Nature and Elements

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenthsof the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of asupernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion.

To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was tautology.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

In the matter of intellect the ant must bea strangely overrated bird. During manysummers, now, I have watched him, whenI ought to have been in better business, andI have not yet come across a living ant thatseemed to have any more sense than a deadone. I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of those wonderfulSwiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about religion.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparingto say is, that in Wildness is the preservation ofthe World.

Viewed from the distance of the moon, theastonishing thing about the earth . . . is that it is alive. . . . Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is therising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. . . . It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full ofinformation, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.

Viewed from the distance of the moon, theastonishing thing about the earth . . . is that it is alive. . . . Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is therising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. . . . It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full ofinformation, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.

I heard the little bird say so.

I detest dogs, those protectors of cowardswho have not the courage to bite the assailant themselves.

A birdie with a yellow bill

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

The water never formed to mind or voice,

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

It did not give of bird or bush,

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. . . . An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

Progress . . . is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature.

Set forth three children under the moon, three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo, done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars—billions upon billions of stars.

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.