As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill ...

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...

first published in The Boston Miscellany Vol. 3, No. 3, January, 1843. Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and in...

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...

Written in Concord, July 19, 1842; first published in The Boston Miscellany Vol. 3, No. 3, January, 1843. Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in ou...

On fields o’er which the reaper’s… Lit by the harvest moon and autumn… My thoughts like stubble floating… And of such fineness as October a… There after harvest could I glean…

About six o’clock we started for Quebec, one hundred and eighty miles distant by the river; gliding past Longueil and Boucherville on the right, and Pointe aux Trembles, “so called from...

Whate’er we leave to God, God doe… And blesses us; The work we choose should be our o… God leaves alone. If with light head erect I sing,

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

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids wou...

Sending In delinquency To disappoint The amber of water At a high soul

Packed in my mind lie all the clot… Which outward nature wears, And in its fashion’s hourly change It all things else repairs. In vain I look for change abroad,

Under the one word, house, are included the schoolhouse, the alms-house, the jail, the tavern, the dwelling-house; and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains the elements o...