Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.

Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.

What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?

WE begin to die not in our sense or extremities, but in our divine faculties.

It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!

America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. Now that the republic--the res- publica--has been settled, it is time to look after the res- privata,--the private state,--to see, as the Roman Senate charged its consuls, "ne quid res-PRIVATA detrimenti caperet," that the private state receive no detriment.