By the middle of the forenoon, though it was a rainy day, we were once more on our way down the north bank of the St. Lawrence, in a northeasterly direction, toward the Falls of St. Ann...

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids wou...

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird, Melting thy pinions in thy upward… Lark without song, and messenger o… Circling above the hamlets as they… Or else, departing dream, and shad…

O Nature! I do not aspire To be the highest in thy choir, - To be a meteor in thy sky, Or comet that may range on high; Only a zephyr that may blow

There is health in thy gray wing, Health of nature’s furnishing. Say, thou modern-winged antique, Was thy mistress ever sick? In each heaving of thy wing

I heartily accept the motto—“That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to th...

I knew a man by sight, A blameless wight, Who, for a year or more, Had daily passed my door, Yet converse none had had with him…

I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to t...

There is a vale which none hath se… Where foot of man has never been, Such as here lives with toil and s… An anxious and a sinful life. There every virtue has its birth,

I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of natur...

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in...

Mine are the night and morning, The pits of air, the gull of space… The sportive sun, the gibbous moon… The innumerable days. I hide in the solar glory,

After spending the night at a farmhouse in Château-Richer, about a dozen miles northeast of Quebec, we set out on our return to the city. We stopped at the next house, a picturesque old...

SALMON Brook, Penichook, Ye sweet waters of my brain, When shall I look, Or cast the hook,

They who prepare my evening meal b… Carelessly hit the kettle as they… With tongs or shovel, And ringing round and round, Out of this hovel