The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.

In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least severalgentlemen or "squires," there is but one to a seigniory.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.

Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat andpotatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.

Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.

Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts - a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.