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 ...

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…

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...

This lighthouse, known to mariners as the Cape Cod or Highland Light, is one of our “primary seacoast lights,” and is usually the first seen by those approaching the entrance of Massach...

About twelve o’clock this day, being in the Lower Town, I looked up at the signal-gun by the flagstaff on Cape Diamond, and saw a soldier up in the heavens there making preparations to ...

Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, I resolved to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another side of nature. I have done so. According to Pliny,...

But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of...

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...

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...

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...

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird, Melting thy pinions in thy upward… Lark without song, and messenger o… Circling above the hamlets as they… Or else, departing dream, and shad…

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,

I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of natur...

Perhaps no one in English history better represents the heroic character than Sir Walter Raleigh, for Sidney has got to be almost as shadowy as Arthur himself. Raleigh’s somewhat antiqu...