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 t...

By the middle of the forenoon, though it was a rainy day, we were once more on our way down the north bank of the St. Lawrence, in a northeasterly direction, toward the Falls of St. Ann...

Thomas Carlyle is a Scotchman, born about fifty years ago, “at Ecclefechan, Annandale,” according to one authority. “His parents ‘good farmer people,’ his father an elder in the Secessi...

Indeed indeed, I cannot tell, Though I ponder on it well, Which were easier to state, All my love or all my hate. Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me

The genuine remains of Ossian, though of less fame and extent, are in many respects of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and i...

MY life is like a stroll upon the… As near the ocean’s edge as I can… My tardy steps its waves sometimes… Sometimes I stay to let them over… My sole employment is, and scrupul…

Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were ...

I knew a man by sight, A blameless wight, Who, for a year or more, Had daily passed my door, Yet converse none had had with him…

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird, Melting thy pinions in thy upward… Lark without song, and messenger o… Circling above the hamlets as they… Or else, departing dream, and shad…

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...

Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented pa...

Among the signs of autumn I perce… The Roman wormwood (called by lea… Ambrosia elatior, food for gods,— For to impartial science the humbl… Is as immortal once as the proudes…

After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my per...

At a lyceum, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done. He described things not in o...

There is health in thy gray wing, Health of nature’s furnishing. Say, thou modern-winged antique, Was thy mistress ever sick? In each heaving of thy wing