Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

There are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest communications we only lend a silent ear.

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.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Lose the world, get lost in it, and find your soul.

And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur into it. We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.

It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.