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 ...

A true poem is distinguished, not so much by a felicitous expression or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. Most have beauty of outline merely, and are str...

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,

centeredWritten around 1840 for The Dial, it was rejected and remained unpublished until 1902. The brave man is the elder son of creation, who has stepped buoyantly into his inheritance...

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in...

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…

Time wears her not; she doth his c… Mortality below her orb is placed. —Raleigh The full-orbed moon with unchanged… Mounts up the eastern sky,

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple-tree is connected with that of man. The geologist tells us that the order of the Rosaceae, which includes the apple, also the true ...

At five p.m., September 13, 1853, I left Boston in the steamer for Bangor by the outside course. It was a warm and still night—warmer, probably, on the water than on the land—and the se...

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...

Great God, I ask for no meaner pe… Than that I may not disappoint my… That in my action I may soar as h… As I can now discern with this cl… And next in value, which thy kindn…

We have occasionally, for several years, met with a number of this spirited journal, edited, as abolitionists need not to be informed, by Nathaniel P. Rogers, once a counsellor at law i...

My books I’d fain cast off, I can… ‘Twixt every page my thoughts go s… Down in the meadow, where is riche… And will not mind to hit their pro… Plutarch was good, and so was Hom…

IN vain I see the morning rise, In vain observe the western blaze, Who idly look to other skies, Expecting life by other ways. Amidst such boundless wealth witho…

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...