When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,--none of the servants.

Have you not budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to float in the atmosphere.... We should wash ourselves clean of such news. Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador a greater wildness than in some recess of Concord.

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

Nothing can shock a brave man but dullness.