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...

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...

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...

There is a vale which none hath se… Where foot of man has never been, Such as here lives with toil and s… An anxious and a sinful life. There every virtue has its birth,

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...

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…

centeredWritten around 1840 for The Dial, it was rejected and remained unpublished until 1902.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...

What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray. Our summer of English ...

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...

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed ...

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...

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...

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...

Mine are the night and morning, The pits of air, the gull of space… The sportive sun, the gibbous moon… The innumerable days. I hide in the solar glory,