Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?

Heroes are often the most ordinary of men.

But it is rather derogatory that your dwelling-place should be only a neighborhood to a great city,--to live on an inclined plane.I do not like their cities and forts, with their morning and evening guns, and sails flapping in one's eye. I want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all Wall Street cannot buy,--nor Broadway with its wooden pavement. I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea,--and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived.

In my walks, I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.