Babies are necessary to grown-ups. A new baby is like the beginning of all things--wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities. In a wo...rld that is cutting down its trees to build highways, losing its earth to concrete ... babies are almost the only remaining link with nature, with the natural world of living things from which we spring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every form of life is in its origin not natural, but divine and human; for it must spring from love, just as there can be no reaso...n without spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Passing over the earlier Continental poets, since we are bound to the pleasant archipelago of English poetry, Chaucer's is the fir...st name after that misty weather in which Ossian lived, which can detain us long. Indeed, though he represents so different a culture and society, he may be regarded as in many respects the Homer of the English poets. Perhaps he is the youthfulest of them all. We return to him as to the purest well, the fountain farthest removed from the highway of desultory life. He is so natural and cheerful, compared with later poets, that we might almost regard him as the personification of spring.... It is still the poetry of youth and life, rather than of thought; and though the moral vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet banished the sun and daylight from his verse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for Waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. Do not the flowers die ever...y autumn? He had not even taken root here. I was not startled to hear that he was dead; it seemed the most natural event that could happen. His fine organization demanded it, and nature gently yielded its request. It would have been strange if he had lived. Neither will nature manifest any sorrow at his death, but soon the note of the lark will be heard down in the meadow, and fresh dandelions will spring from the old stocks where he plucked them last summer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his serv...ice, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library,--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature. I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O thou, with dewy locks, who lookest down Through the clear windows of the morning; turn... Thine angel eyes upon our western isle, Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spring over there takes you by the throat, the flowers blooming by the thousands over white walls. If you strolled around for ...an hour in the hills surrounding my town, you would return with the odor of honey in your clothes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »