There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

You must not count much upon what I can do or learn in New York.... Everything there disappoints me but the crowd; rather, I was disappointed with the rest before I came. I have no eyes for their churches, and what else they find to brag of. Though I know but little about Boston, yet what attracts me, in a quiet way, seems much meaner and more pretending than there,--libraries, pictures, and faces in the street. You don't know where any respectability inhabits.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.

Truth is always paradoxical.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

What a battle a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array throughthe always hostile country! How many enemies there are to sane thinking! Every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles.

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery.