snowdrops’s Reviews > The Journal, 1837-1861 > Status Update

"We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it, a little? To devote your life to the discovery of the divinity in nature or to the eating of oysters, would they not be attended with very different results?"

"He is a wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something, contributed something."

"What else is there to be improved? Who knows what opportunities he may neglect? It is not in vain that the mind turns aside this way or that: follow its leading; apply it whither it inclines to go. Probe the universe in a myriad points. Be avaricious of these impulses. You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one, as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak."

"It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. Improve the suggestion of each object however humble, however slight and transient the provocation." (cont.)

"Walk often in drizzly weather, for then the small weeds (especially if they stand on bare ground), covered with rain-drops like beads, appear more beautiful than ever,—the hypericums, for instance. They are equally beautiful when covered with dew, fresh and adorned, almost spirited away, in a robe of dewdrops."

"Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor and humble, the
workdays of the world, the barren fields, the smallest share of all things but
poetic perception. Give me but the eyes to see the things which you possess."

"Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many instances that I may say I am unborn. There is the instinct for society, but no society. Life is not long enough for one success. Methinks my seasons revolve more slowly than those of nature; I am differently timed. I am contented."

"The newspapers tell us of news not to be named even with that in its own kind which an observing man can pick up in a solitary walk, as if it gained some importance and dignity by its publicness. Do we need to be advertised each day that such is still the routine of life?"

"We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our
pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely
enough, so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break upon
our extremest shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf come back to us."

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen. Suppose the
muskrat or beaver were to turn his views to literature, what fresh views of
nature would he present! The fault of our books and other deeds is that they are too humane,.something speaking in some measure to the
condition of muskrats and skunk-cabbage as well as of men.