Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind abo...ut in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so w...ell; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature. But there is only necessary a moment's sanity and sound senses, to teach us that there is a nature behind the ordinary, in which we have only some vague preemption right and western reserve as yet. We live on the outskirts of that region. Carved wood, and floating boughs, and sunset skies are all that we know of it.... Let us not, my friends, be wheedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. Let us wait a little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be put up. It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner's compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. We are no... nearer than Plato was. The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and, as it were, in a straight line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity... there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »