Miscellanies, Embracing Nature, Addresses, and Lectures

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Ticknor and Fields, 1866 - 383 pages
 

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Page 54 - I was there ; when he set a compass upon the face of the depth ; when he established the clouds above ; when he strengthened the fountains of the deep ; when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment ; when he appointed the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, as one brought up with him ; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him...
Page 106 - I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of ? The meal in the firkin ; the milk in the pan ; the ballad in the street ; the news of the boat ; the glance of the eye ; the form and the gait of the body...
Page 86 - The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward; the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead; man hopes; genius creates.
Page 111 - We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all.
Page 99 - ... to have recorded that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, — his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, — until he finds that he is the complement -of his hearers ; that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature ; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true.
Page 96 - The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.
Page 7 - In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of
Page 86 - What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to ; this every man contains within him, \< although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn.
Page 84 - Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Page 30 - The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.

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