What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.

There is no history of how bad became better.

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847.

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

Nature is full of genius, full of divinity.

Where is the "unexplored land" but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is "unexplored land," to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.

Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures do for themselves.