Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented pa...

New England is by some affirmed to be an island, bounded on the north with the River Canada (so called from Monsieur Cane). And still older, in Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, publi...

About six o’clock we started for Quebec, one hundred and eighty miles distant by the river; gliding past Longueil and Boucherville on the right, and Pointe aux Trembles, “so called from...

What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray. Our summer of English ...

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...

Having walked about eight miles since we struck the beach, and passed the boundary between Wellfleet and Truro, a stone post in the sand—for even this sand comes under the jurisdiction ...

Among the signs of autumn I perce… The Roman wormwood (called by lea… Ambrosia elatior, food for gods,— For to impartial science the humbl… Is as immortal once as the proudes…

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 ...

If you have imagined what a divine work is spread out for the poet, and approach this author too, in the hope of finding the field at length fairly entered on, you will hardly dissent f...

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 ...

At a lyceum, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done. He described things not in o...

The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But...

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where? But the...

The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions. We can therefore publish only our advertisement of it. There is no doubt that the ...

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…