This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole.... The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived.

It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.

Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.

Concord's little arch does not span all our fate, nor is what transpires under it law for the universe.

Music never stops; it is only the listening that is intermittent.