from A Natural History of Massachusetts
I am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook.
...
They are of sick and diseased imaginations who would toll the world`s knell so soon. Cannont these sedentary sects do better than prepare the shrouds and write the epitaphs of those other busy living men? The practical faith of all men belies the preacher`s consolation. What is any man`s discourse to me, if I am not sensible of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of crickets? In it the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men tire me when I am not constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of sparkling streams. Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry that leaps in ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the luster of whose scales, worn bright by the attrition, is relfected upon the bank!We fancy that this din of religion, literature, and philosophy, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlours, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the Earth`s axle; but if a man sleep soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn. ... When we lift out eyelids and open our ears, it disappears with smoke and rattle like the cars on a railroad.
and from Life Without Principle
A truly good book is something so natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered in a prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning`s flash, which perhance shatters the temple of knowledge itself...
Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living thruth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. Yes, every thought which passes through the mind helps to wear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much it has been used.
