The peach-bud glows, the wild bee hums, and wind-flowers wave in graceful gladness.

No one can feel more gratefully the charm of noble scenery, or the refreshment of escape into the unspoiled solitudes of nature, than the laborer at some close in-door employment.

It is the greatest of all mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it is going to be easy, or with the wish to have it so.

My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me.

If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.

If an apple blossom or a ripe apple could tell its own story, it would be, still more than its own, the story of the sunshine that smiled upon it, of the winds that whispered to it, of the birds that sang around it, of the storms that visited it, and of the motherly tree that held it and fed it until its petals were unfolded and its form developed.

A man may make a misanthrope of himself, but he is never one by nature.