Of all nations the English undoubtedly proved hitherto that they had the most business here. Yet I am not sure but I have most sym...pathy with that spirit of adventure which distinguished the French and Spaniards of those days, and made them especially the explorers of the American Continent,--which so early carried the former to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the north, and the latter to the same river in the south. It was long before our frontiers reached their settlements in the West. So far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise of traders.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita ...to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This spirit it was which so early carried the French to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the north, and the Spaniard to the ...same river on the south. It was long before our frontiers reached their settlements in the West, and a voyageur or coureur de bois is still our conductor there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And God said, Let the waters generate, Reptile with spawn abundant, living soul:... And let fowl fly above the earth, with wings Displayed on the open firmament of heaven. And God created the great whales, and each Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously The waters generated by their kinds, And every bird of wing after his kind; And saw that it was good, and blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, multiply, and in the seas And lakes and running streams the waters fill; And let the fowl be multiplied on the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It appears that in a forest like this the great majority of flowers, shrubs, and grasses are confined to the banks of the rivers a...nd lakes, and to the meadows, more open swamps, burnt lands, and mountain-tops; comparatively very few indeed penetrate the woods. There is no such dispersion even of wild-flowers as is commonly supposed, or as exists in a cleared and settled country. Most of our wild-flowers, so called, may be considered as naturalized in the localities where they grow. Rivers and lakes are the great protectors of such plants against the aggressions of the forest, by their annual rise and fall keeping open a narrow strip where these more delicate plants have light and space in which to grow. They are the protégés of the rivers. These narrow and straggling bands and isolated groups are, in a sense, the pioneers of civilization. Birds, quadrupeds, insects, and man also, in the main, follow the flowers, and the latter in his turn makes more room for them and for berry-bearing shrubs, birds, and small quadrupeds. One settler told me that not only blackberries and raspberries but mountain maples came in, in the clearing and burning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pointing into the bay, he said that it was the way to various lakes which he knew. Only solemn bear-haunted mountains, with their ...great wooded slopes, were visible; where, as man is not, we suppose some other power to be. My imagination personified the slopes themselves, as if by their very length they would waylay you, and compel you to camp again on them before night. Some invisible glutton would seem to drop from the trees and gnaw at the heart of the solitary hunter who threaded those woods; and yet I was tempted to walk there. The Indian said that he had been along there several times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I perceive that in these woods the earliest settlements are, for various reasons, clustering about the lakes, but partly, I think,... for the sake of the neighborhood as the oldest clearings. They are forest schools already established,--great centres of light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value;... they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have seen in my time two enormous extensions of the suffrage to men--one in America and one in England. But neither the negroes ...in the South nor the agricultural laborers in Great Britain had shown before they got the ballot any capacity of government; for they had never had the opportunity to take the first steps of political action. Very different has been the history of the march of women toward a recognized position in the State. We have had to prove our ability at each stage of progress, and have gained nothing without having satisfied a test of capacity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss... Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »