Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet.

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.

Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.