There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified — more supremely noble than this very poem — this poem per se — this poem which is a poem and nothing more — this poem written solely for the poem's sake."

"I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth."

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry!"

"The best things in life make you sweaty"

"Sleep. Those little slices of death. How I loathe them."

"We see that in Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabelle Lee."...we see that love sometimes suffocates, sometimes smothers in an attempt to keep the beloved."

"I started writing when I was mute. I always thought I could write because I loved to read so much. I loved the melody of Poe and I loved Paul Laurence Dunbar. I had memorized so much of Dunbar, Poe, Shakespeare, James Weldon Johnson, Longfellow. When my son was able to be quiet enough to listen, I taught him those poets. A few years ago he gave a reading of his poetry and he started the reading by saying "First, let me recite to you some of the poets my mother raised me on...""

"Edgar Allan Poe, whom I admire enormously, set a model for the American short story which is very tough to break. He is the one who established that the traditional short story has to be like this...The fantastic, as Poe understood it, deals with the subconscious, with the nearness of madness. Our vision is altered, much like what the Surrealists believed, and we see things in a different way. But that doesn't mean they exist this way in the outside world. In magical realism miracles do happen, and our literature takes part in them."

"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

"An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher, the neglect of whose golden utterances stamped his native land with infamy. Nevertheless, Poe was vastly the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius."

"Most literary agents advise young writers to avoid writing short stories. [...] If Edgar Allen Poe were alive today, his agent would constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, "Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this middlelength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap!""

"He was an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul. He sounded the horror and the warning of his own doom."

"Poe, who was fortunate in little else, was almost without exception fortunate in his foreign interpreters-the rarest good luck to befall poets. That the French acclaimed his genius long before it was recognized by his fellow countrymen-if, indeed, we may say we have ever recognized it—was due as much to Baudelaire's sympathetic and haunting versions of his poems as to the beauty of the originals. Poe's Spanish interpreter and occasional translator, José Asunción Silva, was, no less than Baudelaire, qualified by tragic experience of life as well as by sympathy and surpassing ability to embody in liquid and lingering Castilian the conception of poetry that was to help in altering to some extent the South American picture of the United States as a land where genius could not exist. To some extent only, unfortunately, for whenever a norteamericanófilo-a creature as rare as the name-has cited Poe as an example of what we might rise to artistically, there has always been a chorus ready to shout, with discouraging truthfulness, "Yes, but they let him die in beggarly obscurity!" Poe is much more alive today south of the Rio Grande than in Virginia or New York: more loved, more reverenced, more often read and beyond comparison more often quoted-both as to his poetry and his theory of poetry."

"There comes Poe, with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge."

"Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens."

"Poe...was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry."

"Almost without the first sign of moral principle, or of the concrete and its heroisms, or the simpler affections of the heart, Poe's verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity towards nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat."

"It is to save our faces that we've given him [Poe] a crazy reputation, a writer from whose classic accuracies we have not known how else to escape."

"Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth."

"I do not know why you or indeed anybody should want to illustrate Poe. ... I admire a few lyrics of his extremely and a few pages of his prose, chiefly in his critical essays, which are sometimes profound. The rest of him seems to be vulgar and commonplace."

"God is sitting here, looking into my very soul to see if I think right thoughts. Yet I am not afraid, for I try to be right and good; and He knows every one of my struggles."

"Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house — still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out. [...] The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear to-day for the first the river in the tree."

"My friends are my "estate." Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them."

"I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur — and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves — Would this do just as well?"

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

"To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations."

"We turn not older with years, but newer every day."

"No approximate words in a poem."

"A Grave – is a restricted Breadth – Yet ampler than the Sun – And all the Seas He populates And lands he looks uponTo Him who on its small Repose Bestows a single Friend – Circumference without Relief – Or Estimate – or End –"

"A death-blow is a life-blow to some Who, till they died, did not alive become; Who, had they lived, had died, but when They died, vitality begun."

"A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King."

"A solemn thing - it was - I said - A Woman - white - to be - And wear - if God should count me fit - Her blameless mystery -"

"After great pain, a formal feeling comes - The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs - The stiff Heart questions 'was it He, that bore,' And 'Yesterday, or Centuries before'?"

"This is the Hour of Lead - Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow - First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go -"

"Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility –"

"We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring –"

"Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity –"

"Bless God, he went as soldiers, His musket on his breast; Grant, God, he charge the bravest Of all the martial blest.Please God, might I behold him In epauletted white, I should not fear the foe then, I should not fear the fight."

"Could Hope inspect her Basis Her Craft were done – Has a fictitious Charter Or it has none –Balked in the vastest instance But to renew – Felled but by one assassin – Prosperity –"

"Dreams – are well – but Waking's better, If One wake at Morn – If One wake at Midnight – better – Dreaming – of the Dawn –"

"Drowning is not so pitiful As the attempt to rise. Three times, 'tis said, a sinking man Comes up to face the skies, And then declines forever To that abhorred abodeWhere hope and he part company,— For he is grasped of God. The Maker’s cordial visage, However good to see, Is shunned, we must admit it, Like an adversity."

"What fortitude the Soul contains, That it can so endure The accent of a coming Foot - The opening of a Door -"

""Faith" is a fine invention When Gentlemen can see – But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency."

"Fame is a fickle food Upon a shifting plate, Whose table once a Guest, but not The second time, is set. Whose crumbs the crows inspect, And with ironic caw Flap past it to the Farmer’s corn; Men eat of it and die."

"Fate slew him, but he did not drop; She felled—he did not fall— Impaled him on her fiercest stakes— He neutralized them all.She stung him, sapped his firm advance, But, when her worst was done, And he, unmoved, regarded her, Acknowledged him a man."

"Glee! the great storm is over! Four have recovered the land; Forty gone down together Into the boiling sand.Ring, for the scant salvation! Toll, for the bonnie souls,— Neighbor and friend and bridegroom, Spinning upon the shoals!How they will tell the shipwreck When winter shakes the door, Till the children ask, "But the forty? Did they come back no more?"Then a silence suffuses the story, And a softness the teller's eye; And the children no further question, And only the waves reply."

"Heart, we will forget him! You and I, to-night! You may forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light.When you have done, pray tell me, That I my thoughts may dim; Haste! lest while you're lagging, I may remember him!"

""Hope" is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all – And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm – I've heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me."

"How happy is the little stone That rambles in the road alone, And doesn't care about careers, And exigencies never fears; Whose coat of elemental brown A passing universe put on; And independent as the sun, Associates or glows alone, Fulfilling absolute decree In casual simplicity."

"I died for Beauty – but was scarce Adjusted in the Tomb, When One who died for Truth, was lain In an adjoining Room – He questioned softly "Why I failed"? "For Beauty," I replied. "And I – for Truth, – Themself are One – We Brethren, are", He said –"

"I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air – Between the Heaves of Storm –"

"There interposed a Fly –With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz – Between the light – and me – And then the Windows failed – and then I could not see to see –"

"I never hear the word "escape" Without a quicker blood, A sudden expectation, A flying attitude.I never hear of prisons broad By soldiers battered down, But I tug childish at my bars,— Only to fail again!"

"I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, Nor visited in heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given."

"I reason, earth is short, And anguish absolute. And many hurt; But what of that?I reason, we could die: The best vitality Cannot excel decay; But what of that?I reason that in heaven Somehow, it will be even, Some new equation given; But what of that?"

"I taste a liquor never brewed - From Tankards scooped in Pearl - Not all the Frankfort Berries Yield such an Alcohol!Inebriate of air - am I - And Debauchee of Dew - Reeling - thro' endless summer days - From inns of molten Blue -"

"I took my power in my hand And went against the world; 'Twas not so much as David had, But I was twice as bold.I aimed my pebble, but myself Was all the one that fell. Was it Goliath was too large, Or only I too small?"

"I took one Draught of Life – I'll tell you what I paid – Precisely an existence – The market price, they said."

"I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too?"

"If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain."

"Immortal is an ample word When what we need is by, But when it leaves us for a time, 'Tis a necessity.Of heaven above the firmest proof We fundamental know, Except for its marauding hand, It had been heaven below."

"How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one's name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!"

"It makes no difference abroad, The seasons fit the same, The mornings blossom into noons, And split their pods of flame.Wild-flowers kindle in the woods, The brooks brag all the day; No blackbird bates his jargoning For passing Calvary.Auto-da-fé and judgment Are nothing to the bee; His separation from his rose To him seems misery."

"It might be easier To fail with land in sight, Than gain my blue peninsula To perish of delight."

"It tossed and tossed,— A little brig I knew,— O'ertook by blast, It spun and spun, And groped delirious, for morn.It slipped and slipped, As one that drunken stepped; Its white foot tripped, Then dropped from sight.Ah, brig, good-night To crew and you; The ocean's heart too smooth, too blue, To break for you."

"It's such a little thing to weep, So short a thing to sigh; And yet by trades the size of these We men and women die!"

"Love is anterior to life, Posterior to death, Initial of creation, and The exponent of breath."

"Love – thou art Veiled – A few – behold thee – Smile – and alter – and prattle – and die – Bliss – were an Oddity – without thee – Nicknamed by God – Eternity –"

"Mine enemy is growing old,— I have at last revenge. The palate of the hate departs; If any would avenge,—Let him be quick, the viand flits, It is a faded meat. Anger as soon as fed is dead; 'Tis starving makes it fat."

"More than the Grave is closed to me – The Grave and that Eternity To which the Grave adheres – I cling to nowhere till I fall – The Crash of nothing, yet of all – How similar appears –"

"Much madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. 'Tis the majority In this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur,—you're straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain."

"My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me,So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell."

"My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – In Corners – till a Day The Owner passed – identified – And carried Me away –And now We roam in Sovereign Woods – And now We hunt the Doe – And every time I speak for Him – The Mountains straight reply –"

"Nature is what we see, The Hill, the Afternoon— Squirrel, Eclipse, the Bumble-bee, Nay—Nature is Heaven.Nature is what we hear, The Bobolink, the Sea— Thunder, the Cricket— Nay,—Nature is Harmony.Nature is what we know But have no art to say, So impotent our wisdom is To Her simplicity."

"New feet within my garden go, New fingers stir the sod; A troubadour upon the elm Betrays the solitude.New children play upon the green, New weary sleep below; And still the pensive spring returns, And still the punctual snow!"

"No rack can torture me, My soul 's at liberty. Behind this mortal bone There knits a bolder oneYou cannot prick with saw, Nor rend with scymitar. Two bodies therefore be; Bind one, and one will flee.The eagle of his nest No easier divest And gain the sky, Than mayest thou,Except thyself may be Thine enemy; Captivity is consciousness, So's liberty."

"Not with a Club, the Heart is broken Nor with a Stone – A Whip so small you could not see it I've knownTo lash the Magic Creature Till it fell, Yet that Whip's Name Too noble then to tell.Magnanimous as Bird By Boy descried – Singing unto the Stone Of which it died –Shame need not crouch In such an Earth as Ours – Shame – stand erect – The Universe is yours."

"One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House – The Brain has Corridors – surpassing Material Place –"

"Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term.Our pace took sudden awe, Our feet reluctant led. Before were cities, but between, The forest of the dead.Retreat was out of hope,— Behind, a sealed route, Eternity's white flag before, And God at every gate."

"Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn Indicative that suns go down; The notice to the startled grass That darkness is about to pass."

"Safe in their Alabaster Chambers - Untouched by Morning - And untouched by noon - Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone -Grand go the Years, In the Crescent above them - Worlds scoop their Arcs - And Firmaments - row - Diadems - drop - And Doges surrender - Soundless as Dots, On a Disk of Snow."

"So proud she was to die It made us all ashamed That what we cherished, so unknown To her desire seemed.So satisfied to go Where none of us should be, Immediately, that anguish stooped Almost to jealousy."

"Some Days retired from the rest In soft distinction lie, The Day that a companion came— Or was obliged to die."

"Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home – With a Bobolink for a Chorister – And an Orchard, for a Dome –"

"God preaches, a noted Clergyman – And the sermon is never long, So instead of getting to Heaven, at last – I'm going, all along."

"Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the culprit,—Life!"

"The Bustle in a House The Morning after Death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon Earth -The Sweeping up the Heart And putting Love away We shall not want to use again Until Eternity -"

"Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires a sorest need.Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of VictoryAs he defeated – dying – On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear!"

"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant – Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surpriseAs Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind –"

"That such have died enables us The tranquiller to die; That such have lived, certificate For immortality."

"The blunder is to estimate,— "Eternity is Then," We say, as of a station. Meanwhile he is so near, He joins me in my ramble, Divides abode with me, No friend have I that so persists As this Eternity."

"A Vastness, as a Neighbor, came, A Wisdom, without Face, or Name, A Peace, as Hemispheres at Home And so the Night became."

"The distance that the dead have gone Does not at first appear; Their coming back seems possible For many an ardent year.And then, that we have followed them We more than half suspect, So intimate have we become With their dear retrospect."

"The face we choose to miss, Be it but for a day— As absent as a hundred years When it has rode away."

"The grass so little has to do,— A sphere of simple green, With only butterflies to brood, And bees to entertain,And stir all day to pretty tunes The breezes fetch along, And hold the sunshine in its lap And bow to everything;And thread the dews all night, like pearls, And make itself so fine,— A duchess were too common For such a noticing.And even when it dies, to pass In odors so divine, As lowly spices gone to sleep, Or amulets of pine.And then to dwell in sovereign barns, And dream the days away,— The grass so little has to do, I wish I were a hay!"

"If Aims impel these Astral Ones The ones allowed to know Know that which makes them as forgot As Dawn forgets them – now"

"The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy."

"The Soul selects her own Society – Then – shuts the Door – To her divine Majority – Present no more –"

"I've known her – from an ample nation – Choose One – Then – close the Valves of her attention – Like Stone –"

"The sweets of Pillage can be known To no one but the Thief, Compassion for Integrity Is his divinest Grief."

"There is a solitude of space, A solitude of sea, A solitude of death, but these Society shall be, Compared with that profounder site, That polar privacy, A Soul admitted to Itself: Finite Infinity."

"There is a word Which bears a sword Can pierce an armed man. It hurls its barbed syllables,— At once is mute again. But where it fell The saved will tell On patriotic day, Some epauletted brother Gave his breath away.Wherever runs the breathless sun, Wherever roams the day, There is its noiseless onset, There is its victory! Behold the keenest marksman! The most accomplished shot! Time's sublimest target Is a soul "forgot"!"

"There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons - That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes -Heavenly Hurt, it gives us - We can find no scar, But internal difference - Where the Meanings, are -"

"They shut me up in Prose - As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet - Because they liked me "still" -Still! Could themself have peeped - And seen my Brain - go round - They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason - in the Pound -"

"This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me – The simple News that Nature told – With tender Majesty Her Message is committed To Hands I cannot see – For love of Her – Sweet – countrymen – Judge tenderly – of Me"

"This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies And lads and girls; Was laughter and ability and sighing, And frocks and curls."

"To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights, What must the Midnights – be!"

"Truth – is as old as God – His Twin identity And will endure as long as He A Co-Eternity –And perish on the Day Himself is borne away From Mansion of the Universe A lifeless Deity."

"Upon the gallows hung a wretch, Too sullied for the hell To which the law entitled him. As nature’s curtain fell The one who bore him tottered in, For this was woman’s son. "'Twas all I had," she stricken gasped; Oh, what a livid boon!"

"We outgrow love, like other things And put it in the Drawer – Till it an Antique fashion shows – Like Costumes Grandsires wore."

"What Soft – Cherubic Creatures – These Gentlewomen are – One would as soon assault a Plush – Or violate a Star –Such Dimity Convictions – A Horror so refined Of freckled Human Nature – Of Deity – ashamed –"

"Who has not found the Heaven – below – Will fail of it above – For Angels rent the House next ours, Wherever we remove –"

"Who has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. God's residence is next to mine, His furniture is love."

"Wild nights - Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury!Futile - the winds - To a Heart in port - Done with the Compass - Done with the Chart!Rowing in Eden - Ah - the Sea! Might I but moor - tonight - In thee!"

"Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon."

"In English, you know who I love, and have translated? Emily Dickinson...I translated Dickinson. It came out in the Nuevo Diario a long time ago, in the beginning of the 1980s. I love her very much."

"(What is it about Emily Dickinson that moves you?) Her use of language, certainly. Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny. She isn't solemn."

"One who, as a child, knew Emily Dickinson well and loved her much recollects her most vividly as a white, ethereal vision, stepping from her cloistral solitude on to the verandah, daintily unrolling a great length of carpet before her with her foot, strolling down to where the carpet ended among her flowers, then turning back and shutting herself out of the world."

"Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day."

"There is another thing about my childhood that is interesting now, in the light of later happenings. I might have said, with Emily Dickinson: "I never saw a moor,/I never saw the sea;/Yet know I how the heather looks,/And what a wave must be." For I never saw the ocean until I went from college to the marine laboratories at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. Yet as a child I was fascinated by the thought of it. I dreamed about it and wondered what it would look like."

"Friends dislike being apart. Separation, says Emily Dickinson, is all the Hell we need. Each shared moment is precious. And the only ones who can remember the hour of loneliness are those who survive it."

"No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson...Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood."

"I'm from the Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor school of writing, where you write about your Amherst backyard or about a farm in Milledgevilk, and then you're actually writing about everything it means to be human."

"The complexity of women's undergarments in nineteenth-century America is not to be waved off, and I proceeded like a polar explorer through clips, clasps, and moorings, catches, straps, and whalebone stays, sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness."

"There’s no higher entitlement than thinking that you should live forever, when part of the beauty of nature is that even the stars die. That's what Emily Dickinson said: 'That it will never come again/is what makes life so sweet.' I believe that."

"My mother was the first songwriter I knew; Emily Dickinson was the first poet and my grandmother the first storyteller...From Emily I learned that the immense silences I found within me were navigable by words and metaphor."

"Her poetry is the diary or autobiography — though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth — of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute."

"Emily Dickinson is nearly infinite in her expression. She wrote seventeen hundred and seventy-five poems, and they constitute a very rich literature certainly. And she was, God knows, highly imaginative, highly intelligent, highly perceptive, and she had a kind of regard for language that a great writer must have. It was a mystery, a miracle to her. I learned a little something about the mystery and miracle of language by reading her..."

"When I visited Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, a lively plump robin was sitting on her step, right under the second-story window she would have stared out of."

"Anger has always played a role in poetry...There is much anger in Emily Dickinson, lightly disguised as mockery. "The Bible is an antique volume / Written by faded men," she proclaims."

"Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility."

"Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadmomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth."

"Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering."

"I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed. It was, moreover, no hermetic retreat, but a seclusion which included a wide range of people, of reading and correspondence. Her sister Vinnie said, "Emily is always looking for the rewarding person." And she found, at various periods, both women and men: her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Amherst visitors and family friends such as Benjamin Newton, Charles Wadsworth, Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, and his wife; her friends Kate Anthon and Helen Hunt Jackson, the distant but significant figures of Elizabeth Barrett, the Brontës, George Eliot. But she carefully selected her society and controlled the disposal of her time. Not only the "gentlewomen in plush" of Amherst were excluded; Emerson visited next door but she did not go to meet him; she did not travel or receive routine visits; she avoided strangers. Given her vocation, she was neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economies."

"Emily Dickinson — viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as "partially cracked," by the twentieth century as fey or pathological — has increasingly struck me as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices."

"She was always stirred by the existences of women like George Eliot or Elizabeth Barrett, who possessed strength of mind, articulateness, and energy. (She once characterized Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale as "holy" — one suspects she merely meant, "great.")"

"Emily Dickinson's strictness, sometimes almost a slang of strictness, speaks with an intellectually active, stimulated quick music."

"Emily Dickinson, whose unappeasable thirst for fame was itself unknown for years after her death, had to fight through her family — "Vesuvius at home" — until a miserable lawsuit and the theft of a manure pile interrupted the posthumous publication of her work, and postponed for forty-nine years what may be her finest book."

"How fleeting the sorrows of youth, how slight the foundations on which the young build towers of despair"

"There is no language that love does not speak"

"The world needs divine power in every human being the recognition of which is the secret to all success and happiness"

"Oh you who read some song I have sung What know you of the soul from whence it sprung"

"It is impossible to pursue a successful literary career and follow the advice of all one's 'best friends'. I feel compelled to follow the light which my own intellect & judgement cast upon my way, rather than any one of the many conflicting rays which other minds would lend me."

"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone. For this brave old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air. The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care."

"Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go. They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all. There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life's gall."

"There is room in the halls of pleasure For a long and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain."

"Here, on this side of the grave, Here, should we labor and love."

"So many gods, so many creeds; So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind Is all the sad world needs."

"You never can tell when you do an act Just what the result will be; But with every deed you are sowing a seed, Though the harvest you may not see. Each kindly act is an acorn dropped In God's productive soil; You may not know, yet the tree shall grow And shelter the brows that toil.You never can tell what your thoughts will do In bringing you hate or love; For thoughts are things, and their airy wings Are swifter than carrier doves. They follow the law of the universe — Each thing must create its kind; And they speed o'er the track to bring you back Whatever went out from your mind."

"I'm no reformer; for I see more light Than darkness in the world; mine eyes are quick To catch the first dim radiance of the dawn, And slow to note the cloud that threatens storm."

"I find a rapture linked with each despair, Well worth the price of anguish. I detect More good than evil in humanity. Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes, And men grow better as the world grows old."

"No question is ever settled Until it is settled right."

"Between the finite and the infinite The missing link of Love has left a void. Supply the link, and earth with Heaven will join In one continued chain of endless life."

"Hell is wherever Love is not, and Heaven Is Love's location. No dogmatic creed, No austere faith based on ignoble fear Can lead thee into realms of joy and peace. Unless the humblest creatures on the earth Are bettered by thy loving sympathy Think not to find a Paradise beyond."

"There is no sudden entrance into Heaven. Slow is the ascent by the path of Love."

"Body and mind, and spirit, all combine To make the Creature, human and divine.Of this great trinity no part deny. Affirm, affirm, the Great Eternal I."

"Affirm the body, beautiful and whole, The earth-expression of immortal soul.Affirm the mind, the messenger of the hour, To speed between thee and the source of power.Affirm the spirit, the Eternal I — Of this great trinity no part deny."

"Each mental wave we send out from the mind, Or base, or kind, Completes its circuit, then with added force Seeks its own source."

"You may choose your word like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart.You may work on your word a thousand weeks, But it will not glow like one That all unsought, leaps forth white hot, When the fountains of feeling run."

"Look to the Great Eternal Cause And not to any man, for light. Look in; and learn the wrong, and right, From your own soul's unwritten laws. And when you question, or demur, Let Love be your Interpreter."

"If fallacies come knocking at my door, I'd rather feed, and shelter full a score, Than hide behind the black portcullis, doubt, And run the risk of barring one Truth out.And if pretension for a time deceive, And prove me one too ready to believe, Far less my shame, than if by stubborn act, I brand as lie, some great colossal Fact."

"Not to the curious or impatient soul That in the start, demands the end be shown, And at each step, stops waiting for a sign; But to the tireless toiler toward the goal, Shall the great miracles of God be known And life revealed, immortal and divine."

"Breathe "God," in any tongue — it means the same; LOVE ABSOLUTE: Think, feel, absorb the thought; Shut out all else; until a subtle flame (A spark from God's creative centre caught) Shall permeate your being, and shall glow, Increasing in its splendour, till, YOU KNOW."

"Give, and thou shalt receive. Give thoughts of cheer, Of courage and success, to friend and stranger. And from a thousand sources, far and near, Strength will be sent thee in thy hour of danger."

"Give of thy love, nor wait to know the worth Of what thou lovest; and ask no returning. And wheresoe'er thy pathway leads on earth, There thou shalt find the lamp of love-light burning."

"Divine the Powers that on this trio wait. Supreme their conquest, over Time and Fate. Love, Work, and Faith — these three alone are great."

"Who climbs the mountain does not always climb. The winding road slants downward many a time; Yet each descent is higher than the last."

"Who would attain to summits still and fair, Must nerve himself through valleys of despair."

"All love that has not friendship for its base, Is like a mansion built upon the sand."

"To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men."

"There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, Can circumvent or hinder or control The firm resolve of a determined soul. Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great; All things give way before it soon or late. What obstacle can stay the mighty force Of the sea seeking river in its course, Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait?"

"Not in the time of pleasure Hope doth set her bow; But in the sky of sorrow, Over the vale of woe. Through gloom and shadow look we On beyond the years! The soul would have no rainbow Had the eyes no tears."

"Who drives the horses of the sun Shall lord it but a day; Better the lowly deed were done, And kept the humble way."

"The rust will find the sword of fame, The dust will hide the crown; Ay, none shall nail so high his name Time will not tear it down."

"The happiest heart that ever beat Was in some quiet breast That found the common daylight sweet, And left to Heaven the rest."

"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country's flag," she said."

"The windows of my soul I throw Wide open to the sun."

"What is good looking, as Horace Smith remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,—generous in your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration."

"O, brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother; where pity dwells, the peace of God is there."

"Press bravely onward! — not in vain Your generous trust in human kind; The good which bloodshed could not gain Your peaceful zeal shall find."

"So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore; The glory from his gray hairs gone For evermore!"

"When faith is lost, when honor dies The man is dead!"

"Making their lives a prayer."

"Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time, So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry; Blot out the epic’s stately rhyme, But spare his "Highland Mary!""

"Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good."

"The hope of all who suffer, The dread of all who wrong."

"I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care."

"Again the shadow moveth o'er The dial-plate of time."

"Yet sometimes glimpses on my sight, Through present wrong the eternal right; And, step by step, since time began, I see the steady gain of man;"

"We lack but open eye and ear To find the Orient's marvels here; The still small voice in autumn's hush, Yon maple wood the burning bush."

"Better heresy of doctrine than heresy of heart."

"Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young."

"The Night is Mother of the Day, The Winter of the Spring, And ever upon old Decay The greenest mosses cling."

"Beauty seen is never lost."

"God blesses still the generous thought, And still the fitting word He speeds, And Truth, at His requiring taught, He quickens into deeds."

"Each crisis brings its word and deed."

"The Beauty which old Greece or Rome Sung, painted, wrought, lies close at home."

"We seemed to see our flag unfurled, Our champion waiting in his place For the last battle of the world, The Armageddon of the race."

"Nature speaks in symbols and in signs."

"Who never wins can rarely lose, Who never climbs as rarely falls."

"To eat the lotus of the Nile And drink the poppies of Cathay."

"The harp at Nature's advent strung Has never ceased to play; The song the stars of morning sung Has never died away."

"Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago."

"Low stir of leaves and dip of oars And lapsing waves on quiet shores."

"All hearts confess the saints elect, Who, twain in faith, in love agree, And melt not in an acid sect The Christian pearl of charity!"

"Life is ever lord of Death And Love can never lose its own."

"Let the thick curtain fall; I better know than all How little I have gained, How vast the unattained."

"Sweeter than any sung My songs that found no tongue; Nobler than any fact My wish that failed of act. Others shall sing the song, Others shall right the wrong,— Finish what I begin, And all I fail of win."

"God is and all is well."

"Their right, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dread arbitrament of war. Their bones whiten every stricken field of the Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine and nakedness of Valley Forge, and the pestilential horrors of the old Jersey prison ship."

"The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast."

"Maud Muller, on a summer's day, Raked the meadows sweet with hay. Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth Of simple beauty and rustic health."

"So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on, And Maud was left in the field alone. But the lawyers smiled that afternoon, When he hummed in court an old love-tune."

"He wedded a wife of richest dower, Who lived for fashion, as he for power. Yet oft, in his marble hearth's bright glow, He watched a picture come and go: And sweet Maud Muller's hazel eyes Looked out in their innocent surprise."

"A manly form at her side she saw, And joy was duty and love was law. Then she took up her burden of life again, Saying only, "It might have been"."

"Weary lawyers with endless tongues."

"Alas for maiden, alas for Judge, For rich repiner and household drudge! God pity them both! and pity us all, Who vainly the dreams of youth recall; For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been!""

"God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day; The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait."

"As yonder tower outstretches to the earth The dark triangle of its shade alone When the clear day is shining on its top; So, darkness in the pathway of man's life Is but the shadow of God's providence, By the great Sun of wisdom cast thereon; And what is dark below is light in heaven."

"For they the mind of Christ discern Who lean, like John, upon His breast."

"Strike! Thou the Master, we Thy keys, The anthem of the destinies! The minor of Thy loftier strain, Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain — "Thy will be done!""

"Somehow not only for Christmas But all the long year through, The joy that you give to others Is the joy that comes back to you. And the more you spend in blessing The poor and lonely and sad, The more of your heart's possessing Returns to make you glad."

"I met some time ago during the American war an eminent citizen of the State of Massachusetts, who told me that he thought that there was no man in the United States whose writings at the time and for some years before the war had had so great influence upon public opinion in that country as the writings of John Greenleaf Whittier. And no doubt that arose partly from this—that he wrote strongly on the subject of freedom, and strongly against the system of slavery which was about to involve that great country in a great civil war ... Whittier himself when he attacks the question of negro slavery and the horror and the curse of it, writes in a manner which must have roused the indignation and excited the animosity of the people for whom he wrote against that enormous evil."

"If God gives a real poet to a people like that, at a time like that, and puts into his heart those sentiments, and into his mouth those words, does he not verily speak to that people and ask them to return to the ways of mercy and righteousness?"

"In the poem of 'Snow-Bound' there are lines on the death of the poet's sister which have nothing superior to them in beauty and pathos in our language. I have read them often with always increasing admiration. I have suffered from the loss of those near and dear to me, and I can apply the lines to my own case and feel as if they were written for me. 'The Eternal Goodness' is another poem which is worth a crowd of sermons which are spoken from the pulpits of our sects and churches, which I do not wish to undervalue. It is a great gift to mankind when a poet is raised up among us who devotes his great powers to the sublime purpose of spreading among men principles of mercy and justice and freedom. This our friend Whittier has done in a degree unsurpassed by any other poet who has spoken to the world in our noble tongue. I feel it a great honor that my bust should stand in your hall near the portrait of your great poet."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it...Opposition to the Mexican War came from writers who were active abolitionists such as Thoreau, Whittier, and Lowell. They believed the war was a plot of southern slave owners to extend slavery, punishing Mexico for having outlawed slavery when it became independent from Spain."

"I have in my hand a poem which our own beloved poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote almost fifty years ago, in the darkest hour of the midnight which brooded over our country. You are most of you, perhaps all, familiar with it. It is addressed to Mr. Garrison. Shall I read a single stanza? I do it to illustrate a point strongly put by our brother who has just taken his seat; that is, the power of a single soul, alone, of a single soul touched with sacred fire, a soul all of whose powers are enlisted the thought, the feeling, the susceptibility, the emotion, the indomitable will, the conscience that never shrinks, and always points to duty-I say, the power which God has lodged in the human mind, enabling to do and to dare and to suffer everything, and thank God for the privilege of doing it. To show also how, when one soul is thus stirred in its innermost and to its uttermost, it is irresistible; that wherever there are souls, here and there, and thick and fast, too, not merely one, and another, and another, of the great mass, but multitudes of souls are ready to receive the truth and welcome it, to incorporate it into their thought and feeling, to live and die for it. That was the effect of Garrison upon the soul of Whittier. He here gives us his testimony. The date of this is 1833-almost fifty years ago. He says in the third stanza: "I love thee with a brother's love,/I feel my pulses thrill/To mark thy spirit soar above/The cloud of human ill./My heart hath leaped to answer thine,/And echo back thy words,/As leaps the warrior's at the shine/And flash of kindred swords!""

"The belief has been constantly expressed in England that in the United States, which has produced William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, James Russell Lowell, John G. Whittier and Abraham Lincoln there must be those of their descendants who would take hold of the work of inaugurating an era of law and order. The colored people of this country who have been loyal to the flag believe the same, and strong in that belief have begun this crusade."

"The god looked out upon the troubled deep Waked into tumult from its placid sleep; The flame of anger kindles in his eye As the wild waves ascend the lowering sky; He lifts his head above their awful height And to the distant fleet directs his sight."

"Storms, thunders, waves! Howl, crash, and bellow till ye get your fill; Ye sometimes rest; men never can be still But in their graves."

"Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high; And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon's roar; The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more.Her deck once red with heroes' blood Where knelt the vanquished foe; When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, And waves were white below; No more shall feel the victor's tread, Or know the conquered knee; The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea! Oh, better that her shattered bulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail And give her to the god of storms, The lightning and the gale!"

"The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom; And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb."

"I know it is a sin For me to sit and grin At him here; But the old three-cornered hat, And the breeches, and all that, Are so queer!"

"Thou say’st an undisputed thing In such a solemn way."

"And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound."

"You think they are crusaders sent From some infernal clime, To pluck the eyes of sentiment And dock the tail of Rhyme, To crack the voice of Melody And break the legs of Time."

"And since, I never dare to write As funny as I can."

"When the last reader reads no more."

"The freeman casting with unpurchased hand The vote that shakes the turrets of the land."

"Thine eye was on the censer, And not the hand that bore it."

"Where go the poet's lines? Answer, ye evening tapers! Ye auburn locks, ye golden curls, Speak from your folded papers!"

"Those kind friends who suggest to a person suffering from a tedious complaint, that he "Had better try Homoeopathy," are apt to enforce their suggestion by adding, that "at any rate it can do no harm." This may or may not be true as regards the individual. But it always does very great harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error, or deception in a profession which deals with the life and health of our fellow-creatures."

"So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device, even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a poor man's necessities."

"Faith loves to lean on time's destroying arm, And age, like distance, lends a double charm."

"And when you stick on conversation’s burrs, Don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs."

"Lean, hungry, savage anti-everythings."

"Then the white man hates him [the Native American], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image."

"You can never be too cautious in your prognosis, in the view of the great uncertainty of the course of any disease not long watched, and the many unexpected turns it may take. I think I am not the first to utter the following caution:— Beware how you take away hope from any human being. Nothing is clearer than that the merciful Creator intends to blind most people as they pass down into the dark valley. Without very good reasons, temporal or spiritual, we should not interfere with his kind arrangements. It is the height of cruelty and the extreme of impertinence to tell your patient he must die, except you are sure that he wishes to know it, or that there is some particular cause for his knowing it. I should be especially unwilling to tell a child that it could not recover; if the theologians think it necessary, let them take the responsibility. God leads it by the hand to the edge of the precipice in happy unconsciousness, and I would not open its eyes to what he wisely conceals."

"I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes."

"Call him not old whose visionary brain Holds o’er the post its undivided reign, For him in vain the envious seasons roll, Who bears eternal summer in this soul."

"Dream on! Though Heaven may woo our open eyes, Through their closed lids we look on fairer skies; Truth is for other worlds, and hope for this; The cheating future lends the present's bliss; Life is a running shade, with fettered hands, That chases phantoms over shifting sands; Death a still spectre on a marble seat, With ever clutching palms and shackled feet; The airy shapes that mock life's slender chain, The flying joys he strives to clasp in vain, Death only grasps; to live is to pursue, — Dream on! there's nothing but illusion true!"

"Wake in our breast the living fires, The holy faith that warmed our sires; Thy hand hath made our nation free; To die for her is serving Thee."

"One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, One Nation evermore!"

"Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold."

"I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well."

"I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped straggling letters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.”"

"God reigneth. All is well."

"Good to the heels the well-worn slipper feels When the tired player shuffles off the buskin; A page of Hood may do a fellow good After a scolding from Carlyle or Ruskin."

"I have always considered my face a convenience rather than an ornament."

"Speak not too well of one who scarce will know Himself transfigured in its roseate glow; Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true, Remembering always he belongs to you; Deal with him as a truant, if you will, But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!"

"Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!"

"To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old."

"The brightest blades grow dim with rust, The fairest meadow white with snow."

"When lawyers take what they would give And doctors give what they would take."

"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain."

"He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, "Know thyself," never alluding to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted existence! Why, the truths a man carries about with him are his tools; and do you think a carpenter is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty board with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail? I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations."

"When one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more."

"I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel ['I', the first-person pronoun] as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously imply any individual centre."

"Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times."

"What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything else;—long arguments on special points between people who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain ultimata [finalities] of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons."

"A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide."

"You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove."

"Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment."

"Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all."

"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad."

"Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere, One thing is certain: Love will triumph here! Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule,— The world's great masters, when you're out of school,— Learn the brief moral of our evening's play Man has his will,—but woman has her way!"

"Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust."

"Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind."

"Mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward."

"How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!"

"I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,— give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen."

"Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all."

"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor."

"Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies?"

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!"

"Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still!"

"Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy? Don't know what it means? - Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it."

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."

"There is that glorious Epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the Historian, in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men: "Good Americans when they die go to Paris.""

"Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar."

"The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city."

"I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question."

"But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where young womanhood is the sacrifice."

"The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men."

"Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned."

"The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed."

"One unquestioned text we read, All doubt beyond, all fear above; Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it—God is love."

"The great delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and according to law."

"Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is force."

"The hat is the ultimum moriens of "respectability"."

"The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming."

"You know well enough what I mean by youth and age;—something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it."

"It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling."

"One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also."

"Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her."

"His home! the Western giant smiles, And twirls the spotty globe to find it; This little speck, the British Isles? ’Tis but a freckle,—never mind it."

"But Memory blushes at the sneer, And Honor turns with frown defiant, And Freedom, leaning on her spear, Laughs louder than the laughing giant."

"Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars?"

"The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper."

"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it."

"Little I ask, my wants are few; I only wish a hut of stone, (A very plain brown stone will do,) That I may call my own;— And close at hand is such a one, In yonder street that fronts the sun."

"Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, That was built in such a logical way It ran a hundred years to a day?"

"A general flavor of mild decay."

"It went to pieces all at once— All at once and nothing first, Just as bubbles do when they burst."

"Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking."

"You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your opinion really want your praise, and will be contented with nothing less."

"Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else,—very rarely to those who say to themselves, "Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!""

"How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!"

"Talk about it as much as you like,—one's breeding shows itself nowhere more than in his religion."

"A few can touch the magic string, And noisy Fame is proud to win them; Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!"

"O hearts that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses!"

"What a miserable thing it is to be poor."

"Leverage is everything,—was what I used to say;—don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side."

"I do not know in what shape the practical question may present itself to you; but I will tell you my rule in life, and I think you will find it a good one. Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane. They are in-sane, out of health, morally. Reason, which is food to sound minds, is not tolerated, still less assimilated, unless administered with the greatest caution; perhaps, not at all. Avoid collision with them, so far as you honorably can; keep your temper, if you can,—for one angry man is as good as another; restrain them from violence, promptly, completely, and with the least possible injury, just as in the case of maniacs,—and when you have got rid of them, or got them tied hand and foot so that they can do no mischief, sit down and contemplate them charitably..."

"If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him. And the temptation is to some natures a very great one. Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. In common life we shirk it by forming habits, which take the place of self-determination. In politics party-organization saves us the pains of much thinking before deciding how to cast our vote."

"We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity."

"All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology."

"We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on."

"The Widow Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow."

"There isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.' ."

"What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,—'atheists,' heretics, infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just like other folks."

"You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It didn't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy."

"Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy, while you are about it."

"Nobody talks much that doesn't say unwise things, — things he did not mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note sometimes."

"What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!"

"You hear that boy laughing?—you think he’s all fun; But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done; The children laugh loud as they troop to his call, And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all."

"Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening."

"Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified."

"The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men, — from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. It is in their hearts that the "sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its source. The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the other, — these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and withered in their delusion."

"You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace."

"Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?"

"So from the heights of Will Life's parting stream descends, And, as a moment turns its slender rill, Each widening torrent bends,From the same cradle's side, From the same mother's knee, —One to long darkness and the frozen tide, One to the Peaceful Sea!"

"Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience."

"The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer."

"Most persons have died before they expire, — died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion."

"On Thee we fling our burdening woe, O love Divine, forever dear: Content to suffer, while we know, Living and dying, Thou art near!"

"Lord of all being, thronèd afar, Thy glory flames from sun and star; Center and soul of every sphere, Yet to each loving heart how near! Sun of our life, Thy quickening ray, Sheds on our path the glow of day; Star of our hope, Thy softened light Cheers the long watches of the night."

"Grant us Thy truth to make us free, And kindling hearts that burn for Thee, Till all Thy living altars claim One holy light, one heavenly flame."

"I talk half the time to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory."

"For there we loved, and where we love is home, Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts, Though o'er us shine the jasper-lighted dome:— The chain may lengthen, but it never parts!"

"I don't want to have the territory of a man's mind fenced in. I don't want to shut out the mystery of the stars and the awful hollow that holds them. We have done with those hypaethral temples, that were open above to the heavens, but we can have attics and skylights to them. Minds with skylights... One-story intellects, two-story intellects, three-story intellects, with skylights. All fact-collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. There are minds with large ground floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowledge; some librarians, for instance, who know enough of books to help other people, without being able to make much other use of their knowledge, have intellects of this class. Your great working lawyer has two spacious stories; his mind is clear, because his mental floors are large, and he has room to arrange his thoughts so that he can get at them,—facts below, principles above, and all in ordered series; poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture in the attics."

""I suppose you are an entomologist?" "Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name. No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp"."

"Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor."

"It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen."

"Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words..."

"If we are only as the potter's clay Made to be fashioned as the artist wills, And broken into shards if we offend The eye of Him who made us, it is well."

"Knowledge—it excites prejudices to call it science—is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore."

"We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless"."

"Right now I'm reading Mark Twain's Autobiography, which I like very much. There is a part where he talks about his love for Oliver Wendell Holmes's writing. Twain tells of how he was accused of plagiarism because once he took a quotation from Holmes and used it as his own. He says that plagiarism does not exist in literature, and I agree. Literature is made of many pieces, of a reinterpretation of similar themes, of a recycling of materials. Only the mask exists, and the writer wears it to interpret the manifold possibilities of humanity that exist around him. He learns to be a writer when he can take someone else's mask and make it a part of himself and talk from that mask."

"So in the heart, When, fading slowly down the past, Fond memories depart, And each that leaves it seems the last; Long after all the rest are flown, Returns a solitary tone,— The after-echo of departed years,— And touches all the soul to tears."

"A tear that trembles for a little while Upon the trembling eyelid, till the world Wavers within its circle like a dream, Holds more of meaning in its narrow orb Than all the distant landscape that it blurs."

"And so, by night, while we were all at rest, I think the coming sped the parting guest."

"What we do belongs to what we are; and what we are is what becomes of us."

"Raise the stone, and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and there am I."

"The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done; The Master has paid him his wages, the goal of his journey is won; He rests, but he never is idle; a thousand years pass like a day, In the glad surprise of Paradise where work is sweeter than play."

"This is the gospel of labour, ring it, ye bells of the kirk! The Lord of Love came down from above, to live with the men who work. This is the rose that He planted, here in the thorn-curst soil: Heaven is blest with perfect rest, but the blessing of Earth is toil."

"The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month."

"Not to the swift, the race: Not to the strong, the fight: Not to the righteous, perfect grace: Not to the wise, the light."

"For men have dulled their eyes with sin, And dimmed the light of heaven with doubt, And built their temple-walls to shut thee in, And framed their iron creeds to shut thee out."

"This is the soldier brave enough to tell The glory-dazzled world that "war is hell": Lover of peace, he looks beyond the strife, And rides through hell to save his country's life."

"Count not the cost of honour to the dead! The tribute that a mighty nation pays To those who loved her well in former days Means more than gratitude for glories fled; For every noble man that she hath bred, Lives in the bronze and marble that we raise, Immortalised by art's immortal praise, To lead our sons as he our fathers led."

"So it's home again, and home again, America for me! My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be, In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars!"

"O brave flag, O bright flag, O flag to lead the free! The glory of thy silver stars, Engrailed in blue above the bars Of red for courage, white for truth, Has brought the world a second youth And drawn a hundred million hearts to follow after thee."

"Honour the brave who sleep Where the lost “Titanic” lies, The men who knew what a man must do When he looks Death in the eyes.“Women and children first,”— Ah, strong and tender cry! The sons whom women had borne and nursed, Remembered,—and dared to die.The boats crept off in the dark: The great ship groaned: and then,— O stars of the night, who saw that sight, Bear witness, These were men!"

"What is Friendship? Something deep That the heart can spend and keep: Wealth that greatens while we give, Praise that heartens us to live."

"If Might made Right, life were a wild-beasts' cage; If Right made Might, this were the golden age; But now, until we win the long campaign, Right must gain Might to conquer and to reign."

"God said, “I am tired of kings,”— But that was a long while ago! And meantime man said, “No,— I like their looks in their robes and rings.” So he crowned a few more, And they went on playing the game as before, Fighting and spoiling things.Man said, “I am tired of kings! Sons of the robber-chiefs of yore, They make me pay for their lust and their war; I am the puppet, they pull the strings; The blood of my heart is the wine they drink. I will govern myself for awhile I think, And see what that brings!”Then God, who made the first remark, Smiled in the dark."

"They tell me thou art rich, my country: gold In glittering flood has poured into thy chest; Thy flocks and herds increase, thy barns are pressed With harvest, and thy stores can hardly hold Their merchandise; unending trains are rolled Along thy network rails of East and West; Thy factories and forges never rest; Thou art enriched in all things bought and sold!But dost thou prosper? Better news I crave. O dearest country, is it well with thee Indeed, and is thy soul in health? A nobler people, hearts more wisely brave, And thoughts that lift men up and make them free,— These are prosperity and vital wealth!"

"Peace without Justice is a low estate,— A coward cringing to an iron Fate! But Peace through Justice is the great ideal,— We'll pay the price of war to make it real."

"I have no joy in strife, Peace is my great desire; Yet God forbid I lose my life Through fear to face the fire.A peaceful man must fight For that which peace demands,— Freedom and faith, honor and right, Defend with heart and hands."

"And yet there is an anger that purifies the heart: The anger of the better against the baser part, Against the false and wicked, against the tyrant's sword, Against the enemies of love, and all that hate the Lord."

"Four things a man must learn to do If he would make his record true: To think without confusion clearly; To love his fellow-men sincerely; To act from honest motives purely; To trust in God and Heaven securely."

"Flowers rejoice when night is done, Lift their heads to greet the sun; Sweetest looks and odours raise, In a silent hymn of praise."

"If all the skies were sunshine, Our faces would be fain To feel once more upon them The cooling splash of rain.If all the world were music, Our hearts would often long For one sweet strain of silence. To break the endless song.If life were always merry, Our souls would seek relief, And rest from weary laughter In the quiet arms of grief."

"The world is full of warfare 'twixt the evil and the good; I watched the battle from afar as one who understood The shouting and confusion, the bloody, blundering fight— How few there are that see it clear, how few that wage it right!"

"Religion? Yes, I know it well; I've heard its prayers and creeds, And seen men put them all to shame with poor, half-hearted deeds. They follow Christ, but far away; they wander and they doubt. I'll serve him in a better way, and live his precepts out."

"Let me but feel thy look's embrace, Transparent, pure, and warm, And I'll not ask to touch thy face, Or fold thee in mine arm. For in thine eyes a girl doth rise, Arrayed in candid bliss, And draws me to her with a charm More close than any kiss."

"There are many kinds of love, as many kinds of light, And every kind of love makes a glory in the night. There is love that stirs the heart, and love that gives it rest, But the love that leads life upward is the noblest and the best."

"But often faltering feet Come surest to the goal; And they who walk in darkness meet The sunrise of the soul."

"He that planteth a tree is the servant of God, He provideth a kindness for many generations, And faces that he hath not seen shall bless him."

"To be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars- to be satisfied with your possessions but not content with yourself until you have made the best of them- to despise nothing in the world except falsehood and meanness, and to fear nothing except cowardice- to be governed by you admirations rather than by your disgusts- to covet nothing that is your neighbors except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners- to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends, and every day of Christ; to spend as much time as you can in God's out-of doors- these are the little guideposts on the footpaths to peace."

"In warlike pomp, with banners flowing, The regiments of autumn stood: I saw their gold and scarlet glowing From every hillside, every wood."

"I heard through the night The rush and the clamour; The pulse of the fight Like blows of Thor's hammer; The pattering flight Of the leaves, and the anguished Moan of the forest vanquished."

"The storm is ended! The impartial sun Laughs down upon the battle lost and won, And crowns the triumph of the cloudy host In rolling lines retreating to the coast."

"For ever so our thoughtful hearts repeat On fields of triumph dirges of defeat; And still we turn on gala-days to tread Among the rustling memories of the dead."

"To desire and strive to be of some service to the world, to aim at doing something which shall really increase the happiness and welfare and virtue of mankind,—this is a choice which is possible for all of us; and surely it is a good haven to sail for. The more we think of it, the more attractive and desirable it becomes. To do some work that is needed, and to do it thoroughly well; to make our toil count for something in adding to the sum total of what is actually profitable for humanity; to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, or, better still, to make one wholesome idea take root in a mind that was bare and fallow; to make our example count for something on the side of honesty and cheerfulness, and courage, and good faith, and love - this is an aim for life which is very wide, and yet very definite, as clear as light. It is not in the least vague. It is only free; it has the power to embody itself in a thousand forms without changing its character. Those who seek it know what it means, however it may be expressed. It is real and genuine and satisfying. There is nothing beyond it, because there can be no higher practical result of effort. It is the translation, through many languages, of the true, divine purpose of all the work and labor that is done beneath the sun, into one final, universal word. It is the active consciousness of personal harmony with the will of God who worketh hitherto. (p.27)"

"I'm only wishing to go a-fishing; For this the month of May was made."

"For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river."

"The mountain is voiceless and imperturbable; and its very loftiness and serenity sometimes make us the more lonely."

"The promotion from all-day picnics to a two weeks' camping-trip is like going from school to college."

"Every mountain is, rightly considered, an invitation to climb."

"Romantic love interests almost everybody, because almost everybody knows something about it, or would like to know."

"How often a man has cause to return thanks for the enthusiasms of his friends! They are the little fountains that run down from the hills to refresh the mental desert of the despondent."

"Christ never asks us to give up merely for the sake of giving up, but always in order to win something better."

"The simple life which blandly ignores all care and conflict, soon becomes flabby and invertebrate, sentimental and gelatinous."

"No amount of energy will take the place of thought."

"Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air; And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair; And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome; But when it comes to living, there is no place like home."

"I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack; The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back."

"Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me! I want a ship that’s westward bound to plow the rolling sea, To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars."

"Thou warden of the western gate, above Manhattan Bay, The fogs of doubt that hid thy face are driven clean away: Thine eyes at last look far and clear, thou liftest high thy hand To spread the light of liberty world-wide for every land."

"Oh, come as comes the morn. Serene and strong and full of faith, America, arise, With steady hope and mighty help to join thy brave Allies. O dearest country of my heart, home of the high desire, Make clean thy soul for sacrifice on Freedom’s altar-fire: For thou must suffer, thou must fight, until the warlords cease, And all the peoples lift their heads in liberty and peace."

"The lintel low enough to keep out pomp and pride: The threshold high enough to turn deceit aside."

"Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul."

"Time Is... Too slow for those who wait, Too swift for those who fear, Too long for those who grieve, Too short for those who rejoice, But for those who love, Time is Eternity. (Music and Other Poems, 1904)"

"Death comes in its own time, in its own way. Death is as unique as the individual experiencing it."

"As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge."

"Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."

"He is a Presbyterian first and an artist second, which is just as comfortable as trying to be a Presbyterian first and a chorus girl second."

"Alone I walked on the ocean strand, A pearly shell was in my hand; I stooped, and wrote upon the sand My name, the year, the day. As onward from the sport I passed, One lingering look behind I cast, A wave came rolling high and fast, And washed my lines away."

"Wisdom, Power and Goodness meet In the bounteous field of wheat."

"Come out — pretty Rose-Bud, — my lone, timid one! Come forth from thy green leaves, and peep at the sun! For little he does, in these dull autumn hours, At height'ning of beauty, or laughing with flowers."

"I am feeble, pale and weary, And my wings are nearly furled; I have caused a scene so dreary, I am glad to quit the world! With bitterness I'm thinking On the evil I have done, And to my caverns sinking From the coming of the sun."

"The Frost looked forth one still, clear night, And he said, "Now I shall be out of sight; So through the valley and over the height In silence I'll take my way.""

"I seem to have always one little window looking but into life."

"Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned."

"Sweet empty sky of June without a stain, Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain, That each dark copse and hollow overfills:"

"The children of the prophets of the Lord, Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate. Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state, The West refused them, and the East abhorred. No anchorage the known world could afford."

"Then Nature shaped a poet's heart — a lyre From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows Drew trembling music."

"No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define — what is a bird."

"No signs of life are here: the very prayers Inscribed around are in a language dead."

"Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, — The exiles by the streams of Babylon."

"The funeral and the marriage, now, alas! We know not which is sadder to recall."

"A lady 'twixt two knights' stone effigies, And every day in dusky glory steeps Their sculptured slumber of five centuries."

"Lo — a black line of birds in wavering thread Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!"

"Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles."

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

"The Jewish problem is as old as history and assumes in each age a new form. All the magnanimity, patience, charity, and humanity, which the Jews have manifested in return for centuries of persecution, have been thus far inadequate to eradicate the profound antipathy engendered by fanaticism and ready to break out in one or another shape at any moment of popular excitement."

"Another founding mother was the American Emma Lazarus, who was affected as much by her country's civil war as by the Russian pogroms in the late nineteenth century...Lazarus perceived herself as a Sephardic Jew, but she didn't want to isolate herself from the contemporary American literary community. When her friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson failed to include her poems in his anthology Parnassus (1874), which included works by prominent and promising national poets, Lazarus wrote him an angry letter. "I cannot resist the impulse of expressing to you my extreme disappointment at finding you have so far modified the enthusiastic estimate you held of my literary labors as to refuse me a place in the large & miscellaneous collection of poems you have just edited," she wrote. And so, she wondered why "I find myself treated with absolute contempt in the very quarter where I had been encouraged to build my fondest hopes." Her letter to Emerson might be read in at least two ways: as a woman's angry response to the "arbitrary" exclusion by a prominent male critic and essayist from "a fair share of immortality"; and as the response by a Jew, as a member of an ethnic and religious minority, who felt that she had been discriminated against. It is interesting, therefore, to note that Lazarus sought to introduce American readers to figures such as Bar Kokhba, the Jewish soldier who led the final revolt against the Romans in Palestine in 132-35 CE, and to Rashi, the twelfth-century biblical and talmudic commentator from Troyes, France. She also wrote a poem about the Touro Synagogue, the famous Sephardic house of worship that was established in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1763. In addition to translating into English the poetry of the popular German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, Lazarus also translated poems by Ibn Gabirol, Halevi, and Ibn Ezra, thus building a bridge between Sephardic life in the United States and the medieval Hebrew past."

"In her eyes a thought Grew sweet and sweeter, deepening like the dawn— A mystical forewarning!"

"What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round."

"The ability to secure your own way and yet impress others with the idea that they are having their own way is rare among men; in women it is as common as eyebrows."

"We weep when we are born, not when we die!"

"My dear Mr. Morse: It was very pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty. One can say to one's self every morning: "There's that letter of Morse's. I haven't read it yet. I think I'll take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few years to make out what he means by those t's that look like w's and those i's that haven't any eyebrows." Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever—unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime."

"That was indeed to live— At one bold swoop to wrest From darkling death the best That Death to Life can give!"

"My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again."

"We visit […] a neighboring graveyard. I am by this time in a condition of mind to become a willing inmate of the place."

"It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight."

"There's a special Providence that watches over idiots, drunken men, and boys."

"Somewhere—in desolate wind-swept space— In Twilight-land—in No-man’s land— Two hurrying Shapes met face to face, And bade each other stand. “And who are you?” cried one, a-gape, Shuddering in the gloaming light. “I know not,” said the second Shape, “I only died last night!”"

"Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise And shows you laughing lips and rougish eyes. But when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, 'Tis ten to one you find the girl in tears."

"Or light or dark, or short or tall, She sets a springe to snare them all: All's one to her—above her fan She'd make sweet eyes at Caliban."

"They fail, and they alone, who have not striven."

"If you chance to live in a town where the authorities cannot rest until they have destroyed every precious tree within their blighting reach, you will be especially charmed by the beauty of the streets of Portsmouth. In some parts of the town, when the chestnuts are in blossom, you would fancy yourself in a garden in fairyland."

"When Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789 he was not much impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in the struggle for independence."

"Famous old houses seem to have an intuitive perception of the value of corner lots. If it is a possible thing, they always set themselves down on the most desirable spot."

"Dwellers by the sea are generally superstitious; sailors always are. There is something in the illimitable expanse of sky and water that dilates the imagination."

"Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?"

"Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, Named of the four winds, North, South, East and West; Portals that lead to an enchanted land Of cities, forests, fields of living gold Vast prairies, lordly summits touched with snow, Majestic rivers sweeping proudly past The Arab's date-palm and the Norseman's pine— A realm wherein are fruits of every zone, Airs of all climes, for lo! throughout the year The red rose blossoms somewhere—a rich land A later Eden planted in the wilds, With not an inch of earth within its bound But if a slave's foot press it sets him free. Here, it is written, Toil shall have its wage And Honor honor, and the humblest man Stand level with the highest in the law. Of such a land have men in dungeons dreamed And with the vision brightening in their eyes Gone smiling to the fagot and the sword. Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them press a wild, a motley throng— Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav, Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those tiger passions, here to stretch their claws. In street and alley what strange tongues are these, Accents of menace alien to our air, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O, Liberty, white goddess, is it well To leave the gate unguarded? On thy breast Fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of fate, Lift the downtrodden, but with the hand of steel Stay those who to thy sacred portals come To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn And trampled in the dust. For so of old The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome, And where the temples of the Caesars stood The lean wolf unmolested made her lair."

"What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, or wingëd air."

"O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!"

"Dear Lord, though I be changed to senseless clay. And serve the potter as he turns his wheel, I thank thee for the precious gift of tears!"

"So precious life is! Even to the old The hours are as a miser’s coins!"

"Here is woe, a self and not the mask of woe."

"When friends are at your hearthside met, Sweet courtesy has done its most If you have made each guest forget That he himself is not the host."

"If my best wines mislike thy taste, And my best service win thy frown, Then tarry not, I bid thee haste; There's many another Inn in town."

"The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born."

"Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety is especially subject to early frosts, as is also the dialectic species."

"After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow."

"I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings."

"Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of venerable colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay."

"The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know."

"Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said."

"The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks."

"Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy."

"Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice."

"The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly."

"All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hour-glass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?"

"Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs—putting in his oar, so to speak—with some pat word or sentence."

"There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite."

"He has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject."

"A man is known by the company his mind keeps."

"True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation."

"Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades."

"What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next."

"To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent—that is to triumph over old age."

"Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.[…] The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms."

"The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is."

"It is only your habitual late riser who takes in the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to go a-fishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky."

"The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated sorrow."

"From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature’s text; And embryo Good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the Evil in its nature."

"They came three thousand miles, and died, To keep the Past upon its throne; Unheard, beyond the ocean tide, Their English mother made her moan."

"There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates."

"It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested."

"The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers, is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience."

"When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp."

"The capacity of indignation makes an essential part of the outfit of every honest man."

"Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it."

"The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below."

"But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet Lessen like sound of friends’ departing feet; And Death is beautiful as feet of friend Coming with welcome at our journey’s end. For me Fate gave, whate’er she else denied, A nature sloping to the southern side; I thank her for it, though when clouds arise Such natures double-darken gloomy skies."

"The child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast; Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair."

"The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in."

"In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing."

"If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, — and that is a book honestly come by."

"She doeth little kindnesses Which most leave undone, or despise."

"Earth’s noblest thing, — a woman perfected."

"Be noble! and the nobleness that lies In other men, sleeping but never dead, Will rise in majesty to meet thine own."

"That love for one, from which there doth not spring Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing."

"If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave? If ye do not feel the chain, When it works a brother's pain, Are ye not base slaves indeed, Slaves unworthy to be freed?"

"Is true Freedom but to break Fetters for our own dear sake, And, with leathern hearts, forget That we owe mankind a debt? No! true freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!"

"They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three."

"His words were simple words enough, And yet he used them so, That what in other mouths was rough In his seemed musical and low."

"All thoughts that mould the age begin Deep down within the primitive soul."

"It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century."

"New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws which in our father's times were best; And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme Will be shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth."

"No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil."

"Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity."

"The real doth not clip the poet's wings,— To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart Reveals some clue to spiritual things, And stumbling guess becomes firm-footed art."

"Two meanings have our lightest fantasies, One of the flesh, and of the spirit one."

"Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart."

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light."

"Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong."

"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

"We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn this iron helm of fate, But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din, List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,— "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.""

"Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied."

"Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes, — they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design."

"New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key."

"I first drew in New England's air, and from her hardy breast Sucked in the tyrant-hating milk that will not let me rest."

"Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men."

"The traitor to humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than to be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!"

"The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude."

"Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts."

"One day with life and heart Is more than time enough to find a world."

"Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride, uphold."

"The birch, most shy and lady-like of trees, Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves."

"The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment."

"Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not."

"Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in, The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us, We bargain for the graves we lie in; At the Devil's booth are all things sold Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold."

"There is no price set on the lavish summer, And June may be had by the poorest comer."

"For a cap and bells our lives we pay, Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking: 'Tis heaven alone that is given away, 'Tis only God may be had for the asking."

"And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays: Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, grasping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers."

"Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it."

"Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how; Everything is happy now, Everything is upward striving; 'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,— 'Tis the natural way of living: Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake; And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, The heart forgets its sorrow and ache; The soul partakes the season's youth, And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth, Like burnt-out craters healed with snow."

"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed, In whatso we share with another's need,— Not that which we give, but what we share,— For the gift without the giver is bare; Who bestows himself with his alms feeds three,— Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me."

"A reading-machine, always wound up and going, He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing."

"There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on; Whose prose is grand verse while his verse the Lord knows Is some of it pr— No, 't is not even prose!"

"In creating, the only hard thing's to begin; A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak, If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke."

"And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak, Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower."

"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge."

"For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd He leaves never a doorway to get in a god."

"Nature fits all her children with something to do, He who would write and can't write, can surely review."

"Ez fer war, I call it murder— There you hev it plain an' flat; I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that."

"You've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God."

"Ef you take a sword an’ dror it, An’ go stick a feller thru, Guv’mint ain’t to answer for it, God’ll send the bill to you."

"Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame; Ev'y thin' thet's done inhuman Injers all on 'em the same."

"’Tain’t by turnin’ out to hack folks You’re agoin’ to git your right, Nor by lookin’ down on black folks Coz you’re put upon by white; Slavery ain’t o’ nary color, ’Tain’t the hide thet makes it wus, All it keers fer in a feller ’S jest to make him fill its pus."

"This goin' ware glory waits ye haint one agreeable feetur."

"Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man; He’s ben on all sides thet give places or pelf; But consistency still wuz a part of his plan,— He’s ben true to one party, an’ thet is himself."

"We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage."

"But John P. Robinson, he Sez they did n't know everythin' down in Judee."

"A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler O' purpose thet we might our principles swaller."

"I du believe with all my soul In the gret Press's freedom, To pint the people to the goal An' in the traces lead 'em."

"I don't believe in princerple, But oh I du in interest."

"It ain't by princerples nor men My preudunt course is steadied— I scent wich pays the best, an' then Go into it baldheaded."

"Of my merit On thet pint you yourself may jedge; All is, I never drink no sperit, Nor I haint never signed no pledge."

"Ez to my princerples, I glory In hevin' nothin' o' the sort."

"God makes sech nights, all white an' still, Fur'z you can look or listen, Moonshine an' snow on field an' hill, All silence an' all glisten."

"Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown An' peeked in thru' the winder, An there sot Huldy all alone, 'ith no one nigh to hender."

"The very room, coz she was in, Seemed warm from floor to ceilin'"

"'T was kin' o' kingdom-come to look On sech a blessed cretur."

"She thought no v'ice hed sech a swing Ez hisn in the choir; My! when he made Ole Hunderd ring She knowed the Lord was nigher."

"His heart kep' goin' pity-pat, But hern went pity-Zekle."

"To say why gals acts so or so, Or don't, 'ould be persumin'; Mebby to mean yes an' say no Comes nateral to women."

"He stood a spell on one foot fust Then stood a spell on t' other, An' on which one he felt the wust He could n't ha' told ye nuther."

"All kin' o' smily round the lips, An' teary round the lashes."

"Like streams that keep a summer mind Snow-hid in Jenooary."

"My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 'tis to crow: Don't never prophesy — onless ye know."

"It's 'most enough to make a deacon swear."

"The one thet fust gits mad 's 'most ollers wrong."

"Folks never understand the folks they hate."

"Ef you want peace, the thing you've gut tu du Is jes' to show you're up to fightin', tu."

"Bad work follers ye ez long's ye live."

"No, never say nothin' without you're compelled tu, An' then don't say nothin' thet you can be held tu."

"The surest plan to make a Man Is, think him so."

"Our papers don't purtend to print on'y wut Guv'ment choose, An' thet insures us all to git the very best o' noose."

"Our Pilgrim stock wuz pithed with hardihood."

"Soft-heartedness, in times like these, Shows sof'ness in the upper story."

"Earth's biggest country 's gut her soul, An' risen up earth's greatest nation."

"Under the yaller pines I house, When sunshine makes 'em all sweet-scented, An' hear among their furry boughs The baskin' west-wind purr contented."

"Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth On war's red techstone rang true metal; Who ventered life an' love an' youth For the gret prize o' death in battle?"

"In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For, though during its term of office the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs."

"Whatever be the effect of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship, to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for opinions, and to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized world for patriotism."

"Both of them mean that Labor has no rights which Capital is bound to respect,—that there is no higher law than human interest and cupidity."

"To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with the fever and ague on him to stop shaking and he will be cured. The discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?...Discussion is the very life of free institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed."

"It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative."

"We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician."

"The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon with his glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an anachronism of summer, the relic of a bygone world where such monsters swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old, fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no trace but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually before it."

"Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons."

"Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle."

"What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!"

"It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds."

"Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides Into the silent hollow of the past; What is there that abides To make the next age better for the last?"

"The little that we do Is but half-nobly true; With our laborious hiving What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss."

"Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote."

"Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face."

"They come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation!"

"The snow had begun in the gloaming, And busily all the night Had been heaping field and highway With a silence deep and white."

"Though old the thought and oft exprest, 'Tis his at last who says it best."

"Not failure, but low aim, is crime."

"Darkness is strong, and so is Sin, But only God endures forever!"

"Along A River-Side, I Know Not Where, I walked one night in mystery of dream; A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair, To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air."

"God, give us peace! not such as lulls to sleep, But sword on thigh and brow with purpose knit! And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep, Her ports all up, her battle lanterns lit, And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!"

"Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this."

"How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies, I give thanks For a new relish, careless to inquire My pleasure's pedigree, if so it please, Nobly, I mean, nor renegade to art. The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness, Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, The one thing finished in this hasty world, Forever finished, though the barbarous pit, Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout As if a miracle could be encored."

"The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions."

"What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!"

"The question of common sense is always "What is it good for?"—a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage."

"Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences in belief."

"If there are men who regret the Good Old Times, without too clear a notion of what they were, they should at least be thankful that we are rid of that misguided energy of faith which justifies conscience in making men unrelentingly cruel."

"He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft."

"One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning."

"From the summit of power men no longer turn their eyes upward, but begin to look about them. Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession, many."

"Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction."

"There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business."

"It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled."

"Simple as it seems, it was a great discovery that the key of knowledge could turn both ways, that it could open, as well as lock, the door of power to the many."

"Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy."

"Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is."

"There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded."

"Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action."

"Sentiment is intellectualized emotion, — emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy."

"No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself."

"An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist."

"Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character."

"Where Church and State are habitually associated it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police."

"A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic."

"He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it."

"I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you all your storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do this because, in virtue of our protective system, we can afford to make better bad weather than anybody else. And what wiser use could we make of it than to export it in return for the paupers which some European countries are good enough to send over to us who have not attained to the same skill in the manufacture of them?"

"There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory."

"One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in it - the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature - a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion."

"I have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and consequences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life, and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct — to endanger the rights of property and possession. But I believe that the real gravamen of the charges lies in the habit it has of making itself generally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most inconvenient moment whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited by it."

"Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics."

"The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory; in fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and stability. They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race, and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed."

"Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and they solved it with singular discretion. They put as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the way of the people's will, but of their whim."

"Their children learned the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the application of it to a question of fundamental morals that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship."

"Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined."

"The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety - valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads."

"An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run."

"All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air."

"Communism means barbarism, but Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and community of interests, sympathy, the giving to the hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must combine to produce - means, in short, the practical application of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction."

"I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir."

"In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity."

"It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence."

"There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat."

"Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come."

"These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread."

"The wisest man could ask no more of Fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the Many, honored by the Few; To count as naught in World or Church or State; But inwardly in secret to be great."

"The Maple puts her corals on in May, While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling, To be in tune with what the robins sing."

"In life's small things be resolute and great To keep thy muscle trained: know'st thou when Fate Thy measure takes, or when she'll say to thee, "I find thee worthy; do this deed for me"?"

"As life runs on, the road grows strange With faces new, and near the end The milestones into headstones change, 'Neath every one a friend."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it...Opposition to the Mexican War came from writers who were active abolitionists such as Thoreau, Whittier, and Lowell. They believed the war was a plot of southern slave owners to extend slavery, punishing Mexico for having outlawed slavery when it became independent from Spain. However, even the abolitionists believed in the "manifest destiny of the English race," as Lowell put it in 1859, "to occupy this whole continent and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans.""

"The thing he loved most in the world after his country was the English tongue, of which he was an infallible master, and his devotion to which was in fact a sort of agent in his patriotism."

"It was the great Frederick Douglass, who had a price on his head, who said “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And echoing his words was the answer of the great abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell: “The limits of tyranny is proscribed by the measure of our resistance to it”."

"Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy."

"I feel a sort of yearnin' 'nd a chokin' in my throat When I think of Red Hoss Mountain 'nd of Casey's tabble dote!"

"He could whip his weight in wildcats."

"The best of all physicians Is apple pie and cheese!"

"It always was the biggest fish I caught that got away."

"When I demanded of my friend what viands he preferred, He quoth: "A large cold bottle, and a small hot bird!""

"Oh, you who've been a-fishing will indorse me when I say That it always is the biggest fish you catch that gets away!"

"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe— Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew."

"The little toy dog is covered with dust, But sturdy and stanch he stands; And the little toy soldier is red with rust, And his musket moulds in his hands. Time was when the little toy dog was new, And the soldier was passing fair; And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue Kissed them and put them there."

"The gingham dog and the calico cat Side by side on the table sat; 'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!) Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink! The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate Appeared to know as sure as fate There was going to be a terrible spat."

"The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!" And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!" The air was littered, an hour or so, With bits of gingham and calico."

"Next morning, where the two had sat They found no trace of dog or cat; And some folks think unto this day That burglars stole that pair away! But the truth about the cat and pup Is this: they ate each other up! Now what do you really think of that!"

"Father calls me William, sister calls me Will, Mother calls me Willie, but the fellers call me Bill! Mighty glad I ain't a girl—ruther be a boy, Without them sashes, curls, an' things that 's worn by Fauntleroy! Love to chawnk green apples an' go swimmin' in the lake— Hate to take the castor-ile they give for bellyache! 'Most all the time, the whole year round, there ain't no flies on me, But jest 'fore Christmas I'm as good as I kin be!"

"Like Mark Twain, Eugene Field was an ardent dissenter against the prevailing social order in private conversation, although not much of that dissent was found in his writings-nor in Twain's. Both of those men were born too soon, or perhaps were just naturally cautious of being combative in public. They were cast by Fate into a period which we know today as the era of rugged individualism-a nation marching behind a banner bearing the legend: "Self conquers all!" Meaning, of course, that it's up to you alone-a doctrine which practically everybody across the land took for granted, and one which hangs on in spite of its falsity. Yet Field and Twain occasionally exhibited signs of doubt and wrote satirical comment on American life. Field poked fun at the shallow culture of the Chicago pork packers, and Mark Twain indulged in brief outbursts of anarchistic protest. None of their onsets, however, was incisive enough to make the big financiers question their loyalty to the existing economic and social system."

"There is no time like the pleasant."

"Many are called but few get up."

"Diplomacy: Lying in state."

"My wife has a whim of iron."

"A woman's mind is cleaner than a man's—she changes it oftener."

"Darling: the popular form of address used in speaking to a person of the opposite sex whose name you cannot at the moment recall."

"Only the young die good."

"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."

"I don't recall your name, but your manners are familiar."

"Modesty is the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it."

"Actresses will happen in the best-regulated families."

"Cat: A pygmy lion who loves mice, hates dogs and patronizes human beings."

"A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well."

"Age, like distance, lends a double charm."

"My object to venture the suggestion that an important application of phonetics to metrical problems lies in the study of phonetic word-structure."

"The old Old winds that blew When chaos was, what do They tell the clattered trees that I Should weep?"

"These be Three silent things: The falling snow...the hour Before the dawn...the mouth of one Just dead."

"Listen. With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall."

"I know Not these my hands And yet I think there was A woman like me once had hands Like these."

"Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud."

"'Daring with my poem 'Special Pleading' to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style'"

"Sweet Sometime, fly fast for me."

"My principle is, the artist shall put forth, humbly & lovingly, without bitterness, the very best & highest that is within him,utterly regardless of contemporary criticism."

"Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God."

"On Poe - I esteem Poe more highly than my countrymen are wont to do . The trouble with him (Poe) was, he did not KNOW enough. He needed to know a good many more things in order to be a great poet."

"On Swinburne - He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt."

"On William Morris - He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile."

"On Whitman - His poetry refreshed me like harsh salt spray."

"O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead! The time needs heart — 'tis tired of head."

"And yet shall Love himself be heard, Though long deferred, though long deferred: O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: Music is Love in search of a word."

"Virginal shy lights, Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods, Of the heavenly woods and glades, That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within The wide sea-marshes of Glynn."

"The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West."

"Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain."

"The incalculable Up-and-Down of Time."

"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris."

"In the heart's album there are treasured faces, Our household darlings, friends which are our own; And with them favorite haunts and cherished places, So dear, they seem but made for us alone."

"When you were a tadpole and I was a fish In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you even then."

"Mindless we lived and mindless we loved And mindless at last we died; And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift We slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot lands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the womb of death And crept into light again."

"Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a life to come."

"Yet happy we lived and happy we loved, And happy we died once more; Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold Of a Neocomian shore. The eons came and the eons fled And the sleep that wrapped us fast Was riven away in a newer day And the night of death was past."

"And, oh! what beautiful years were these When our hearts clung each to each; When life was filled and our senses thrilled In the first faint dawn of speech."

"Thus life by life and love by love We passed through the cycles strange, And breath by breath and death by death We followed the chain of change. Till there came a time in the law of life When o’er the nursing sod, The shadows broke and soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God."

"I was thewed like an Auroch bull And tusked like the great cave bear; And you, my sweet, from head to feet Were gowned in your glorious hair."

"I flaked a flint to a cutting edge And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland lank And fitted it, head and haft."

"Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, Where the mammoth came to drink; Through brawn and bone I drave the stone And slew him upon the brink."

"Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson feast The clan came tramping in."

"I carved that fight on a reindeer bone With rude and hairy hand; I pictured his fall on the cavern wall That men might understand. For we lived by blood and the right of might Ere human laws were drawn, And the age of sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone."

"And that was a million years ago In a time that no man knows; Yet here tonight in the mellow light We sit at Delmonico's. Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is dark as jet, Your years are few, your life is new, Your soul untried, and yet —"

"Our love is old, our lives are old, And death shall come amain; Should it come today, what man may say We shall not live again?"

"God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds And furnished them wings to fly; We sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn, And I know that it shall not die, Though cities have sprung above the graves Where the crook–bone men made war And the ox–wain creaks o'er the buried caves Where the mummied mammoths are."

"For we know the clod, by the grace of God Will quicken with voice and breath; And we know that Love, with gentle hand Will beckon from death to death."

"Then as we linger at luncheon here O'er many a dainty dish, Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a tadpole and I was a fish."

"To weld the theory of soul-transmigration to the reality of evolution was an inspiration that, coming to Langdon Smith in the midst of a busy life, nevertheless sung itself into his heart with a wealth of poetic meaning and suggestion that found its ultimate expression in verses which so securely link his name with those whom no passing moment can plunge into obscurity. … The crowning glory of "Evolution" is, perhaps, the manner in which he interwove throughout his masterpiece of imagination a golden thread of romance that becomes more and more lustrous as the story unfolds. He linked inseparably physical life and spiritual life, the so-called vital and eternal sparks, as, into the web of the lives that evolve, he wove the woof of love and brought them down through the ages as one."

"Ten seconds into the century, the first issue of the New York Journal of 1 January 1901 fell from the newspaper’s complex of fourteen high-speed presses. The first issue was rushed by automobile across pavements slippery with mud and rain to a waiting express train, reserved especially for the occasion. The newspaper was folded into an engraved silver case and carried aboard by Langdon Smith, a young reporter known for his vivid prose style. At speeds that reached eighty miles an hour, the special train raced through the darkness to Washington, D.C., and Smith’s rendezvous with the president, William McKinley. … the Journal exulted: A banner headline spilled across the front page of the 2 January 1901 issue, asserting the Journal's distinction of having published "the first Twentieth Century newspaper. . . in this country," and that the first issue had been delivered at considerable expense and effort directly to McKinley."

"Consider, then, and act upon the true ends of existence. This world which stretches out before you, is but the vestibule of an immortal life. These deeds that are taking place around you, touch upon chords that extend by a thousand connections, visible and invisible, and vibrate in eternity."

"Each man … finds life to be a discipline. Each has his separate form of discipline; but it bears upon the kindred spirit that is in every one of us, and strikes upon motives, sympathies, faculties, that run through the common humanity. Surely, you will not calculate any essential difference from mere appearances; for the light laughter that bubbles on the lip often mantles over brackish depths of sadness, and the serious look may be the sober veil that covers a divine peace. You know that the bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches, and how many blithe hearts dance under coarse wool."

"[A] true man … never frets about his place in the world; but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star!"

"There is no happiness in life, there is no misery, like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a Home."

"Life is a . We are thrown into it, and tried. The actual weight and value of a man are expressed in the spiritual substance of the man. All else is ."

"An aged Christian, with the snow of time on his head, may remind us that those points of earth are whitest that are nearest heaven."

"Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disk of eternity with a dollar, and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust."

"[N]ever does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury."

"Morality is but the vestibule of religion."

"Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are. To be is the great thing."

"Through all God's works there runs a beautiful harmony. The remotest truth in his universe is linked to that which lies nearest the throne."

"At the bottom of a good deal of the bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion."

"I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else."

"A great many men — some comparatively small men now — if put in the right position, would be Luthers and Columbuses."

"Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be."

"Poetry is the utterance of truth — deep, heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle."

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation-robes glittering with fire; and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gate of heaven."

"Christ saw much in this world to weep over, and much to pray over; but he saw nothing in it to look upon with contempt."

"Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant."

"There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own."

"[Christ] illustrates the purport of life as he descends from his transfiguration to toil, and goes forward to exchange that robe of heavenly brightness for the crown of thorns."

"Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair."

"[U]nder the shadow of earthly disappointment, all unconsciously to ourselves, our Divine Redeemer is walking by our side."

"Pride is the master-sin of the devil; and the devil is the father of lies."

"Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts; but out of the truth of things — truth of character and vision — grows true life."

"An angel, robed in spotless white, Bent down and kissed the sleeping Night. Night woke to blush; the sprite was gone. Men saw the blush and called it Dawn."

"It is a little dark still, but there are warnings of the day and somewhere out of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn."

"Because you love me I have much achieved, Had you despised me then I must have failed, But since I knew you trusted and believed, I could not disappoint you and so prevailed."

"You are sweet, O Love, dear Love, You are soft as the nesting dove. Come to my heart and bring it rest As the bird flies home to its welcome nest."

"I know what the caged bird feels, alas! When the sun is bright on the upland slopes; When the wind blows soft through the springing grass, And the river floats like a stream of glass; When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, And the faint perfume from its chalice steals— I know what the caged bird feels! I know why the caged bird beats his wing Till its blood is red on the cruel bars; For he must fly back to his perch and cling When he fain would be on the bough a-swing; And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars And they pulse again with a keener sting— I know why he beats his wing! I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— When he beats his bars and he would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, But a plea that upward to Heaven he flings— I know why the caged bird sings!"

"We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!"

"I started writing when I was mute. I always thought I could write because I loved to read so much. I loved the melody of Poe and I loved Paul Laurence Dunbar. I had memorized so much of Dunbar, Poe, Shakespeare, James Weldon Johnson, Longfellow. When my son was able to be quiet enough to listen, I taught him those poets. A few years ago he gave a reading of his poetry and he started the reading by saying 'First, let me recite to you some of the poets my mother raised me on . . .'"

"I was always interested in fair play, probably from reading the works of Paul Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Charles Dickens as a child. I was always concerned about justice and injustice. To the extent that I could understand the issues, I was always on the side of the underdog. I'm on the same side today."

"the title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is from [Paul Lawrence] Dunbar's "Sympathy.""

"There stretch'd a sleeping army. One by one, They took their places until thousands met; No leader's stars flash'd on before, and none Lean'd on his sword or stagger'd with his gun -- I wonder if their feet have rested yet!"

"My mother says I must not pass Too near that glass; She is afraid that I will see A little witch that looks like me, With a red mouth to whisper low The very thing I should not know."

"This was your butterfly, you see— His fine wings made him vain: The caterpillars crawl, but he Passed them in rich disdain.— My pretty boy says, “Let him be Only a worm again!"

"Other suns will shine as golden, Other skies be just as blue; Other south winds blow as softly, Gently drinking up the dew."

"All the glories of the sunset, In the sunrise one may see; That which others call the dawning Is the night for you and me."

"If this be all, for which I've listened long, Oh, spirit of the dew! You did not sing to Shelley such a song As Shelley sung to you."

"Yet, with this ruined Old World for a nest, Worm-eaten through and through,-"

"England’s sun was slowly setting o’er the hill-tops far away, Filling all the land with beauty at the close of one sad day; And its last rays kissed the forehead of a man and maiden fair,— He with footsteps slow and weary; she with sunny, floating hair; He with bowed head, sad and thoughtful; she with lips so cold and white, Struggled to keep back the murmur, “Curfew must not ring to-night.”"

"The sunshine of thine eyes, (O still celestial beam!) Whatever it touches it fills With the life of its lambent gleam. The sunshine of thine eyes, Oh, let it fall on me! Though I be but a mote of the air, I could turn to gold for thee."

"This is a haunted world. It hath no breeze But is the echo of some voice beloved: Its pines have human tones; its billows wear The color and the sparkle of dear eyes. Its flowers are sweet with touch of tender hands That once clasped ours. All things are beautiful Because of something lovelier than themselves, Which breathes within them, and will never die. — Haunted,—but not with any spectral gloom; Earth is suffused, inhabited by heaven."

"These blossoms, gathered in familiar paths, With dear companions now passed out of sight, Shall not be laid upon their graves. They live, Since love is deathless. Pleasure now nor pride Is theirs in mortal wise, but hallowing thoughts Will meet the offering, of so little worth, Wanting the benison death has made divine."

"Oh, her heart’s adrift with one On an endless voyage gone! Night and morning Hannah’s at the window binding shoes."

"I do not own an inch of land, But all I see is mine, — The orchard and the mowing fields, The lawns and gardens fine."

"Richer am I than he who owns Great fleets and argosies; I have a share in every ship Won by the inland breeze, To loiter on yon airy road Above the apple-trees. I freight them with my untold dreams; Each bears my own picked crew; And nobler cargoes wait for them Than ever India knew, — My ships that sail into the East Across that outlet blue."

"Sometimes they seem like living shapes, — The people of the sky, — Guests in white raiment coming down From heaven, which is close by; I call them by familiar names, As one by one draws nigh."

"A part is greater than the whole; By hints are mysteries told. The fringes of eternity, — God's sweeping garment-fold, In that bright shred of glittering sea, I reach out for and hold."

"By suns unsettling kist. Out through the utmost gates of space, Past where the gray stars drift, To the widening Infinite, my soul Glides on, a vessel swift, Yet loses not her anchorage In yonder azure rift."

"Here sit I, as a little child; The threshold of God's door Is that clear band of chrysoprase; Now the vast temple floor, The blinding glory of the dome I bow my head before. Thy universe, O God, is home, In height or depth, to me; Yet here upon thy footstool green Content am I to be; Glad when is oped unto my need Some sea-like glimpse of Thee."

"Every phase of our life belongs to us. The moon does not, except in appearance, lose her first thin, luminous curve, nor her silvery crescent, in rounding to her full. The woman is still both child and girl, in the completeness of womanly character. We have a right to our entire selves, through all the changes of this mortal state, a claim which we shall doubtless carry along with us into the unfolding mysteries of our eternal being. Perhaps in this thought lies hidden the secret of immortal youth: for a seer has said that "to grow old in heaven is to grow young.""

"What does cause depression of spirits? Heavy head and heavy heart, and no sufficient reason for either, that I know of. I am out of doors every day, and have nothing unusual to trouble me; yet every interval of thought is clouded ; there is no rebound, no rejoicing as it is my nature to rejoice, and as all things teach me to do. We are strange phenomena to ourselves, when we will stop to gaze at ourselves; but that I do not believe in; there are pleasanter subjects, and self is a mere speck on the great horizon of life."

"I believe the best poetry of our times is growing too artistic; the study is too visible. If freedom and naturalness are lost out of poetry, everything worth having is lost."

"Eternal life and eternal death; what do these words mean? This is the question that comes up again and again. It has recently been brought up by those whom I am appointed to instruct; and the question with its answer, brings new and fearful responsibility with every return. I am more and more convinced that the idea of duration is not the one that affects us most: for here it has proved that those who are least careful about what they are in heart and life, are trying hardest to convince themselves and others that the "doctrine of eternal punishment" is not true. By making themselves believe that to be the all-important question, they draw off their own and others' attention from the really momentous one, — "Am I living the eternal life? Is it begun in me now?" And now I see why I have questioned whether it was right in me to express my own doubts of this very doctrine. The final renovation of all souls, their restoration to life in holiness and love, is certainly a hope of mine that is not without a strong infusion of confidence; but I dare not say it is a belief; because both reason and revelation have left it in deep mystery; and the expression of any such belief does not seem to me likely to help others much; certainly not those who are indolent or indifferent regarding the true Christian life. Then the "loss of the soul" is in plain language spoken of by our Lord as possible. What can that mean, but the loss of life in Him? the loss of ennobling aspirations, of the love of all good, of the power of seeing and seeking truth? And if this is possible to us now, by our own choice, why not forever? — since, as free beings, our choice must always be in our own power? The truth that we must all keep before us, in order to be growing better forever, is that life is love and holiness ; death, selfishness and sin; then it is a question of life and death to be grappled with in the deep places of every soul."

"Much of our Christianity is not of a sufficiently enlarged type to satisfy an educated Hindoo; not that Unitarianism is necessary, for that system has but a surface-liberalism which can become very hard, and finally very narrow, as its history among us has often proved. It is not a system at all that we want: it is Christ, the "wisdom of God and the power of God," Christ, the loving, creating, and redeeming friend of the world, Christ, whose large, free being enfolds all that is beautiful in nature and in social life; and all that is strong and deep and noble in the sanctuary of every living soul. When Christians have truly learned Christ, they can be true teachers."

"Sometimes it seems to me that God's way of dealing with me is not to let me see much of my friends, those who are most to me in the spiritual life, lest I should forget that the invisible bond is the only reality. That is the only way I can reconcile myself to the inevitable separations of life and death."

"The noblest of men and friends has left the world, — Phillips Brooks. One month ago this morning he breathed his last. He, with whom it was impossible to associate the idea of death; — was? — is so, still! — the most living man I ever knew — physically, mentally, spiritually. It is almost like taking the sun out of the sky. He was such an illumination, such a warmth, such an inspiration! And he let us all come so near him, — just as Christ does! I felt that I knew Christ personally through him. He always spoke of Him as his dearest friend, and he always lived in perfect, loving allegiance to God in Him. Now I know him as I know Christ, — as a spirit only, and his sudden withdrawal is only an ascension to Him, in the immortal life. Shut into my sick-room, I have seen none of the gloom of the burial; I know him alive, with Christ, from the dead, forevermore. Where he is, life must be. He lived only in realities here, and he is entering into the heart of them now. "What a new splendor in heaven!" was my first thought of him, after one natural burst of sorrow. What great services he has found! How gloriously life, with its immortal opportunities, must be opening to him! He, — one week here, — the next there, — and seen no more here again. The very suddenness of his going makes the other life seem the real one, rather than this. And a man like this is the best proof God ever gives human beings of their own immortality."

"O Mariner-soul, Thy quest is but begun, There are new worlds Forever to be won."

"The true poetic temperament has in it an element of religion; for religion and poetry both deal with the spiritual interpretation of life, and one who possesses the temperament for either is conscious of the vastness overshadowing common things, and sees the infinite meaning of the apparent finiteness of the visible world. The delicate perception of truth which is a distinctive quality of the poet often leads to the deep appreciation of the spirit in and through nature, and enables one to feel and know God. Lucy Larcom possessed the poetic temperament, with this strong element of religion. She was preeminently religious, in the sense of possessing a spiritual power, dealing continually with spiritual things. She began early to interpret life in the light of divine truth; and truth made real in human character she considered the one thing worth striving for."

"All quiet along the Potomac to-night, No sound save the rush of the river, While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead— The picket ’s off duty forever."

"Calmer than midnight's deepest bush Is the sun-bright Summer nooning, With its cloudy shadows seeking rest, That fall on the hillside swooning. Great Night with its solemn starry eyes, Over Day's gate asks us whither We go, what our password is, To the camp beyond the river. ..."

"I'm king of the dead—and I make my throne On a monument slab of marble cold; And my scepter of rule is the spade I hold: Come they from cottage or come they from hall, Mankind are my subjects, all, all, all! Let them loiter in pleasure or toilfully spin— I gather them in, I gather them in!"

"Flowers are Love's truest language."

"The mountain rill Seeks with no surer flow the far bright sea, Than my unchang'd affections flow to thee."

"Great faith it needs, according to my view, To trust in that which never could be true."

"He loved his kind, but sought the love of few, And valued old opinions more than new."

"But then to part! to part when Time Has wreathed his tireless wing with flowers, And spread the richness of a clime Of fairy o'er this land of ours; When glistening leaves and shaded streams In the soft light of Autumn lay, And, like the music of our dreams, The viewless breezes seemed to stray— 'T was bitter then to rend the heart With the sad thought that we must part; And, like some low and mournful spell, To whisper but one word—farewell!"

"Pure and undimmed, thy angel smile Is mirrored on my dreams, Like evening's sunset-girded isle Upon her shadowed streams: And o'er my thoughts thy vision floats, Like melody of spring-bird, notes; When the blue halcyon gently laves His plumage in the flashing waves."

"Press on! there's no such word as fail! Press nobly on! the goal is near,— Ascend the mountain! breast the gale! Look upward, onward,—never fear! Why shouldst thou faint? Heaven smiles above, Though storm and vapor intervene; That sun shines on, whose name is Love, Serenely o'er Life's shadow'd scene."

"Press on! If Fortune play thee false To-day, tomorrow she'll be true; Whom now she sinks she now exalts, Taking old gifts and granting new, The wisdom of the present hour Makes up the follies past and gone; To weakness, strength succeeds, and power From frailty springs! Press on, press on!"

"Within the sober realm of leafless trees, The russet year inhaled the dreamy air; Like some tanned reaper, in his hour of ease, When all the fields are lying brown and bare."

"My soul to-day Is far away Sailing the Vesuvian Bay."

"With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise."

"Yon deep bark goes Where Traffic blows From lands of sun to lands of snows;— Yon happier one, Its course is run From lands of snow to lands of sun."

"We bring roses, beautiful fresh roses, Dewy as the morning and colored like the dawn."

"O Night! most beautiful and rare! Thou givest the heavens their holiest hue, And through the azure fields of air Bring’st down the gentle dew."

"The terrible rumble, grumble and roar Telling the battle was on once more— And Sheridan twenty miles away!"

"When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock, And the brown bee drones i' the rose, And the west is a red-streaked four-o'-clock And summer is near its close— It's—Oh for the gate and the lotus lane And dusk and dew and home again!"

"A rope, a prayer, and an oak-tree near, And a score of hands to swing him clear. A grim, black thing for the setting sun And the moon and the stars to look upon."

"I am a part of all you see In Nature; part of all you feel: I am the impact of the bee Upon the blossom; in the tree I am the sap,—that shall reveal The leaf, the bloom,—that flows and flutes Up from the darkness through its roots."

"This is the truth as I see it, my dear, Out in the wind and the rain: They who have nothing have little to fear,— Nothing to lose or to gain."

"At daybreak Morn shall come to me In raiment of the white winds spun."

"A moonlight traveler in Fancy’s land."

"Some shall reap that never sow; And some shall toil and not attain."

"Into the sunset’s turquoise marge The moon dips, like a pearly barge; Enchantment sails through magic seas, To fairyland Hesperides, Over the hills and away."

"What magic shall solve us the secret Of beauty that’s born for an hour?"

"Though sands be black and bitter black the sea, Light lie before me and behind me night, And God within far Heaven refuse to light The consolation of the dawn for me,— Between the shadowy bournes of Heaven and Hell, It is enough love leaves my soul to dwell  With Memory."

"Why will we struggle to attain, and strive When all we gain is but an empty dream?— Better, unto my thinking, doth it seem To end it all and let who will survive;To find at last all beauty is but dust; That love and sorrow are the very same; That joy is only suffering's sweeter name; And sense is but the synonym of lust.Far better, yea, it seems to me to die; To set glad lips against the lips of Death— The only thing God gives that comforteth, The only thing we do not find a lie."

"When death hath poured oblivion through my veins And brought me home, as all are brought, to lie In that vast house, common to serfs and thanes,— I shall not die, I shall not utterly die, For beauty born of beauty—that remains."

"Old homes! old hearts! Upon my soul forever Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter."

"Again let us dream where the land lies sunny, And live, like the bees, on our hearts' old honey, Away from the world that slaves for money—  Come, journey the way with me."

"There are haunters of the silence, ghosts that hold the heart and brain."

"Some reckon time by stars, And some by hours: Some measure days by dreams, And some by flowers: My heart alone records My days and hours."

"The awful phantom of the hungry poor."

"Ah, happy world, where all things live Creatures of one great law, indeed; Bound by strong roots, the splendid flower,— Swept by great seas, the drifting seed!"

"A place of dream, the Holy Land Hangs midway between earth and heaven."

"Beauty vanishes like a vapor, Preach the men of musty morals."

"He is one of those people to whom you must allow moods,—when their sun shines, dance,—and when their vapors rise, sit in the shadow."

"In all climes we pitch out tents, Cronies of the elements, With the secret lords of birth Intimate and free."

"The people blossoms armies and puts forth The splendid summer of its noiseless might."

"Nor love they least Who strike with right good will To vanquish ill And fight God’s battle upward from the beast."

"Who would not rather founder in the fight Than not have known the glory of the fray?"

"Praise be to you, O hills, that you can breathe Into our souls the secret of your power!"

"I have need of the sky, I have business with the grass; I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling Lone and high, And the slow clouds go by. I will get me away to the waters that glass The clouds as they pass. I will get me away to the woods."

"Spring in the world! And all things are made new!"

"For ’t is always fair weather When good fellows get together With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear."

"The East and the West in the spring of the world shall blend As a man and a woman that plight Their troth in the warm spring night."

"The great white cold walks abroad!"

"How loving is the Lord God and how strong withal!"

"Shall the iron argue with the smith what it would be? Or, shall the wrought iron reason with the monger To whom it would be sold?"

"Love seeks a guerdon; friendship is as God, Who gives and asks no payment."

"Fair weather weddings make fair weather lives."

"There is no sorrow like a love denied Nor any joy like love that has its will."

"There are worser ills to face Than foemen in the fray; And many a man has fought because— He feared to run away."

"You shall not change, but a nobler race of men Shall walk beneath the stars and wander by the shore; I can not guess their glory, but I think the sky and sea Will bring to them more gladness than they brought to us of yore."

"We have reached the age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in life's struggle, when, beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashings of the dragon's tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a damned fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with that same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke the thought aloud, 'Why don't he hit him on the head?' Alas, comrades, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile."

"There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place, There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile on Casey's face, And when responding to the cheers he lightly of his hat, No stranger in the crowd could doubt, 't was Casey at the bat."

""Strike one" the Umpire said.From the bleachers black with people there rose a sullen roar, Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore, "Kill him! Kill the Umpire!" shouted someone from the stand — And it's likely they'd have done it had not Casey raised his hand."

"Oh! somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright, The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has "struck out.""

"My soul is full of whispered song,— My blindness is my sight; The shadows that I feared so long Are full of life and light."

"Yea, when mortality dissolves, Shall I not meet thine hour unawed? My house eternal in the heavens Is lighted by the smile of God!"

"We serve Him most who take the most of His exhaustless love."

"Desolate—Life is so dreary and desolate— Women and men in the crowd meet and mingle, Yet with itself every soul standeth single, Deep out of sympathy moaning its moan— Holding and having its brief exultation— Making its lonesome and low lamentation— Fighting its terrible conflicts alone."

"How many lives we live in one, And how much less than one, in all."

"Her religious sentiments were deep and strong, her faith in the Eternal Goodness unwavering. Educated in the faith of Universalism, she believed to the last in the final salvation of all God's children."

"Happy the heart that keeps its twilight hour, And, in the depths of heavenly peace reclined. Loves to commune with thoughts of tender power; Thoughts that ascend, like angels beautiful, A shining Jacob's ladder of the mind."

"This is my world! within these narrow walls, I own a princely service."

"Low gurgling laughter, as sweet As the swallow's song i' the South, And a ripple of dimples that, dancing, meet By the curves of a perfect mouth"

"I think, ofttimes, that lives of men may be Likened to wandering winds that come and go, Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow O’er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee."

"When the warrior returns, from the battle afar, To the home and the country he nobly defended, O! warm be the welcome to gladden his ear, And loud be the joy that his perils are ended: In the full tide of song let his fame roll along, To the feast-flowing board let us gratefully throng, Where, mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave, And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave."

"So sings the world's fond slave! so flies the dream Of life's gay morn; so sinks the meteor ray Of fancy into darkness; and no beam Of purer light shines on the wanderer's way.So sings not he who soars on other wings Than fancy lends him; whom a cheering faith Warms and sustains, and whose freed spirit springs To joys that bloom beyond the reach of death.And thou would'st live again! again dream o'er The wild and feverish visions of thy youth Again to wake in sorrow, and deplore Thy wanderings from the peaceful paths of truth! Yet yield not to despair! be born again, And thou shalt live a life of joy and peace, Shall die a death of triumph, and thy strain Be changed to notes of rapture ne'er to cease."

"If we believe in the existence of a great moral and political evil amongst us, and that duty, honour, and interest, call upon us to prepare the way for its removal, we must act."

"O say can you see by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there; O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream: 'Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion, A home and a country, should leave us no more? Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave: And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave, O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand Between their loved home and the war's desolation. Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: "In God is our trust." And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!"

"The ripest peach is highest on the tree."

"One naked star has waded through The purple shadows of the night, And faltering as falls the dew It drips its misty light."

"O’er folded blooms, On swirls of musk, The beetle booms adown the glooms And bumps along the dusk."

"An’ the Gobble-uns ’ll git you  Ef you   Don’t    Watch     Out!"

"The despot’s heel is on thy shore, Maryland! His torch is at thy temple-door, Maryland! Avenge the patriotic gore That flecked the streets of Baltimore, And be the battle-queen of yore, Maryland! My Maryland!"

"Hushed in the alabaster arms of Death Our young Marcellus sleeps."

"Gentlest and bravest in the battle-brunt, The Champion of the Truth; He won his banner in the very front Of our immortal youth."

"The South is blameless; for she holds in fee The stainless swords of Washington and Lee."

"If she but smile, the crystal calm shall break In music, sweeter than it ever gave, As when a breeze breathes o'er some sleeping lake, And laughs in every wave."

"Knowledge alone is the being of Nature, Giving a soul to her manifold features, Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness, The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song."

"From the Desert I come to thee On a stallion shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire. Under thy window I stand, And the midnight hears my cry: I love thee, I love but thee, With a love that shall not die Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!"

"They sang of love, and not of fame; Forgot was Britain's glory; Each heart recalled a different name, But all sang Annie Lawrie."

"Sleep, soldiers! still in honored rest Your truth and valor wearing: The bravest are the tenderest,— The loving are the daring."

"Peace the offspring is of Power."

"The hollows are heavy and dank With the steam of the Goldenrods."

"All, wherein I have part, All that was loss or gain, Slips from the clasping heart, Breaks from the grasping brain. Lo, what is left? I am bare As a new-born soul, — I am naught: My deeds are dust in air, My words are ghosts of thought. I ride through the night alone, Detached from the life that seemed, And the best I have felt or known Is less than the least I dreamed."

"Once let the Angel blow! — A peal from the parted heaven, The first of seven! For the time is come that was foretold So long ago! As the avalanche gathers, huge and cold, From the down of the harmless snow, The years and the ages gather and hang Till the day when the word is spoken: When they that dwell in the end of time Are smitten alike for the early crime, As the vials of wrath are broken!"

"Yes, let the Angel blow! A peal from the parted heaven, The first of seven!— The warning, not yet the sign, of woe! That men arise And look about them with wakened eyes, Behold on their garments the dust and slime, Refrain, forbear, Accept the weight of a nobler care And take reproach from the fallen time!"

"Thunder-spasms the waking be Into Life from Apathy: Life, not Death, is in the gale, — Let the coming Doom prevail!"

"No visitors shall yonder valley find. Except the spirits of the rain and wind: Here you must bide, my friends, with me entombed In this dim crypt, where shelved around us lie The mummied authors."

"Across the narrow beach we flit, One little sand-piper and I; And fast I gather, bit by bit. The scattered driftwood, bleached and dry."

"The barren island dreams in flowers, while blow The south winds, drawing haze o'er sea and land; Yet the great heart of ocean, throbbing slow, Makes the frail blossoms vibrate where they stand;And hints of heavier pulses soon to shake Its mighty breast when summer is no more, And devastating waves sweep on and break, And clasp with girdle white the iron shore."

"The heart of God through his creation stirs, We thrill to feel it, trembling as the flowers That die to live again, — his messengers, To keep faith firm in these sad souls of ours.The waves of Time may devastate our lives, The frosts of age may check our failing breath, They shall not touch the spirit that survives Triumphant over doubt and pain and death."

"Thou great Creator! Pardon us who reach For other heaven beyond this world of thine, This matchless world, where thy least touch doth teach Thy solemn lessons clearly, line on line. And help us to be grateful, we who live Such sordid, fretful lives of discontent, Nor see the sunshine nor the flower, nor strive To find the love thy bitter chastening meant."

"The summer day was spoiled with fitful storm; At night the wind died and the soft rain dropped; With lulling murmur, and the air was warm, And all the tumult and the trouble stopped."

"What though our eyes with tears be wet? The sunrise never failed us yet.The blush of dawn may yet restore Our light and hope and joy once more. Sad soul, take comfort, nor forget That sunrise never failed us yet!"

"Already the dandelions Are changed into vanishing ghosts."

"O brief, bright smile of summer! O days divine and dear The voices of winter's sorrow Already we can hear.And we know that the frosts will find us, And the smiling skies grow rude, While we look in the face of Beauty, And worship her every mood."

"I haf von funny leedle poy Vot comes schust to mine knee; Der queerest schap, der createst rogue, As ever you dit see. He runs und schumps and schmashes dings In all barts off der house: But vot off dot? He vas mine son, Mine leedle Yawcob Strauss."

"Tis plain to me As A B C, My dear friend, Mr. Neff!" "Oh, yes! but then," Says Mr. N , "You know I'm D E F!"

"If an S and an I and an O and a U With an X at the end spell Su; And an E and a Y and an E spell I, Pray what is a speller to do? Then, if also an S and an I and a G And an HED spell side, There's nothing much left for a speller to do But to go commit siouxeyesighed."

"What if there be a fated day When the Faery Isle shall pass away, And its beautiful groves and fountains seem The myths of a long, delicious dream! A century's joys shall first repay Our hearts, for the evil of that day; And the Elfin-King has sworn to wed A daughter of Earth, whose child shall be, By cross and water hallowe'd, From the fairies' doom forever free. What if there be a fated day! It is far away! it is far away! Maiden, fair Maiden, I, who sing Of this summer isle am the island King."

"O child! dear child! Above the clouds I lift my wing To hear the bells of Heaven ring; Some of their music, though my flights be wild, To Earth I bring; Then let me soar and sing!"

"In the lap of hoary Europe lie her children ill at rest, Reaching hands of supplication to their brethren of the West; Pale about the lifeless fountain of their ancient freedom, wait Till the angel move its waters and avenge their stricken state. Let me then, a new crusader, to the eastward set my face, Wake the fires of old tradition on each sacred altar-place, Till a trodden people rouse them, with a clamor as divine As the winds of autumn roaring through the clumps of forest-pine. I myself would seize their banner; they should follow where it led, To the triumph of the victors or the pallor of the dead."

"O, our feeble tests of greatness! Look for one so calm of soul As to take the even chalice of his life and drink the whole. Noble deeds are held in honor, but the wide world sorely needs Hearts of patience to unravel this, — the worth of common deeds."

"The year of jubilee has come; Gather the gifts of Earth with equal hand; Henceforth ye too may share the birthright soil, The corn, the wine, and all the harvest-home."

"I dare aver He is a brave discoverer Of climes his elders do not know. He has more learning than appears On the scroll of twice three thousand years."

"At last the god cometh! The air runs over with splendor; The fire leaps high on the altar; Melodious thunders shake the ground. Hark to the Delphic responses! Hark! it is the god!"

"I loved: and in the morning sky, A magic castle upward grew!"

"Let the winds blow! a fiercer gale Is wild within me! what may quell That sullen tempest? I must sail Whither, O whither, who can tell!"

"Hopeless of all he dared to hope so long, The music born within him dies away; Even the song he loved becomes a pain, Full-freighted with a yearning all in vain."

"Where's he that died o' yesterday? What better chance hath he To clink the can and toss the pot When this night's junkets be? For the lad that died o' yesterday Is just as dead — ho! ho! — As the whoreson knave men laid away A thousand years ago."

"Crops failed; wealth took a flight; house, treasure, land, Slipped from my hold—thus plenty comes and goes. One friend I had, but he too loosed his hand (Or was it I?) the year I met with Rose."

"Give me to die unwitting of the day, And stricken in Life's brave heat, with senses clear!"

"When summer gathers up her robes of glory, And, like a dream of beauty, glides away."

"Warm lights are on the sleepy uplands waning Beneath dark clouds along the horizon rolled, Till the slant sunbeams, through the fringes raining, Bathe all the hills in melancholy gold."

"Beside the brook and on the umbered meadow, Where yellow fern-tufts fleck the faded ground, With folded lids beneath their palmy shadow, The gentian nods, in dewy slumbers bound."

"Enchantress of the stormy seas, Priestess of Night's high mysteries!"

"The shy little may-flower weaves her nest; But the south wind blows o'er the fragrant loam, And betrays the path to her woodland home."

"The summer skies are darkly blue, The days are still and bright, And Evening trails her robes of gold Through the dim halls of Night."

"And still the aster greets us, as we pass, With her faint smile,—among the withered grass."

"Again the fair azalea bows Beneath her snowy crest."

"Raven from the dim dominions On the Night's Plutonian shore, Oft I hear thy dusky pinions Wave and flutter round my door— See the shadow of thy pinions Float along the moonlit floor."

"Tell him I lingered alone on the shore, Where we parted, in sorrow, to meet nevermore; The night-wind blew cold on my desolate heart But colder those wild words of doom,—“Ye must part.”"

"Star of resplendent front! Thy glorious eye Shines on me still from out yon clouded sky."

"The sweet imperious mouth, whose haughty valor Defied all portents of impending doom."

"There is rust upon locks and hinges, And mold and blight on the walls, And silence faints in the chambers, And darkness waits in the halls."

"Youth is thy gift—the youth that baffles Time."

"Bend low, O dusky Night, And give my spirit rest; Hold me to your deep breast, And put old cares to flight; Give back the lost delight That once my soul possest, When Love was loveliest,— Bend low, O dusky night!"

"At end of Love, at end of Life, At end of Hope, at end of Strife, At end of all we cling to so— The sun is setting—must we go?At dawn of Love, at dawn of Life, At dawn of Peace that follows Strife, At dawn of all we long for so— The sun is rising—let us go."

"I hied me off to Arcady— The month it was the month of May, And all along the pleasant way The morning birds were mad with glee, And all the flowers sprang up to see, As I went on to Arcady."

"I dwell no more in Arcady:— But when the sky is blue with May, And flowers spring up along the way, And birds are blithe, and winds are free, I know what message is for me,— Fotr I have been in Arcady."

"This Life is a fleeting breath, And whither and how shall I go, When I wander away with Death By a path that I do not know?"

"If there is any thing that keeps the mind Open to angel visits, and repels The ministry of ill—tis human love."

"Wisdom sits alone Topmost in Heaven."

"He who binds His soul to knowledge steals the key of heaven."

"At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city."

"One lamp—thy mother's love—amid the stars Shall lift its pure flame changeless, and, before The throne of God burn through eternity— Holy—as it was lit and lent thee here."

"They are all up—the innumerable stars— And hold their place in heaven. […] There they stand, Shining in order, like a living hymn Written in light, awaking at the breath Of the celestial dawn, and praising Him Who made them, with the harmony of spheres."

"For it stirs the blood in an old man’s heart, And makes his pulses fly, To catch the thrill of a happy voice, And the light of a pleasant eye."

"Let us weep in our darkness—but weep not for him! Not for him—who, departing, leaves millions in tears! Not for him—who has died full of honor and years! Not for him—who ascended Fame’s ladder so high From the round at the top he has stepp'd to the sky."

"But the sin forgiven by Christ in Heaven By man is cursed alway!"

"The value of life deepens incalculably with the privileges of travel."

"It is the month of June, The month of leaves and roses, When pleasant sights salute the eyes, And pleasant scents the noses."

"Ah, me! the vision has vanished— The music has died away!"

"I sing the hymn of the conquered, who fell in the battle of life,— The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife; Not the jubilant song of the victors, for whom the resounding acclaim Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the chaplet of fame, But the hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart, Who strove and who failed, acting bravely a silent and desperate part."

"And all but their faith overthrown."

"They only the victory win, Who have fought the good fight, and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within; Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high; Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight,—if need be, to die."

"But the gray and the cold are haunted By a beauty akin to pain,— By the sense of a something wanted, That will never come again."

"Oh! faint delicious spring-time violet, Thine odor, like a key, Turns noiselessly in memory's wards to let A thought of sorrow free."

"Of every noble work the silent part is best, Of all expression that which can not be expressed."

"Strive not to say the whole! The Poet, in his Art, Must intimate the whole, and say the smallest part."

"Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be; Yet oh, how dear it is to us, this life we live and see!"

"But I believe that God is overhead; And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead."

"For ever and ever, my darling, yes— Goodness and love are undying; Only the troubles and cares of earth Are winged from the first for flying. Our way we plough In the furrow "now;" But after the tilling and growing the sheaf; Soil for the root, but the sun for the leaf— And God keepeth watch forever."

"Whenever a snow-flake leaves the sky, It turns and turns to say "Good-bye! Good-by, dear cloud, so cool and gray!" Then lightly travels on its way."

"But when a snow-flake, brave and meek, Lights on a rosy maiden's cheek, It starts—"How warm and soft the day!" "'Tis summer!" and it melts away."

"Shake was a dramatist of note; He lived by writing things to quote."

"What does he plant who plants a tree? He plants the friend of sun and sky; He plants the flag of breezes free; The shaft of beauty, towering high; He plants a home to heaven anigh For song and mother-croon of bird In hushed and happy twilight heard— The treble of heaven's harmony— These things he plants who plants a tree."

"What, know you not […] That love must kiss that Mortal’s eyes Who hopes to see fair Arcady? No gold can buy you entrance there; But beggared Love may go all bare— No wisdom won with weariness; But Love goes in with Folly’s dress— No fame that wit could ever win; But only Love may lead Love in To Arcady, to Arcady."

"Ah woe is me, through all my days Wisdom and wealth I both have got, And fame and name and great men’s praise; But Love, ah! Love I have it not."

"A pitcher of mignonette, In a tenement's highest casement: Queer sort of flower-pot—yet That pitcher of mignonette Is a garden in heaven set, To the little sick child in the basement— The pitcher of mignonette, In the tenement's highest casement."

"Off with your hat as the flag goes by! And let the heart have its say; You're man enough for a tear in your eye That you will not wipe away."

"I love her doubting and anguish; I love the love she withholds; I love my love that loveth her And anew her being moulds."

"The Smile of her I love is like the dawn Whose touch makes Memnon sing: O, see where wide the golden sunlight flows— The barren desert blossoms as the rose!"

"Not from the whole wide world I chose thee— Sweetheart, light of the land and the sea! The wide, wide world could not inclose thee, For thou art the whole wide world to me."

"Heaven from the hopeless doubter The true believer makes: Against the darkness outer The light God's likeness takes."

"Through love to light! Oh wonderful the way That leads from darkness to the perfect day!"

"From all the misty morning air, there comes a summer sound,— A murmur as of waters from skies, and trees and ground. The birds they sing upon the wing, the pigeons bill and coo."

"I am a woman—therefore I may not Call to him, cry to him, Fly to him, Bid him delay not."

"O white and midnight sky, O starry bath, Wash me in thy pure, heavenly crystal flood: Cleanse me, ye stars, from earthly soil and scath— Let not one taint remain in spirit or blood!"

"How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection presents them to view."

"Then soon with the emblem of truth overflowing, And dripping with coolness, it rose from the well."

"The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, The moss-covered bucket, which hung in the well."

"Lo where the stage, the poor, degraded stage, Holds its warped mirror to a gaping age."

"Through life’s dark road his sordid way he wends, An incarnation of fat dividends."

"Behold! in Liberty’s unclouded blaze We lift our heads, a race of other days."

"Yes, social friend, I love thee well, In learned doctors’ spite; Thy clouds all other clouds dispel, And lap me in delight."

"Gay, guiltless pair, What seek ye from the fields of heaven? Ye have no need of prayer, Ye have no sins to be forgiven."

"'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, — not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there."

"The children were nestled all snug in their beds; While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads."

"Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer, and Vixen, "On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem; "To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall! "Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

"He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot; A bundle of toys he had flung on his back, And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack. His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow; The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath; He had a broad face and a little round belly That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly."

"But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight — "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!""

"When Freedom from her mountain-heights Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there. She mingled with its gorgeous dyes The milky baldric of the skies, And striped its pure, celestial white With streakings of the morning light.Flag of the free heart’s hope and home! By angel hands to valour given! Thy stars have lit the welkin dome, And all thy hues were born in heaven. Forever float that standard sheet! Where breathes the foe, but falls before us, With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet, And Freedom’s banner streaming o'er us?"

"Up the River of Death Sailed the Great Admiral!"

"You might have deemed our long gun-deck Two hundred feet of hell."

"Since what unnumbered year Hast thou kept watch and ward And o’er the buried Land of Fear So grimly held thy guard?"

"Strike—for your altars and your fires! Strike—for the green graves of your sires! God, and your native land!"

"Come to the bridal chamber, Death! Come to the mother’s, when she feels For the first time her first-born’s breath! Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke! Come in consumption’s ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm! Come when the heart beats high and warm, With banquet song, and dance, and wine! And thou art terrible!—the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier, And all we know or dream or fear Of agony are thine. But to the hero, when his sword Has won the battle for the free, Thy voice sounds like a prophet’s word; And in its hollow tones are heard The thanks of millions yet to be."

"One of the few, the immortal names, That were not born to die."

"Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines, Shrines to no code or creed confined,— The Delphian vales, the Palestines, The Meccas of the mind."

"Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days! None knew thee but to love thee, Nor named thee but to praise."

"There is an evening twilight of the heart, When its wild passion-waves are lulled to rest."

"They love their land because it is their own, And scorn to give aught other reason why; Would shake hands with a king upon his throne, And think it kindness to his Majesty."

"This bank-note world."

"Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt, The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt, The Douglas in red herrings."

"When Spring is old, and dewy winds Blow from the south, with odors sweet, I see my love, in shadowy groves, Speed down dark aisles on shining feet."

"She throws a kiss, and bids me run In whispers sweet as roses’ breath; I know I can not win the race, And at the end, I know, is death."

"Bubble, bubble, flows the stream Like an old tune through a dream."

"Theirs is no vulgar sepulchre--green sods Are all their monument, and yet it tells A nobler history than pillared piles Or the eternal pyramids."

"Hail to the land whereon we tread, Our fondest boast! The sepulchres of mighty dead, The truest hearts that ever bled, Who sleep on glory’s brightest bed, A fearless host: No slave is here:—our unchained feet, Walk freely as the waves that beat Our coast."

"On thy fair bosom, silver lake, The wild swan spreads his snowy sail, And round his breast the ripples break As down he bears before the gale."

"The water is calm and still below, For the winds and waves are absent there, And the sands are bright as the stars that glow In the motionless fields of upper air."

"Percival, the most popular poet before Bryant, a poet who made the first attempt in our history to write the meeting-place between the kind of experience which may be called scientific, and poetry, is ignored. More than ignored: he is referred to in all the anthologies as a one-poem poet, and then a poor imitative poem, "The Coral Grove," is printed."

"Many mellow Cydonian suckets Sweet apples, anthosmial, divine, From the ruby-rimmed beryline buckets Star-gemmed, lily-shaped, hyaline; Like the sweet golden goblet found growing On the wild emerald cucumber-tree, Rich, brilliant, like chrysophrase glowing Was my beautiful Rosalie Lee."

"In the music of the morns Blown through the Conchimarian horns, Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns, To the Genius of Eternity Crying, “Come to me! Come to me!”"

"On the beryl-rimmed rebecs of Ruby Brought fresh from the hyaline streams, She played on the banks of the Yuba Such songs as she heard in her dreams."

"As an egg, when broken, never Can be mended, but must ever Be the same crushed egg for ever— So shall this dark heart of mine!"

"As the diamond is the crystalline Revelator of the achromatic white light of Heaven, so is a perfect poem the crystalline revelation of the Divine Idea."

"Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict."

"I laugh, for hope hath happy place with me; If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."

"I sing New England, as she lights her fire In every Prairie's midst; and where the bright Enchanting stars shine pure through Southern night, She still is there, the guardian on the tower, To open for the world a purer hour."

"Most joyful let the Poet be; It is through him that all men see."

"My highway is unfeatured air, My consorts are the sleepless stars, And men my giant arms upbear — My arms unstained and free from scars."

"A wail in the wind is all I hear; A voice of woe for a lover's loss."

"We have two lives about us, Two worlds in which we dwell; Within us, and without us, Alternate Heaven and Hell: Without, the somber Real, Within our hearts of hearts, the beautiful Ideal!"

"Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands, Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands, Silent above the flowers, her children lost, Slain by the arrows of the early frost."

"Heaven is not gone, but we are blind with tears, Groping our way along the downward slope of Years!"

"A voice of greeting from the wind was sent, The mists enfolded me with soft white arms, The birds did sing to lap me in content, The rivers wove their charms, And every little daisy in the grass Did look into my face and smile to see me pass."

"All Love is Beauty, and all Beauty—Love!"

"We love in others what we lack ourselves, And would be every thing but what we are."

"There are gains for all our losses, There are balms for all our pain: But when youth, the dream, departs, It takes something from our hearts, And it never comes again."

"Silence is the speech of love, The music of the spheres above."

"Children are the keys of Paradise. … They alone are good and wise, Because their thoughts, their very lives, are prayer."

"Not what we would, but what we must, Makes up the sum of living; Heaven is both more and less than just In taking and in giving."

"A face at the window, A tap on the pane: Who is it that wants me To-night in the rain?"

"It beckons, I follow. Good by to the light! I am going, oh! whither? Out into the night!"

"Joy may be a miser, But Sorrow’s purse is free."

"Day and night my thoughts incline To the blandishments of wine: Jars were made to drain, I think, Wine, I know, was made to drink!"

" I have been sojourning late Among the pleasant places of my Past, The green and quiet neighborhoods of Thought, In which I wandered in my wayward youth; With no companion but the constant Muse, Who sought me when I needed her—ah when Did I not need her, solitary else?"

"Once when the days were ages, And the old Earth was young, The high gods and the sages From Nature's golden pages Her open secrets wrung. Each questioned each to know Whence came the Heavens above, and whence the Earth below."

"There is no death—the thing that we call death Is but another, sadder name for life, Which is itself an insufficient name, Faint recognition of that unknown Life— That Power whose shadow is the Universe."

"His eyes All radiant with glad surprise, Looked forward through the Centuries And saw the seeds which sages cast In the world’s soil in cycles past Spring up and blossom at the last; Saw how the souls of men had grown, And where the scythes of Truth had mown Clear space for Liberty’s white throne; Saw how, by sorrow tried and proved, The blackening stains had been removed Forever from the land he loved; Saw Treason crushed and Freedom crowned, And clamorous Faction, gagged and bound, Gasping its life out on the ground."

""Learn while you're young," he often said, "There is much to enjoy, down here below; Life for the living, and rest for the dead!" Said the jolly old pedagogue, long ago."

"The living need charity more than the dead."

"I know,—yet my arms are empty, That fondly folded seven, And the mother heart within me Is almost starved for heaven."

"Never yet was a spring-time, Late though lingered the snow, That the sap stirred not at the whisper Of the south wind, sweet and low; Never yet was a spring-time When the buds forgot to blow."

"Fifteen takes its perplexities very seriously and grieves wihout restraint over its sorrows."

"One of the first things to be noted in business life is its imperialism. Business is exacting, engrossing, and inelastic."

"Let every birthday be a festival, a time when the gladness of the house finds expression in flowers, in gifts, in a little fête. Never should a birthday be passed over without note, or as if it were a common day, never should it cease to be a garlanded milestone in the road of life."

"Every child's birthright is a happy home."

"My own opinion is that youthfulness of feeling is retained, as is youthfulness of appearance, by constant use of the intellect."

"Mind does dominate body. We are superior to the house in which we dwell."

"Self complacency is fatal to progress."

"On the day long after childhood when I suddenly heard of his death, the sky grew dark above my head. I was walking on a Southern highway, and a friend driving in a pony carriage passed me, stopped and said, "Have you heard that Charles Dickens is dead?" It was as if I had been robbed of one of the dearest of friends."

"I would not, if I could, give up the memory of the joy I have had in books for any advantage that could be offered in other pursuits or occupations. Books have been to me what gold is to the miser, what new fields are to the explorer, what a new discovery is to the scientific student."

"In the whole round of human affairs little is so fatal to peace as misunderstanding."

"Who now shall accuse and arraign us? What man shall condemn and disown? Since Christ has said only the stainless Shall cast at his fellows a stone."

"O woman, born first to believe us; Yea, also born first to forget; Born first to betray and deceive us, Yet first to repent and regret!O first then in all that is human, Lo! first where the Nazarene trod, O woman! O beautiful woman! Be then first in the kingdom of God!"

""All honor to him who shall win the prize," The world has cried for a thousand years; But to him who tries, and who fails and dies, I give great honor and glory and tears.Give glory and honor and pitiful tears To all who fail in their deeds sublime; Their ghosts are many in the van of years, They were born with Time in advance of Time."

"Oh, great is the hero who wins a name, But greater many and many a time Some pale-faced fellow who dies in shame, And lets God finish the thought sublime.And great is the man with a sword undrawn, And good is the man who refrains from wine; But the man who fails and yet still fights on, Lo, he is the twin-born brother of mine."

"O star-built bridge, broad milky way! O star-lit, stately, splendid span! If but one star should cease to stay And prop its shoulders to God's plan — The man who lives for self, I say, He lives for neither God nor man."

"I count the columned waves at war With Titan elements; and they, In martial splendor, storm the bar And shake the world, these bits of spray."

"Each gives to each, and like the star Gets back its gift in tenfold pay.To get and give and give amain The rivers run and oceans roll. O generous and high-born rain When reigning as a splendid whole! That man who lives for self alone Lives for the meanest mortal known."

"Is it worthwhile that we jostle a brother, Bearing his load on the rough road of life? Is it worthwhile that we jeer at each other, In blackness of heart — that we war to the knife? God pity us all in our pitiful strife."

"In men whom men condemn as ill I find so much of goodness still. In men whom men pronounce divine I find so much of sin and blot I hesitate to draw a line Between the two, where God has not."

"He rode as rides the hurricane; He seem'd to swallow up the plain; He rode as never man did ride, He rode, for ghosts rode at his side, And on his right a grizzled grim — No, no, this tale is not of him."

"A grand old Neptune in the prow, Gray-hair'd, and white with touch of time, Yet strong as in his middle prime; A grizzled king, I see him now, With beard as blown by wind of seas, And wild and white as white sea-storm, Stand up, turn suddenly, look back Along the low boat's wrinkled track, Then fold his mantle round a form Broad-built as any Hercules, And so sit silently."

"Beside The grim old sea-king sits his bride, A sun-land blossom, rudely torn From tropic forests to be worn Above as stern a breast as e'er Stood king at sea or anywhere."

"He seem'd as lithe and free and tall And restless as the boughs that stir Perpetual topt poplar trees. And one, that one, had eyes to teach The art of love, and tongue to preach Life's hard and sober homilies; And yet his eager hands, his speech, All spoke the bold adventurer; While zoned about the belt of each There swung a girt of steel, till all Did seem a walking arsenal."

"These be but men. We may forget The wild sea-king, the tawny brave, The frowning wold, the woody shore, The tall-built, sunburnt men of Mars. . .But what and who was she, the fair? The fairest face that ever yet Look'd in a wave as in a glass; That look'd as look the still, far stars, So woman-like, into the wave To contemplate their beauty there, Yet look as looking anywhere?"

"I only saw her as she pass'd — A great, sad beauty, in whose eyes Lay all the loves of Paradise. . . . You shall not know her — she who sat Unconscious in my heart all time I dream'd and wove this wayward rhyme, And loved and did not blush thereat."

"The sunlight of a sunlit land, A land of fruit, of flowers, and A land of love and calm delight; A land where night is not like night, And noon is but a name for rest, And love for love is reckoned best. Where conversations of the eyes Are all enough; where beauty thrills The heart like hues of harvest-home; Where rage lies down, where passion dies, Where peace hath her abiding place. . . ."

"A face that lifted up; sweet face That was so like a life begun, That rose for me a rising sun Above the bended seven hills Of dead and risen old new Rome.Not that I deem'd she loved me. Nay, I dared not even dream of that. I only say I knew her; say She ever sat before me, sat All still and voiceless as love is, And ever look'd so fair, divine, Her hush'd, vehement soul fill'd mine, And overflowed with Runic bliss, And made itself a part of this."

"O you had loved her sitting there, Half hidden in her loosen'd hair: Why, you had loved her for her eyes, Their large and melancholy look Of tenderness, and well mistook Their love for light of Paradise."

"Her mouth Was roses gather'd from the south, The warm south side of Paradise, And breathed upon and handed down, By angels on a stair of stars."

"This creature comes from out the dim Far centuries, beyond the rim Of time's remotest reach or stir."

"I dared not dream she loved me. Nay, Her love was proud; and pride is loth To look with favor, own it fond Of one the world loves not to-day … No matter if she loved or no, God knows I loved enough for both, And knew her as you shall not know Till you have known sweet death, and you Have cross'd the dark; gone over to The great majority beyond."

"Lo! all things moving must go by. The sea lies dead. Behold, this land Sits desolate in dust beside His snow-white, seamless shroud of sand; The very clouds have wept and died, And only God is in the sky."

"Where storm-born shadows hide and hunt I knew thee, in thy glorious youth, And loved thy vast face, white as truth; I stood where thunderbolts were wont To smite thy Titan-fashioned front, And heard dark mountains rock and roll; I saw the lightning's gleaming rod Reach forth and write on heaven's scroll The awful autograph of God!"

"A thousand miles of mighty wood Where thunder-storms stride fire-shod; A thousand flowers every rod, A stately tree on every rood; Ten thousand leaves on every tree, And each a miracle to me; And yet there be men who question God!"

"The mountains from that fearful first Named day were God's own house. Behold, 'Twas here dread Sinai's thunders burst And showed His face. 'Twas here of old His prophets dwelt. Lo, it was here The Christ did come when death drew near."

"These stony altars they have hurled Oppression back, have kept the boon Of liberty. Behold, how free The mountains stand, and eternally."

"For the Right, through thickest night, Till the man-brute Wrong be driven From high places; till the Right Shall lift like some grand beacon light. For the Right! Love, Right and duty; Lift the world up, though you fall Heaped with dead before the wall; God can find a soul of beauty Where it falls, as gems of worth Are found by miners dark in earth."

"Come listen, O Love, to the voice of the dove, Come, hearken and hear him say, THERE ARE MANY TO-MORROWS, MY LOVE, MY LOVE, — THERE IS ONLY ONE TO-DAY."

"Rugged! Rugged as Parnassus! Rude, as all roads I have trod — Yet are steeps and stone-strown passes Smooth o'er head, and nearest God.Here black thunders of my canyon Shake its walls in Titan wars! Here white sea-born clouds companion With such peaks as know the stars!"

"Dear, I took these trackless masses Fresh from Him who fashioned them; Wrought in rock, and hewed fair passes, Flower set, as sets a gem.Aye, I built in woe. God willed it; Woe that passeth ghosts of guilt. Yet I built as His birds builded — Builded singing as I built.All is finished! Roads of flowers Wait your loyal little feet. All completed? Nay, the hours Till you come are incomplete."

"O, the sea of lights for streaming When the thousand flags are furled— When the gleaming bay lies dreaming As it duplicates the world!You will come my dearest, truest! Come my sovereign queen often; My blue skies will then be bluest; My white rose be whitest then:Then the song! Ah, then the sabre Flashing up the walls of night! Hate of wrong and love of neighbor Rhymes of battle for the Right!"

"We plant this stone as some small seed Is sown at springtime, warm with earth; We sow this seed as some good deed Is sown, to grow until its worth Shall grow, through rugged steeps of time, To touch the God-built stars sublime."

"Man's books are but a climbing stair, Lain step by step, like stairs of stone; The stairway here, the temple there — Man's lampad honor, and his trust, The God who called him from the dust."

"Man's books are but man's alphabet, Beyond and on his lessons lie — The lessons of the violet, The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil:The toil that nature ever taught, The patient toil, the constant stir, The toil of seas where shores are wrought, The toil of Christ, the carpenter; The toil of God incessantly By palm-set land or frozen sea."

"Behold this sea, that sapphire sky! Where nature does so much for man, Shall man not set his standard high, And hold some higher, holier plan? Some loftier plan than ever planned By outworn book of outworn land?Where God has done so much for man, Shall man for God do aught at all? The soul that feeds on books alone — I count that soul exceeding small That lives alone by book and creed,— A soul that has not learned to read."

"Almost his first words were, "Well, let us go and talk with the poets!" In vain I assured this untamed poet that the "Bards of San Francisco Bay," whom he had so naively saluted, had taken the vows of neither brotherhood nor sisterhood; that they feasted at no common board; flocked not; discoursed with no beaded rills; neither did their skilled hands sweep any strings whatever, and he must, therefore, listen in vain for the seraphic song."

"Behold, we live through all things,—famine, thirst, Bereavement, pain; all grief and misery, All woe and sorrow; life inflicts its worst On soul and body,—but we can not die. Though we be sick, and tired, and faint, and worn,— Lo, all things can be borne!"

"I count no more my wasted tears; They left no echo of their fall; I mourn no more my lonesome years; This blessed hour atones for all."

"Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again, just for to-night!"

"Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years! I am so weary of toil and of tears,— Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,— Take them and give me my childhood again!"

"O flowers! the soul that faints or grieves New comfort from your lips receives; Sweet confidence and patient faith are hidden in your leaves."

"Dawn of a brighter, whiter day Than ever blessed us with its ray,— A dawn beneath whose purer light all guilt and wrong shall fade away."

"Up the sky in silence holy Comes the young moon slowly, slowly, Softly with her light divine, Filling, like a cup with wine."

"The wind is full of memories; It whispers low and clear The sacred echoes of the past, And brings the dead more near."

"Who knows the thoughts of a child?"

"They sat and combed their beautiful hair, Their long, bright tresses, one by one, As they laughed and talked in the chamber there, After the revel was done."

"Tying her bonnet under her chin, She tied her raven ringlets in; But not alone in the silken snare Did she catch her lovely floating hair, For, tying her bonnet under her chin, She tied a young man’s heart within."

"So sweet, so sweet, the roses in their blowing, So sweet the daffodils, so fair to see; So blithe and gay the humming-bird a-going From flower to flower, a-hunting with the bee."

"Some day, some day of days, threading the street, With idle, heedless pace, Unlooking for such grace, I shall behold your face! Some day, some day of days, thus may we meet."

"A life on the ocean wave! A home on the rolling deep, Where the scattered waters rave, And the winds their revels keep! Like an eagle caged I pine On this dull unchanging shore: Oh give me the flashing brine, The spray and the tempest's roar!"

"The cold blast at the casement beats; The window-panes are white; The snow whirls through the empty streets; It is a dreary night!"

"When the night-wind bewaileth the fall of the year, And sweeps from the forest the leaves that are sere; I wake from my slumber and list to the roar And it saith to my spirit, "No more, never more!""

"I won a noble fame; But with a sudden frown, The people snatched my crown, And, in the mire, trod down My lofty name."

"But I account it worth All pangs of fair hopes crost— All loves and honors lost,— To gain the heavens, at cost Of losing earth."

"So, lest I be inclined To render ill for ill,— Henceforth in me instil, O God, a sweet good-will To all mankind."

""What is wealth?" the king would say, "Even this shall pass away"."

"Pleasure comes, but not to stay; Even this shall pass away."

"Pain is hard to bear," he cried, "But with patience, day by day, Even this shall pass away."

"What is fame? Fame is but a slow decay— Even this shall pass away."

"And though hard be the task, "Keep a stiff upper lip.""

"Nearer my Father's house, Where the many mansions be, Nearer the great white throne, Nearer the crystal sea. Nearer the bound of life, Where we lay our burdens down, Nearer leaving the cross, Nearer gaining the crown."

"Her washing ended with the day, Yet lived she at its close, And passed the long, long night away In darning ragged hose. But when the sun in all its state Illumed the Eastern skies, She passed about the kitchen grate And went to making pies."

"Father, perfect my trust; Let my spirit feel in death, That her feet are firmly set On the rock of a living faith!"

"Over the hill to the poor-house I'm trudgin' my weary way."

"Things at home are crossways, and Betsy and I are out."

"I have talked with Betsy, and Betsy has talked with me, And so we've agreed together that we can't never agree."

"Betsy, like all good women, had a temper of her own."

"The more we arg'ed the question the more we didn't agree."

"I don't complain of Betsy or any of her acts, Exceptin' when we 've quarreled and told each other facts."

"Not a log in this buildin' but its memories has got And not a nail in this old floor but touches a tender spot."

"Fare you well, old house! you're naught that can feel or see, But you seem like a human bein'—a dear old friend to me; And we never will have a better home, if my opinion stands, Until we commence a-keepin' house in the house not made with hands."

"To appreciate heaven well 'Tis good for a man to have some fifteen minutes of hell."

"There's lots of people—this town wouldn't hold them; Who don't know much excepting what's told them."

"Whilst twilight's curtain spreading far, Was pinned with a single star."

"Tis vain for present fame to wish-- Our persons first must be forgotten; For poets are like stinking fish-- They never shine until they're rotten."

"Ha! see where the wild-blazing Grog-shop appears, As the red waves of wretchedness swell; How it burns on the edge of tempestuous years— The horrible Light-house of Hell!"

"They say that man is mighty, He governs land and sea; He wields a mighty scepter O'er lesser powers than he; But a mighty power and stronger, Man from his throne hath hurled, For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world."

"Sorrow and scarlet leaf, Sad thoughts and sunny weather: Ah me, this glory and this grief Agree not well together!"

"A Song for September, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)."

"No dream his life was—but a fight! Could any Beatrice see A lover in that anchorite?"

"On a Bust of Dante, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)."

"O Time! whose verdicts mock our own, The only righteous judge art thou!"

"I fill this cup to one made up Of loveliness alone, A woman, of her gentle sex The seeming paragon; To whom the better elements And kindly stars have given A form so fair, that, like the air, 'Tis less of earth than heaven."

"Her every tone is music's own, Like those of morning birds, And something more than melody Dwells ever in her words."

"Look out upon the stars, my love, And shame them with thine eyes."

"The sportive hopes that used to chase their shifting shadows on, Like children playing in the sun, are gone—for ever gone; And on a careless, sullen peace, my double-fronted mind, Like Janus, when his gates are shut, looks forward and behind.Apollo placed his harp, of old, awhile upon a stone, Which has resounded since, when struck, a breaking harp string's tone; And thus my heart, though wholly now from early softness free, If touch'd, will yield the music yet, it first received of thee."

"The winds are awed, nor dare to breathe aloud; The air seems never to have borne a cloud, Save where volcanoes send to heav'n their curl'd And solemn smokes, like altars of the world."

"Why thus longing, thus forever sighing For the far-off, unattained, and dim, While the beautiful all round thee lying Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?"

"Poor indeed must thou be, if around thee Thou no ray of light and joy canst throw—"

"Death has shaken out the sands of thy glass."

"At the piping of all hands, When the judgment-signal's spread— When the islands and the lands And the seas give up their dead, And the South and North shall come; When the sinner is dismayed, And the just man is afraid, Then Heaven be thy aid, Poor Tom."

"Far beneath the tainted foam That frets above our peaceful home, We dream in joy and wake in love Nor know the rage that yells above."

"I saw two clouds at morning, Tinged with the rising sun, And in the dawn they floated on, And mingled into one. I thought that morning cloud was blest, It moved so sweetly to the West."

"A weapon that comes down as still As snowflakes fall upon the sod; But executes a freeman's will, As lightning does the will of God; And from its force nor doors nor locks Can shield you,—'t is the ballot-box."

"From every place below the skies The grateful song, the fervent prayer,— The incense of the heart, —may rise To heaven, and find acceptance there."

"He entered; but the mask he wore Concealed his face from me. Still, something I had seen before He brought to memory. "Who art thou? What thy rank, thy name?" I questioned, with surprise; "Thyself" the laughing answer came, "As seen of others' eyes.""

"Why should I stay? Nor seed nor fruit have I, But, sprung at once to beauty’s perfect round, Nor loss nor gain nor change in me is found,— A life-complete in death-complete to die."

"Old Grimes is dead, that good old man We never shall see more; He used to wear a long black coat All buttoned down before."

"Fill every beaker up, my men, pour forth the cheering wine: There’s life and strength in every drop,—thanksgiving to the vine!"

"I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty. Was thy dream then a shadowy lie? Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly; And thou shalt find thy dream to be A truth and noonday light to thee."

"I see not a step before me as I tread on another year; But I ’ve left the Past in God’s keeping,—the Future His mercy shall clear; And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near."

"I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light."

"That which we look on with unselfish love And true humility is surely ours, Even as a lake looks at the stars above And makes within itself a heaven of stars."

"Life's race well run, Life's work well done, Life's victory won, Now cometh rest."

"'T is but a little faded flower, But oh, how fondly dear! 'T will bring me back one golden hour, Through many a weary year."

"Who hath not saved some trifling thing More prized than jewels rare, A faded flower, a broken ring, A tress of golden hair."

"Where is the heart that doth not keep, Within its inmost core, Some fond remembrance hidden deep, Of days that are no more?"

"The splendor of Silence,—of snow-jeweled hills and of ice."

"The way of the Wind is a strange, wild way."

"Her suffering ended with the day, Yet lived she at its close, And breathed the long, long night away In statue-like repose.But when the sun in all his state Illumed the eastern skies, She passed through Glory's morning-gate, And walked in Paradise."

"God gives us ministers of love, Which we regard not, being near; Death takes them from us, then we feel That angels have been with us here!"

"Adieu, the city's ceaseless hum, The haunts of sensual life, adieu! Green fields, and silent glens we come, To spend this bright spring-day with you.Whether the hills and vales shall gleam With beauty, is for us to choose; For leaf and blossom, rock and stream, Are coloured with the spirit's hues.Here, to the seeking soul, is brought A nobler view of human fate, And higher feeling, higher thought, And glimpses of a higher state.Through change of time, on sea and shore, Serenely nature smiles away; Yon infinite blue sky bends o'er Our world, as at the primal day.The self-renewing earth is moved With youthful life each circling year; And flowers that Ceres' daughter loved At Enna, now are blooming here.Glad nature will this truth reveal, That God is ours and we are His. O friends, my friends! what joy to feel That He our loving Father is!"

"Go bow thy head in gentle spite, Thou lily white. For she who spies thee waving here, With thee in beauty can compare As day with night."

"Thou in thy lake dost see Thyself: so she Beholds her image in her eyes Reflected. Thus did Venus rise From out the sea."

"A man sat on a rock and sought Refreshment from his thumb; A dinotherium wandered by And scared him some. His name was Smith. The kind of rock He sat upon was shale. One feature quite distinguished him— He had a tail."

"Nature abhors imperfect work And on it lays her ban; And all creation must despise A tailless man."

"These in the robings of glory, Those in the gloom of defeat, All with the battle-blood gory, In the dusk of eternity meet;— Under the sod and the dew, Waiting the judgment-day;— Under the laurel the Blue, Under the willow, the Gray."

"If I should die to-night And you should come in deepest grief and woe— And say:—"Here's that ten dollars that I owe," I might arise in my large white cravat And say, "What's that?""

"Nothing to do but work, Nothing to eat but food, Nothing to wear but clothes To keep one from going nude."

"Nothing to breathe but air Quick as a flash 'tis gone; Nowhere to fall but off, Nowhere to stand but on."

"Nowhere to go but out, Nowhere to come but back."

"Friends I have had both old and young, And ale we drank and songs we sung: Enough you know when this is said, That, one and all, they died in bed. In bed they died and I’ll not go Where all my friends have perished so."

"I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach; But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech. Hold to thine ear And plain thou'lt hear Tales of ships."

"Of Christian souls more have been wrecked on shore Than ever were lost at sea."

"New England's dead. New England's dead! On every hill they lie; On every field of strife, made red By bloody victory."

"The land is holy where they fought And holy where they fell; For by their blood that land was bought, The land they loved so well."

"Gather leaves and grasses, Love, to-day; For the Autumn passes Soon away. Chilling winds are blowing. It will soon be snowing."

"Ah, we fondly cherish Faded things That had better perish. Memory clings To each leaf it saves. Chilly winds are blowing. It will soon be snowing On our graves."

"I love you because You're a sweet little fool!"

"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, But the whole boundless continent is yours."

"Then cricket sing thy song, or answer mine Thine whispers blame, but mine has naught but praises It matters not. — Behold the autumn goes, The Shadow grows, The moments take hold of eternity; Even while we stop to wrangle or repine Our lives are gone Like thinnest mist, Like yon escaping colour in the tree: — Rejoice! rejoice! whilst yet the hours exist Rejoice or mourn, and let the world swing on Unmoved by Cricket-song of thee or me."

"How oft in schoolboy-days, from the school's sway Have I run forth to Nature as to a friend, — With some pretext of o'erwrought sight, to spend My school-time in green meadows far away! Careless of summoning bell, or clocks that strike, I marked with flowers the minutes of my day."

"Why hold ye so my heart, nor dimly let Through your deep leaves the light of yesterday, The faded glimmer of a sunshine set? Is it that in your darkness, shut from strife, The bread of tears becomes the bread of life? Far from the roar of day, beneath your boughs Fresh griefs beat tranquilly, and loves and vows Grow green in your gray shadows, dearer far Even than all lovely lights and roses are?"

"Should pale death with arrow dread Make the ocean caves our bed, Though no eye of love might see Where that shrouded grave shall be, Thou! who hear'st the surges roll, Deign to save the suppliant soul."

"[T]he strength of a nation, especially of a republican nation, is in the intelligent and well-ordered homes of the people."

"A disposition to dwell on the bright side of character, is like gold to the possessor."

"Pride is a fruitful source of uneasiness. It keeps the mind in disquiet. Too high an opinion of ourselves, involves the desire of impressing others with the same opinion. This is often attended with difficulty. If we do not succeed in inspiring them with an equal idea of our own merits, we shall be expecting more deference and regard than they are inclined to pay. So, pride will be disappointed and offended."

"We speak of educating our children. Do we know that our children also educate us?"

"Mothers, whatever you wish your children to become, strive to exhibit in your own lives and conversation."

"The glorified spirit of the infant is a star to guide the mother to its own blissful clime."

"As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward."

"I love, and the world is mine!"

"A democrat by conviction rather than by temperament, urging democracy as 'the only method consistent with human instinct toward expansion,' he was yet an educator, and believed in equality upon a high, not upon a low plane. Like Ruskin, he demanded of men their best, and with less than their best refused to be satisfied."

"My "Poems" were written without a purpose, other than the expression of faiths and ideals strongly realized and emotions keenly felt. They were written for the joy of writing, and for the satisfaction of an irresistible impulse. It is my belief that it is not the business of art either to teach or to preach."

"The question of perpetual copyright is, in my judgement, entitled to the full and favorable consideration of the Congress of an enlightened republic. There would seem to be every reason for the equitable protection, without limit as to time, of the unquestioned property rights of its citizens."

"They live indeed—the dead by whose example we are upward led."

"She was a great woman with the heart of a little child. Her works praise her; the millions of God's creatures whom she has saved from suffering sing her praise. Where she has gone the recognition of this world counts for little. She has gone where the merciful are blessed, where the pure in heart see God."

"The business of art is to enlarge and correct the heart and to lift our ideals out of the ugly and the mean through love of the ideal...The business of art is to appeal to the soul."

"Maeterlinck says that compared with ordinary truths mystic truths have strange privileges—they can neither age nor die. Beauty is eternal and ugliness, thank God, is ephemeral. Can there be any question as to which should attract the poet?"

"Existence has little repose, and the cultivation and love of poetry require a detached spirit and a certain amount of leisure."

"Of all the arts poetry is the most intimate and personal."

"poetry in some form is necessary to all—save, perhaps, to those who are content to live upon bread alone."

"Poetry belongs to the real things—to the realm of the ideal which is "the only real.""

"In education poetry is invaluable; the study of it cultivates the memory, the imagination, and the heart."

"poetry, which is the voice of the soul's aspirations, has for it, of all the arts, the most natural and immediate appeal."

"Sculpture and painting are moments of life. Poetry is life itself."

"The future of poetry should be, must be, in the hearts of children, lifting them above mean desires and helping them to believe, with Socrates, that they who have the fewest wants are nearest to the gods."

"poetry needed no renascence. It was not young, it is not old."

"The atmosphere of poetry today seems strained and unnatural. There is an attempt to force the growth of poetry."

"Many modern poets seem to think that poetry should be sensual. It should not—it should be sensuous."

"there is a higher truth and a lower truth, and it is the higher truth that is the proper subject of poetry."

"There is no true poetry that is not dedicated to the soul and to joy."

"Ugliness in poetry they may find clever and interesting. But it is only beauty that "snatches the breath and fills the eyes with tears.""

"I am told [Mrs. Coates] bears me in mind and is of a disposition to look with something of favor on my work—which I might say, quoting one of William's playful quips, 'shows her good sense.' They tell me Mrs. Coates is quite a woman among women—is beautiful, shines with great brightness, and, by those who know her well, is admired and cherished...(93) I don't know Mr. Coates but I know the wife—a beautiful, true woman, I have always believed her. We have had several talks together—or maybe only one talk: I am not clear about that now—but I shall always remember what she said—the effect of her talk, which was mainly about Matthew Arnold, who was her guest in Germantown. Arnold is a man for whom I never seem to be able to get up any stir—with whom I never have had and never could have a thorough-going affinity. But Mrs. Coates gave me the other side of him—the social side, the personal side, the intellectual side—the side of deportment, behavior—the side which I ought perhaps most to hear about and did willingly and gladly hear of from her. For every man has that better thing to be said of him—is entitled to all it may mean, signify, explain...(112) Yes, tell the Coates people—Mrs., Mr. Coates—to come over: I will see them...(156) I saw [Mr. and Mrs. Coates]—was glad to see them: both of them are so good, cordial, sincere—she particularly. It does my old eyes good to look at such a woman...(215) The letter [Mrs. Coates had sent to me] that came with [the poem, "The Promised Land"] was very hospitable, forth-giving: I liked it: indeed, the letter was a better poem than the poem: a real poem, in fact...(396)"

"Mrs. Coates is the very incarnation of contradiction. The action of her life is cast along the lines of conventional routine; but the hidden and real existence of the woman is carried on miles beyond and above all the material concerns, in the pure ether of the poet's realm. She will shut herself up with the "wide-eyed muse" to round a sonnet of majestic reach, or she will merge into the gay world, the laces of a dutchess about her, precious stones at her throat and glowing roses on her breast, there to dazzle all listeners to her conversation, in which bon mot, persiflage, eloquence and philosophy are interwoven. She is a "fine lady," and yet her poetry is never tainted by "fine ladyism." She is a bluestocking, but with none of the unlovely signs of bluestockingism about her. Another woman with Mrs. Coates' voice, mobile face, and evident histrionic instinct would have dashed away from the conventional life and sought vent for the "tempest within" in the mimic world of the stage, but Mrs. Coates is mistress of a perfectly ordered home."

"Some day, it is to be hoped, we may look for a book of lyrics from Mrs. Florence Earle Coates, whose store of music increases with each month's magazines. Where there is so much sweetness in single notes, there must needs be an unusual charm in a complete opus."

"As generous as a woman and as inspiring as a poet as she is discriminating in hero worship, this appreciation of "the noblest man that ever lived in the tides of time" is dedicated by her friend, THE AUTHOR."

"Ah, what a life is theirs who live in Christ; How vast the mystery! Reaching in height to heaven, and in its depth The unfathomed sea!"

"O happy life! life hid with Christ in God! So making me, At home, and by the wayside, and abroad, Alone with Thee!"

"Sleep, baby, sleep! Thy father's watching the sheep. Thy mother's shaking the dreamland tree, And down drops a little dream for thee. Sleep, baby, sleep!"

"You cannot prove to yourself that you love God by examining your feelings towards Him. They are indefinite and they fluctuate. But just so far as you obey Him, just so far, depend upon it, you love Him."

"You cannot will to possess the spirit of Christ; that must come as His gift, but you can choose to study His life, and to imitate it."

"We must be wise task-masters, and not require of ourselves what we can not possibly perform. Recreation we must have. Otherwise, the strings of our soul, wound up to an unnatural tension, will break."

"It sweetens every bit of work to think that I am doing it in humble, far-off, yet real imitation of Jesus."

"The question is not whether you ever gave yourself to God, but whether you are His now."

""Cheerfully and gratefully I lay myself and all I am or own at the feet of Him who redeemed me with His precious blood, engaging to follow Him, bearing the cross He lays upon me." This is the least I can do, and I do it while my heart lies broken and bleeding at His feet."

"And as to carrying religion into everything, how can one help it if one's religion is a vital part of one's-self, not a cloak put on to go to church and hang up out of the way against next Sunday."

"It is a religion of principle that God wants from us, not one of mere feeling."

"Not till I was shut up to prayer and to the study of God's word by the loss of earthly joys — sickness destroying the flavor of them all — did I begin to penetrate the mystery that is learned under the cross. And wondrous as it is, how simple is this mystery! To love Christ, and to know that I love Him — this is all."

"Much of my experience of life has cost me a great price and I wish to use it for strengthening and comforting other souls."

"I thought that prattling boys and girls Would fill this empty room; That my rich heart would gather flowers From childhood's opening bloom.One child and two green graves are mine, This is God's gift to me; A bleeding, fainting, broken heart— This is my gift to Thee."

"Some of His children must go into the furnace to testify that the Son of God is there with them."

"I am not sure that it is best for us, once safe and secure on the Rock of Ages, to ask ourselves too closely what this and that experience may signify. Is it not better to be thinking of the Rock, not of the feet that stand upon it?"

"Lay hold on Christ with both your poor, empty hands."

"The longer I live the more conscious I am of human frailty, and of the constant, overwhelming need we all have of God's grace."

"No truth can be said to be seen as it is until it is seen in its relation to all other truths. In this relation only is it true."

"Thy skirts indeed the foe may part, Thy robe be pierced with sword and dart, They shall not touch thy noble heart, Carolina!"

"Throw thy bold banner to the breeze! Front with thy ranks the threatening seas Like thine own proud armorial trees, Carolina! Fling down thy gauntlet to the Huns, And roar the challenge from thy guns; Then leave the future to thy sons, Carolina!"

"And down the dunes a thousand guns lie crouched, Unseen, beside the flood — Like tigers in some Orient jungle crouched That wait and watch for blood. Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade, Walk grave and thoughtful men, Whose hands may one day wield the patriot's blade As lightly as the pen."

"Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause; Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned!"

"I cannot hear thy voice with others' ears, Who make of thy lost liberty a gain; And in thy tale of blighted hopes and fears Feel not that every note is born with pain."

"I saw a worm, with many a fold; It spun itself a silken tomb; And there in winter time enrolled, It heeded not the cold or gloom."

"God walked alone unhonored through the earth; For Him no heart-built temple open stood, The soul forgetful of her nobler birth Had hewn him lofty shrines of stone and wood, And left unfinished and in ruins still The only temple he delights to fill."

"Wilt Thou not visit me? The plant beside me feels Thy gentle dew; And every blade of grass I see, From Thy deep earth its quickening moisture drew."

"Come! for I need Thy love, More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain; Come like Thy Holy Dove, And let me in Thy sight rejoice to live again."

"The world doth ever change; there is no peace Among the shallows of its storm-vexed breast; With every breath the frothy waves increase, They toss up mire and dirt, they cannot rest; I thank Thee that within thy strong-built ark My soul across the uncertain sea can sail, And though the night of death be long and dark, My hopes in Christ shall reach within the veil; And to the promised haven steady steer, Whose rest to those who love is ever near."

"I saw on earth another light Than that which lit my eye Come forth as from my soul within, And from a higher sky."

"'Twas brighter far than noonday's beam; It shone from God within, And lit, as by a lamp from heaven, The world's dark track of sin."

"I see them, crowd on crowd they walk the earth, Dry leafless trees no autumn wind laid bare; And in their nakedness find cause for mirth, And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare; No sap doth through their clattering branches flow, Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear; Their hearts the living God have ceased to know, Who gives the springtime to th' expectant year."

"They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel"

"The Autumn wood the aster knows, The empty nest, the wind that grieves, The sunlight breaking thro' the shade, The squirrel chattering overhead, The timid rabbits lighter tread Among the rustling leaves."

"And in the woods a fragrance rare Of wild azaleas fills the air, And richly tangled overhead We see their blossoms sweet and red."

"Whence is yonder flower so strangely bright? Would the sunset's last reflected shine Flame so red from that dead flush of light? Dark with passion is its lifted line, Hot, alive, amid the falling night."

"Crimson clover I discover By the garden gate, And the bees about her hover, But the robins wait. Sing, robins, sing, Sing a roundelay,— 'Tis the latest flower of Spring Coming with the May!"

"I love the fair lilies and roses so gay, They are rich in their pride and their splendor; But still more do I love to wander away To the meadow so sweet, Where down at my feet, The harebell blooms modest and tender."

"All the woodland path is broken By warm tints along the way, And the low and sunny slope Is alive with sudden hope When there comes the silent token Of an April day,— Blue hepatica!"

"Gracious as sunshine, sweet as dew Shut in a lily's golden core."

"[T]he pure memories given To help our joy on earth, when earth is past, Shall help our joy in heaven!"

"With guilt's defilement stained without, within, How can I hope Thy cleansing grace to win? —Because Thou saidst, "I have forgiven thy sin.""

"White as the blossoms which the almond-tree, Above its bald and leafless branches bears."

"The lotos bowed above the tide and dreamed."

"Pain is no longer pain when it is past."

"I was born in Judaism, and have adhered to it through all my erratic career. Through that pure and simple religion I have found greatest comfort and blessing."

"She is a sensitive poet who, unfortunately, cannot write."

"I hail the seasons as they go, I woo the sunshine, brave the wind, I scan the lily and the rose, I nod to every nodding tree, I follow every stream that flows, And wait beside the steadfast sea."

"The country is crazy with barrenness, and the sea mocks it with its terrible beauty."

"A habit grew upon me of consulting the sea as soon as I rose in the morning. Its aspect decided how my day would be spent. I watched it at last with constant study of its changes, seeking to understand its effect upon me mentally, and ever attracted by its awful materiality, for it always talked to me of the ease with which it could drown me. I was drawn to its shores by night; its vague sphere, swayed by some influence mightier than itself, which made its voice articulate, drew my soul out beside it, to utter speech for speech."

"The desolation of winter sustains our frail hopes. Nature is kindest then; she does not taunt us with fruition. It is the luxury of summer which tantalizes—her long, brilliant, blossoming days, her dewy, radiant nights."

"Never does the soul feel so far from human life as when a man finds himself alone in the vistas of the moon, either in the streets of a sleeping city, the avenues of the woods, or by the border of the sea. Earth, swayed perhaps by her powerful satellite, withdraws her sympathy from him and he wanders in a white void, wondering if he was born to be thus annulled."

"Comfort is tedious when it lasts too long."

"A woman despises a man for loving her, unless she happens to return his love."

"The planted seed consigned to common earth, Disdains to moulder with the baser clay; But rises up to meet the light of day, Spreads all its leaves, and flowers, and tendrils forth; And, bathed and ripened in the genial ray, Pours out its perfume on the wandering gales, Till in that fragrant breath its life exhales."

"Blindfold I walk this life's bewildering maze; Up flinty steep, through frozen mountain pass, Through thornset barren and through deep morass: But strong in faith I tread the uneven ways, And bare my head unshrinking to the blast, Because my Father's arm is round me cast; And if the way seems rough, I only clasp The hand that leads me with a firmer grasp."

"Though I were gifted with an angel's tongue, And voice like that with which the prophets sung, Yet if mild charity were not within, 'T were all an impious mockery and sin."

"Leaning on thy dear faithful breast, I would resign my breath, And in thy loved embraces lose The bitterness of death."

"If he bring me a rose, a briar rose, To place in my braided hair, I shall know there are thorns in life for me And many a wearying care. If he bring me a lily pure and pale And lay it upon my breast, I shall know that my life will be of peace, As a bird in its mother's nest."

"Within a temple's towering walls I stand A temple vast; the heaven is its dome: No corniced crag was hewn by human hand, Nor by it wrought this tracery of foam;"

"O wondrous sphinx! within thy marble breast What undreamed secrets lie concealed! Hast thou no pity for my wild unrest My maddening longing for the unrevealed?"

"North from the beautiful islands, North from the headlands and highlands, The long sea-wall, The white ships flee with the swallow; The day-beams follow and follow, Glitter and fall."

"Now that the wind is tamed and broken, And day gleams over the lea, Row, row, for the one you love Was out on the raging sea: Row, row, row, Sturdy and brave o’er the treacherous wave, Hope like a beacon before, Row, sailor, row Out to the sea from the shore!"

"Over the ships that are anchored, Over the fleets that part, Over the cities dark by the shore, High as a dream thou art!"

"A bore is a man who, when you ask how he is, tells you."

"Like every novice, I fancied myself a discoverer."

"I feel my capacity to experience a terror greater than anything yet conceived by the human mind—something combining in fearful and unnatural amalgamation hitherto supposed incompatible elements."

"O'Brien's early death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror."

"We near the realization of that supreme social concept, our whole view of life and, consequently, of art, will be correspondingly modified. We shall come to insist more and more upon experts in all things. Respect for standards, love of order, will return. The petty personalism, that has long dominated us, will die away. Our poets will achieve the objective view of the world of men and things—and it is out of that view that all great art, as all great life, must grow."

"Meeting and getting to know John Gneisenau Neihardt was one of those thrills of a lifetime."

"The relationship between the counterculture and Indian country was complicated from the beginning. Desiring a deeper connection with the Earth and a more meaningful form of spirituality, hippies made pilgrimages to reservations searching for the mystical Indian wisdom they had read about in books like John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks and Carlos Castaneda's wildly successful but fraudulent series about the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus."

"Of true benevolence, its charms divine, With other motives to call forth its power, And its grand triumphs, multiplied beyond All former bounds, in this its golden age, Humbly I sing, awed by the holy theme; A theme exalted, though as yet unsung, In beauty rich, of inspiration full, And worthy of a nobler harp than that From which heroic strains sublimely sound."

"Time well employed is Satan's deadliest foe: It leaves no opening for the lurking fiend."

"The sultry summer past, September comes, Soft twilight of the soft-declining year. All mildness, soothing loneliness and peace, The fading season ere the falling come."

"Be thy best thoughts to work divine addressed; Do something — do it soon — will all thy might; An angel's wing would droop if long at rest, And God Himself inactive were no longer blessed."

"'Tis infamy to die and not be missed."

"Rouse to some work of high and holy love, And thou an angel's happiness shall know."

"Night-refuge, set aloft this travelled hill, 'Tis deemed by many a lodger but an inn; Others look round them better and scarce fill Their first cup ere its mystery doth begin, And they are led by some divine desire, Where, midmost of an inner room, there bends Clear flame on golden altar, to which fire A wide-eyed vestal changelessly attends. And most, so led, have joy to serve that light And with the jealous priestess vigil keep; But woe to any wearying neophyte, And woe to him who serves with eyes of sleep: To such is she more bitter than to those On whom, unlit, her doors forever close!"

"Friend of my heart! Among the Autumn trees We walk together baring thought to thought Of this vast symbol-earth wherein lie wrought Hints of immortal dreams and destinies! And you and I are part of all of these! Ourselves mysterious emblems, tones half-caught From voices far, wherein our souls have sought Deep meanings, silent, 'mid earth's melodies."

"Out of the conquered Past Unravishable Beauty; Hearts that are dew and dust Rebuking the dream of Death; Flower of the clay down-cast Triumphant in earth’s aroma; Strings that were strained in rust A-tremble with Music’s breath!Wine that was spilt in haste Arising in fumes more precious; Garlands that fell forgot Rooting to wondrous bloom; Youth that would flow to waste Pausing in pool-green valleys— And Passion that lasted not Surviving the voiceless Tomb!"

"O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!"

"O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassion'd stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness. America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law."

"O beautiful for heroes prov'd In liberating strife, Who more than self their country loved, And mercy more than life. America! America! May God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness, And ev'ry gain divine."

"O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed by human tears. America! America! God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea."

"Never was there lovelier town Than our Falmouth by the sea. Tender curves of sky look down On her grace of knoll and lea."

"Here is princely interchange Of the gifts of shore and field, Starred with treasures rare and strange That the liberal sea-chests yield. Culture here burns breezy torch Where gray captains, bronzed of neck Tread their little length of porch With a memory of the deck. Ah, and here the tenderest hearts, Here where sorrows sorest wring And the widows shift their parts Comforted and comforting. Holy bell of Paul Revere Calling such to prayer and praise. While a hundred times the year Herds her flock of faithful days!"

"Greetings to thee, ancient bell Of our Falmouth by the sea! Answered by the ocean swell, Ring thy centuried Jubilee! Like the white sails of the Sound, Hast thou seen the years drift by, From the dreamful, dim profound To a goal beyond the eye."

"Still thy mellow voice and clear Floats o'er land and listening deep, And we deem our fathers hear From their shadowy hill of sleep. Ring thy peals for centuries yet, Living voice of Paul Revere! Let the future not forget That the past accounted dear!"

"By the promise of noon"s blue splendor in the dawn"s first silvery gleam, By the song of the sea that compelleth the path of the rockcleaving stream, I summon thee, recreant dreamer, to rise and follow thy dream."

"In the inmost core of thy being I am a burning fire, From thine own altar-flame kindled in the hour when souls aspire, For know that men"s prayers shall be answered, and guard thy spirit"s desire."

"That which thou wouldst be thou must be, that which thou shalt be thou art; As the oak, astir in the acorn, the dull earth rendeth apart, Lo thou, the seed of thy longing, that breaketh and waketh the heart."

"I am the cry of the night wind, startling thy traitorous sleep; Moaning I echo thy music, and e"en while thou boastest to reap Alien harvests, my anger resounds from the vehement deep."

"I am the solitude folding thy soul in a sudden embrace. Faint waxes the voice of thy fellow, wan the light on his face. Life is as cloud-drift about thee alone in shelterless space."

"I am the drawn sword barring the lanes thy mutinous feet Vainly covet for greenness. Loitering pace or fleet, Thine is the crag-path chosen. On the crest shall rest be sweet."

"I am thy strong consoler when the desolate human pain Darkens upon thee, the azure outblotted by rush of the rain. All thou dost cherish may perish; still shall thy quest remain."

"Call me thy foe in thy passion; claim me in peace for thy friend; Yet bethink thee by lowland and upland, wherever thou wiliest to wend, I am thine Angel of Judgment; mine eyes thou must meet in the end."

"Because the years are few, I must be glad; Because the silence is so near, I sing; "Twere ill to quit an inn where I have had Such bounteous fare nor pay my reckoning. I would not, from some gleaming parapet Of Sirius or Vega, bend my gaze On a remembered sparkle and regret That from it thanklessly I went my ways Up through the starry colonnades nor found Violets in any Paradise more blue Than those that blossomed on my own waste ground Nor vespers sweeter than the robins knew."

"Though earth be but an outpost of delight, Heaven"s wild frontier by tragedy beset, Only a Shakespeare may her gifts requite. Only a happy Raphael pay his debt. Yet I, to whom, even as to these, are given Cascading foam, emblazoned butterflies, The moon"s pearl chariot through the massed clouds driven, And the divinity of loving eyes, Would make my peace now with mine hostess Earth, Give and take pardon for all brief annoy, And toss her, far beneath my lodging"s worth, Poor that I am, a coin of golden joy."

"Eliza R. Snow arose and said that she felt to concur with the President, with regard to the word Benevolent, that many Societies with which it had been associated, were corrupt,—that the popular Institutions of the day should not be our guide—that as daughters of Zion, we should set an example for all the world, rather than confine ourselves to the course which had been heretofore pursued."

"E. R. Snow offer'd an amendment by way of transposition of words, instead of The Nauvoo Female Relief Society, it shall be call'd the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo—Seconded by Prest. J. Smith and carried."

"In the heav’ns are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare; Truth is reason—truth eternal Tells me I’ve a mother there. When I leave this frail existence— When I lay this mortal by, Father, mother, may I meet you In your royal court on high?"

"My sisters, let us cultivate ourselves, that we may be capable of doing much good. We are daughters of our Heavenly Father, and our position as Saints of the Most High is at the head of the world."

"Women had much more to do in moulding Society than men had We want to be living monuments of the character of our Heavenly Father and Mother and if we lived up to the priveliges we had we would all meet in their presence and have a good time together, if we could only get through without a spot on our Garments without speaking against the Priesthood or the principles of the Gospel Then what a Glorious thing it would be, how pure how holy and how enobled we would feel be if we could live thus."

"Woman must save her self. I would not risk my salvation to any man or being I must stand before my God and be judged If I act as a priestest [priestess] unto my God I must earn my position[.]"

"I want you to instruct the sisters."

"The type of Negro oftenest depicted by modern fiction writers, is a genuine Southern production, a race of ante-bellum days-the simple-hearted, affectionate negro, who has no higher ambition than to serve faithfully the children of his former master. Isabel A. Mallon's story entitled, "The Colonel and Me," in the recent issue of the Ladies' Home Journal, is an example of this class of literature of which thinking Negroes are becoming heartily tired. While these stories occasionally interest, they never inspire the Negro reader, and besides, give the Anglo-Saxon reader false ideas concerning the race. It is praiseworthy to be a good servant, but all Negroes are not content to be merely hewers of wood and drawers of water. Out of the Negro race must come soldiers, statesmen, poets, authors, financiers and reformers, and fiction that is written with Negro men and women as heroes and heroines must keep these facts in mind...Another poem that appeals to all bold, courageous souls in "The Warning," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who, some critics aver, won more English hearts over to the anti-slavery cause than did the "Quaker Poet.""

"The rights of individuals ought to be the primary object of all government, and cannot be too securely guarded by the most explicit declarations in their favor."

"America stands armed with resolution and virtue; but she still recoils at the idea of drawing the sword against the nation from whom she derived her origin. Yet Britain, like an unnatural parent, is ready to plunge her dagger into the bosom of her affectionate offspring."

"I have my fears. Yet, notwithstanding the complicated difficulties that rise before us, there is no receding; and I should blush if in any instance the weak passions of my sex should damp the fortitude, the patriotism, and the manly resolution of yours. May nothing ever check that glorious spirit of freedom which inspires the patriot in the cabinet, and the hero in the field, with courage to maintain their righteous cause, and to endeavor to transmit the claim to posterity, even if they must seal the rich conveyance to their children with their own blood."

"The thorns, the thistles, and the briers, in the field of politics seldom permit the soil to produce anything, but weariness to the body, vexation to the mind, and ruin to the adventurer."

"Our situation is truly delicate & critical. On the one hand we are in need of a strong federal government founded on principles that will support the prosperity & union of the colonies. On the other we have struggled for liberty & made costly sacrifices at her shrine and there are still many among us who revere her name too much to relinquish (beyond a certain medium) the rights of man for the dignity of government."

"Even the Italian master in politicks, the subtle and renouned Machiavel acknowledges, that no republic ever yet stood on a stable foundation without satisfying the common people."

"The waves have rolled in upon me, the billows have repeatedly broken over me: yet I am not sunk down."

"’Twixt the optimist and pessimist The difference is droll: The optimist sees the doughnut But the pessimist sees the hole."

"Wealth and titles, which were sure to be heaped on the hero or heroine of the tale at last, she considered as the ultimatum of all sublunary good."

"... she had on a blue bonnet, and with a pair of lovely eyes of the same color, has contrived to make me feel devilish odd about the heart."

"The mind of youth eagerly catches at promised pleasure: pure and innocent by nature, it thinks not of the dangers lurking beneath those pleasures, till too late to avoid them."

"Oh my dear girls, for to such only am I writing, listen not to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by paternal approbation; be assured it is now past the days of romance."

"Of all the pleasures of which the human mind is sensible, there is none equal to that which warms and expands the bosom, when listening to commendations bestowed on us by a beloved object, and are conscious of having deserved them."

"Pleasure is a vain illusion; she draws you on to a thousand follies, errors, and I may say vices, and then leaves you to deplore your thoughtless credulity."

"The very basis of true peace of mind is a benevolent wish to see all the world as happy as one's Self; and from my soul do I pity the selfish churl, who, remembering the little bickerings of anger, envy, and fifty other disagreeables to which frail mortality is subject, would wish to revenge the affront which pride whispers him he has received."

"... my boys, with only moderate incomes, when placed in the church, at the bar, or in the field, may exert their talents, make themselves friends, and raise their fortunes on the basis of merit."

"... while discretion points out the impropriety of my conduct, inclination urges me on to ruin."

"... the heart that is truly virtuous is ever inclined to pity and forgive the errors of its fellow creatures."

"'Tis the summer prime, when the noiseless air In perfumed chalice lies, And the bee goes by with a lazy hum Beneath the sleeping skies."

"Yes, this is Life; and everywhere we meet, Not victor crowns, but wailings of defeat."

"'Tis rushing now adown the spout And gushing out below, Half frantic in its joyousness, And wild in eager flow. The earth is dried and parch’d with heat, And it hath longed to be Released from out the selfish cloud, To cool the thirsty tree."

"How beautiful the water is! To me 'tis wondrous fair— No spot can ever lonely be If water sparkle there— It hath a thousand tongues of mirth, Of grandeur, or delight; And every heart is gladder made When water greets the sight."

"Faith is the subtle chain, Which binds us to the Infinite: the voice Of a deep life within, that will remain Until we crowd it thence."

"White-winged angels meet the child On the vestibule of life, And they offer to his lips All that cup of mingled strife."

"My friends, do we realize for what purpose we are convened? Do we fully understand that we aim at nothing less than an entire subversion of the present order of society, a dissolution of the whole existing compact? Do we see that it is not an error of today, nor of yesterday against which we are lifting up the voice of dissent but that it is against the ... error of all times — error borne onward from the footprints of the first pair ejected from Paradise, down to our own time? ... Bitterness is the child of wrong; if any of our number has become embittered ... it is because social wrong has so penetrated to the inner life that we are crucified today."

"The measure of capacity is the measure of sphere for either man or woman."

"How few women have any history after the age of thirty!"

"The tender violet bent in smiles To elves that sported nigh, Tossing the drops of fragrant dew To scent the evening sky."

"'Tis grace to sing to nature, and to pray The God of nature, out of His large heart, To grant us knowledge of His human way; This is the whole of nature and of art."

""Something in the sense of morning Lifts the heart up to the sun." In our youth we may be pagan, God is many, and the One Great Supreme will wait till evening When our little day is done."

"Where wildness has been wilderness shall be, But give God time; and life is but a span, Nine inches, while before it and behind Stretches the garden of the cosmic gods."

"Lighter than dandelion down, Or feathers from the white moth’s wing, Out of the gates of bramble-town The silkweed goes a-gypsying."

"Thou hoarse Aristophanic mime, Grotesque Silenus of the slime, That dar'st to lift a comic voice Where thrushes worship and rejoice."

"The sun, this old November, Across the sodden slope, May bid the heart remember, But cannot bid it hope."

"New friends forbear, and let old friends remember With pity him who ends his course to-day; Nor heap with scorn his grave in dead December Whose life bore golden promises in May."

"In this age of innovation, perhaps no experiment will have an influence more important on the character and happiness of our society, than the granting to females the advantages of ... education. The honor of this triumph ... belongs to the men of America. They appear willing to risk the hazard of proving, experimentally, whether that degree of literature, which only can qualify woman to become ... an instructive as well as agreeable friend, be compatible with the cheerful discharge of her domestic duties, and that delicacy of feeling, and love of retirement, which nature so obviously imposes on the sex."

"All that I intended was, that self-control, in every station and to every individual, is indispensable, if people would retain that equanimity of mind, which depending on self-respect, is the essential of contentment and happiness."

"Readers soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost."

"A day of bliss is quickly told, A thousand would not make us old As one of sorrow doth— It is by cares, by woes and tears, We round the sum of human years——"

"Her husband requested she would read, and she determined to read; her husband wished her to talk, and she resolved to talk. ... Then she had the habit into which your poor conversationalists usually fall, namely, asking questions."

"There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind. The person who can regard the changes in the forest foliage,—that can watch the slow circles of the dead leaf, as it falls from the bough of some lofty tree, till it mingles with the thousands already covering the ground beneath, and not moralize is—not a person that I would advise to retire to the country, in search of happiness. He or she had better stay in the city and be amused. Those who cannot think, have, in my opinion, a necessity (which goes very far towards creating a right) for amusement."

"There is no influence so powerful as that of the mother. ... But next in rank and efficacy to that pure and holy source of moral influence, is that of the schoolmaster."

"Americans have two ardent passions; the love of liberty, and love of distinction. These passions mutually stimulate and increase each other ; the enjoyment of equal rights as citizens giving every man a chance of becoming eminent, and that eminence being derived from living under a free government, the Americans are thus necessarily as ambitious of fame as they are tenacious of freedom."

"Why is it that water, so monotonous in its characteristics, should nevertheless, possess a charm for every mind? I believe it is chiefly because it bears the impress of the Creator, which we feel neither the power of time or of man can efface or alter."

"Some one has called flowers the poetry of earth. They are only its Lyrical poetry. Water is the grand Epic of creation; and there is not a human soul but feels the influence of its majesty, its power or its beauty."

"There is hardly a more heart-thrilling pleasure enjoyed by mortals, than that which parents feel when seeing their child first being able to 'catch knowledge of objects.'"

"Riches are always overestimated; the enjoyment they give is more in the pursuit than the possession."

"Happiness is, in truth, a very cheap thing when the heart will be contented to traffic with nature—art has quite a different price."

"It requires but a few threads of hope, for the heart that is skilled in the secret, to weave a web of happiness."

"There are few sensations more painful than in the midst of deep grief, to know the season which we have always associated with mirth and rejoicing is at hand."

"There is small danger of being starved in our land of plenty; but the danger of being stuffed is imminent, and yet hardly a thought is bestowed on the subject by those who direct the public sentiment."

"You may indulge any childish propensity with less injury to the intellect than that of gluttony. Eating to excess constantly will deaden or destroy the energies of the mind, while those of the animal are increased, till the immortal becomes perfectly swinish—and yet many tender, delicate mothers seem to think, that to make their children eat is all that is requisite to make them great."

"Mr. and Mrs. R. persuaded themselves that, while they kept the Sabbath day with pharisaical strictness, the other six days were their own. They strove for earth and sighed for heaven, and failed of enjoyment in the pursuit of either."

"What a ready passport wealth gives its possessor to the good opinions of this world!"

"Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, And every where that Mary went The lamb was sure to go."

"And you each gentle animal In confidence may bind, And make them follow at your call, If you are always kind."

"Though youth be past and beauty fled, The constant heart its pledge redeems, Like Box that guards the flowerless bed And brighter from the contrast seems."

"The violet bank, the moss-fringed seat Beneath the drooping tree."

"To speak without metaphor—the engrossing pursuit of Americans is wealth."

"What in the rising man was industry and economy, becomes in the rich man parsimony and avarice."

"A man is never more self satisfied than when he is confirming a favorite theory."

"It is a bad business, dealing in lottery tickets...Riches got in such a hasty manner never wear well."

"This is a speculating and selfish age; and to think "money will answer all things," is too much the characteristic of Americans."

"A few hundred dollars will dry the weeping eyes of the most despairing damsel, and make her think the defection of her plighted swain a very lucky speculation—and so instead of breaking her own heart, she very coolly determines to break his credit, comforting herself with the thought that cash is more current than love."

"O, beautiful rainbow, All woven of light! There's not in thy tissue, One shadow of night:— It seems as heav'n opened, When thou dost appear, And a visible presence Of angels drew near, And sung the rainbow, The rainbow— The smile of God is here."

"Let no one understand me as speaking lightly of that Catechism. It was framed by good men, and doubtless with the best intentions. But there can be no perfect system of faith as expounded by men; and there should be no creed which requires the human mind to render its unqualified assent before it has examined and reflected."

"Crackers toasted or hard bread may be added a short time before the soup is wanted; but do not put in those libels on civilized cookery, called dumplings! One might about as well eat, with the hope of digesting, a brick from the ruins of Babylon, as one of the hard, heavy masses of boiled dough which usually pass under this name."

"Nor need we power or splendor, Wide halls or lordly dome, The good, the true, the tender, These form the wealth of home."

"Hail, Holy Day! the blessing from above Brightens thy presence like a smile of love, Smoothing, like oil upon a stormy sea, The roughest waves of human destiny— Cheering the good, and to the poor oppressed Bearing the promise of their heavenly rest."

"Rugged strength and radiant beauty— These were one in nature's plan; Humble toil and heavenward duty— These will form the perfect man!"

"What matter though the scorn of fools be given, If the path followed lead us on to heaven!"

"Woman's empire, holier, more refined, Moulds, moves and sways the fall'n but God-breathed mind, Lifting the earth-crushed heart to hope and heaven."

"Oh! wondrous power, how little understood, Entrusted to the Mother's mind alone To fashion genius, form the soul for good, Inspire a West, or train a Washington!"

"And evermore the Deep has worshipped God; And Bards and Prophets tune their mystic lyres While listening to the music of the floods."

"Beauty was lent to nature as the type Of heaven's unspeakable and holy joy, Where all perfection makes the sum of bliss."

"We have said little of the "Rights of Woman." Her first right is to education, in its Widest sense—to such education as will give her the full development of all her personal, mental, and moral qualities. Having that, there will be no longer any question about her rights; and rights are liable to be perverted to wrongs when we are incapable of rightly exercising them."

"The most welcome guest in society will ever be the one to whose mind every thing is a suggestion, and whose words suggest something to everybody."

"What has made this nation great? Not its heroes, but its households."

"Since the men from a party or fear of a frown, Are kept by a sugar-plum quietly down, Supinely asleep—and depriv'd of their sight, Are stipp'd of their freedom, and robb'd of their right; If the sons, so degenerate! the blessings despise, Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise; And though we've no voice but a negative here, The use of the taxables, let us forbear:— (Then merchants import till your stores are all full, May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!) Stand firmly resolv'd, and bid Grenville to see, That rather than freedom we part with our tea."

"Weep not for those Who sink within the arms of death Ere yet the chilling wintry breath Of sorrow o'er them blows; But weep for them who here remain, The mournful heritors of pain, Condemn'd to see each bright joy fade, And mark grief's melancholy shade Flung o'er Hope's fairest rose."

"Sorrow treads heavily, and leaves behind A deep impression e’en when she departs; While joy trips by, with steps light as the wind, And scarcely leaves a trace upon our hearts Of the faint footfalls, only this is sure — In this world nought, save suffering can endure."

"The gathered rose, and the stolen heart, Can charm but for a day."

"Like lamps in Eastern sepulchres, Amid my heart’s deep gloom, Affection sheds its holiest light Upon my husband’s tomb. And, as those lamps, if brought once more To upper air grow dim, So my soul’s love is cold and dead, Unless it glow for him."

"The charm of eloquence, — the skill To wake each secret string, And from the bosom's chords at will Life's mournful music bring, — The o'ermastering strength of mind, which sway The haughty and the free, Whose might earth's mightiest one obeys, These, — these were given to thee."

"Oh never yet did Peace her chaplet twine, To lay upon base Mammon’s sordid shrine, Where Earth’s most precious things are bought and sold; Thrown on that pile, the "pearl of price" would be Despised, because unfit for merchantry."

"Peace, sweet Peace, is always found In her eternal home on holy ground."

"When the glad sun, exulting in his might, Comes from the dusky-curtain'd tents of night."

"Like the sweet melody which faintly lingers Upon the wind-harp's strings at close of day, When gently touch'd by evening's dewy fingers It breathes a low and melancholy lay; So the calm voice of sympathy meseemeth; And while its magic spell is round me cast, My spirit in its cloistered silence dreameth, And vaguely blends the future with the past."

"Number the riches by thy memory hoarded, Relics of joys thy by-past years have known, — How many real things has life afforded? How much true light was o'er thy pathway thrown?"

"— The grave's dark portal Soon shuts this world of shadows from our view, Then shall we grasp realities immortal, If to the truth within us we are true."

"There dwelleth in the sinlessness of youth A sweet rebuke that vice may not endure."