Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings,— The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows

Let such pure hate still underprop Our love, that we may be Each other’s conscience, And have our sympathy Mainly from thence.

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...

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and t...

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,

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 ...

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...

Away! away! away! away! Ye have not kept your secret well, I will abide that other day, Those other lands ye tell. Has time no leisure left for these…

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…

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...

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...

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I ...

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...

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where? But the...