Nature: Addresses, and Lectures

Front Cover
Houghton, Mifflin, 1876 - 372 pages
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 17 - 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.
Page 71 - Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else ; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.
Page 52 - 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 93 - What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street...
Page 72 - The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty ; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man.
Page 64 - The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.
Page 95 - Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.
Page 34 - 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. "The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.
Page 17 - 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 them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,— no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.
Page 96 - Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit ; — not to be reckoned one character ; — not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred^, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south ? Not so, brothers and friends — please God, ours shall not be so.

Bibliographic information