Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.

Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market.

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.

Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?