Complete Works, Volume 3

Front Cover
Houghton Mifflin & Company, 1883
 

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Page 31 - These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed.
Page 199 - Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?
Page 155 - The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem ; the shepherd, his lamb ; the farmer, corn ; the miner, a gem ; the sailor, coral and shells ; the painter, his picture ; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
Page 200 - Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, I should say, that, one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men.
Page 11 - The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time.
Page 206 - The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual ; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy ; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king.
Page 240 - The ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect world was to be defended — that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay.
Page 71 - All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral, and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal.
Page 201 - They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. <Jhe spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless) it is not loving ; it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.
Page 43 - ... mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer...

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