In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. There too I admired, though I did not gathe...

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…

Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the ...

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...

Low-anchored cloud, Newfoundland air, Fountain-head and source of rivers… Dew-cloth, dream-drapery, And napkin spread by fays;

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…

Letter to the editor of The Liberator, March 28, 1845. We have now, for the third winter, had our spirits refreshed, and our faith in the destiny of the Commonwealth strengthened, by th...

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buck-eye does not grow in New England, and the mocking-bird is rarely ...

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...

John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history. If any person, in...

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...

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...

The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But...