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...

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...

Within the circuit of this ploddin… There enter moments of an azure hu… Untarnished fair as is the violet Or anemone, when the spring strews… By some meandering rivulet, which…

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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,

MY life is like a stroll upon the… As near the ocean’s edge as I can… My tardy steps its waves sometimes… Sometimes I stay to let them over… My sole employment is, and scrupul…

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,

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...

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…

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...