A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by thehuman voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

Christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. He knew what he was thinking of when he said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." I draw near to him at such a time. Yet he taught mankind but imperfectly how to live; his thoughts were all directed toward another world. There is another kind of success than his. Even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it somewhat longer. There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.