Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?

As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend.

If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him . . he will be surrounded by grandeur.

Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.

I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon.

Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much time is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many circumstances that I may say I am unborn.

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.