Animals and Nature

The great brand Made lightnings in the splendor of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea, So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur.

 

“Tirra lirra,” by the river Sang Sir Lancelot.

 

Praise to thee, my Lord, for all thy creatures, Above all Brother Sun Who brings us the day and lends us his light.

 

Drunk we lie down in empty hills, heaven and earth our quilt and pillow. 1

 

California is an Italy without its art. There are subjects for the artist, but it is universally true that the only scenery which inspires utterance is that which man feels himself the master of. The mountains of California are so gigantic that they are not favorable to art or poetry. There are good poets in England but none in Switzerland. There the mountains are too high. Art cannot add to nature.

The things of nature do not really belong tous; we should leave them to our children as we have received them.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

A noiseless patient spider,

[ Punch line of joke about a scorpion stinging a frogthat is carrying him across a river despite the fact that this would result in both their deaths :] I can’t help it. It’s my nature.

But keep the wolf far hence that’s foe to men,

Geniumque loci primamque deorum

Dieu! que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois!

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.

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 water never formed to mind or voice,

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

It did not give of bird or bush,