I am a parcel of vain strivings ti… By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their… Were made so loose and wide, Methinks,

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 th...

first published in The Boston Miscellany Vol. 3, No. 3, January, 1843. Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and in...

Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright...

The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions. We can therefore publish only our advertisement of it. There is no doubt that the ...

Every man is entitled to come to cattle-show, even a transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle. I wish to see once more those old familiar fa...

O Nature! I do not aspire To be the highest in thy choir, - To be a meteor in thy sky, Or comet that may range on high; Only a zephyr that may blow

THOUGH all the fates should pro… Leave not your native land behind. The ship, becalmed, at length stan… The steed must rest beneath the hi… But swiftly still our fortunes pac…

Perhaps no one in English history better represents the heroic character than Sir Walter Raleigh, for Sidney has got to be almost as shadowy as Arthur himself. Raleigh’s somewhat antiqu...

New England is by some affirmed to be an island, bounded on the north with the River Canada (so called from Monsieur Cane). And still older, in Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, publi...

I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of natur...

Within the circuit of this ploddin… There enter moments of an azure hu… Untarnished fair as is the violet Or anemone, when the spring stew t… By some meandering rivulet, which…

This lighthouse, known to mariners as the Cape Cod or Highland Light, is one of our “primary seacoast lights,” and is usually the first seen by those approaching the entrance of Massach...