Henry David Thoreau

Where it ends.It fills a few hollows,And makes banks for the swallows,It sets the sand a-blowing,And the blackberries a-growing.

This golden youth long since was past,Its silver manhood went as fast,An iron age drew on at last;‘Tis vain its character to tell,The several fates which it befell,What year it died, when ’twill arise,We only know that here it lies.

Among the signs of autumn I perceiveThe Roman wormwood (called by learned menAmbrosia elatior, food for gods,—For to impartial science the humblest weedIs as immortal once as the proudest flower—)Sprinkles its yellow dust over my shoesAs I cross the now neglected garden.—We trample under foot the food of godsAnd spill their nectar in each dropp…

The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows.

Who, for a year or more,Had daily passed my door,Yet converse none had had with him.I met him in a lane,Him and his cane,About three miles from home,Where I had chanced to roam,And volumes stared at him, and he at me.In a more distant placeI glimpsed his face,And bowed instinctively;Starting he bowed to me,Bowed simultaneously,…

Say, thou modern-winged antique,Was thy mistress ever sick?In each heaving of thy wingThou dost health and leisure bring,Thou dost waive disease and painAnd resume new life again.

Dangling this way and that, their linksWere made so loose and wide,Methinks,For milder weather.A bunch of violets without their roots,And sorrel intermixed,Encircled by a wisp of strawOnce coiled about their shoots,The lawBy which I’m fixed.A nosegay which Time clutched from outThose fair Elysian fields,With weeds and broken stems, in haste,Doth make the rabble routThat wasteThe…

Untarnished fair as is the violetOr anemone, when the spring stew themBy some meandering rivulet, which makeThe best philosophy untrue that aimsBut to console man for his grievences.I have remembered when the winter came,High in my chamber in the frosty nights,When in the still light of the cheerful moon,On the every twig and rail and…

As one she had designed for Beauty’s toy,But after manned him for her own strong-hold.On every side he open was as day,That you might see no lack of strength within,For walls and ports do only serve alwayFor a pretence to feebleness and sin.Say not that Cćsar was victorious,With toil and strife who stormed the House…

The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,The innumerable days.I hide in the solar glory,I am dumb in the pealing song,I rest on the pitch of the torrent,In slumber I am strong.No numbers have counted my tallies,No tribes my house can fill,I sit by the shining Fount of LifeAnd pour the deluge still;And ever by delicate powersGathering…