A true poem is distinguished, not so much by a felicitous expression or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. Most have beauty of outline merely, and are str...

Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, I resolved to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another side of nature. I have done so. According to Pliny,...

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buck-eye does not grow in New England, and the mocking-bird is rarely ...

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed ...

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill ...

I think awhile of Love, and while… Love is to me a world, Sole meat and sweetest drink, And close connecting link Tween heaven and earth.

Pray to what earth does this sweet… Which asks no duties and no consci… The moon goes up by leaps, her che… In some far summer stratum of the… While stars with their cold shine…

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along...

My books I’d fain cast off, I can… ‘Twixt every page my thoughts go s… Down in the meadow, where is riche… And will not mind to hit their pro… Plutarch was good, and so was Hom…

first published in The Boston Miscellany Vol. 3, No. 3, January, 1843. Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and in...

John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history. If any person, in...

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit,...

Perhaps no one in English history better represents the heroic character than Sir Walter Raleigh, for Sidney has got to be almost as shadowy as Arthur himself. Raleigh’s somewhat antiqu...

Low-anchored cloud, Newfoundland air, Fountain-head and source of rivers… Dew-cloth, dream-drapery, And napkin spread by fays;