The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.

There are times when we have had enough even of our Friends.

Your religion is where your love is.

See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead.... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

If to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in Love. It demands directness as of an arrow.