And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur int...o it. We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who knows but this hill may one day be a Helvellyn, or even a Parnassus, and the Muses haunt here, and other Homers frequent the n...eighboring plains?... It was a place where gods might wander, so solemn and solitary, and removed from all contagion with the plain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact that Romans once inhabited her reflects no little dignity on Nature herself; that from some particular hill the Roman onc...e looked out on the sea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Other roads do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveler to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery it traverses... without intrusion, silently creating and adorning it, and is as free to come and go as the zephyr.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But we still remember ... above all, the cool, free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proffering their fruit to us, thoug...h still green and crude,--the hard, round, glossy fruit, which, if not ripe, still was not poison, but New English too, brought hither, its ancestors, by ours once. These gentler trees imparted a half-civilized and twilight aspect to the otherwise barbarian land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The attention of those who frequent the camp-meetings at Eastham is said to be divided between the preaching of the Methodists and... the preaching of the billows on the back side of the Cape, for they all stream over here in the course of their stay. I trust that in this case the loudest voice carries it. With what effect may we suppose the ocean to say, "My hearers!" to the multitude on the bank. On that side some John N. Maffit; on this, the Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; ea...ten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after... all, some villager's familiar wood-lot, some widow's thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan, too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sight of one of these frontier houses, built of these great logs, whose inhabitants have unflinchingly maintained their ground... many summers and winters in the wilderness, reminds me of famous forts, like Ticonderoga or Crown Point, which have sustained memorable sieges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps our own woods and fields,--in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,--with the primitiv...e swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »