Essays and Poems

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

Beauty is its own excuse for being.

The soul is superior to its knowledge; wiser than any of its works.

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight

But Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamemnon

Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.

Is it not the true scholar the only true master?

Clouded and shrouded there doth sit The Infinite embosomed in a man.

All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my business.

When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies,- yet, general ends are somehow answered. We see, now, events forced on which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws: and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.