A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remotest parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me.... A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me.

We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.

An Englishman, methinks,--not to speak of other European nations,--habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of theEnglish nation; he is a member of the royal regiment of Englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud of it. But an American--one who has made tolerable use of his opportunities--cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of man in these respects.

A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood.

Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work.

Love your life, poor as it is.

...A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from - toward; it is the history of every one of us. It is a great art to saunter.