Sublime

Au cours de toutes mes promenades je n’ai jamais rencontré un homme occupé à une tâche aussi simple et naturelle que la construction de sa propre maison. Nous appartenons à une communauté. Ce n’est pas seulement le tailleur qui, selon le proverbe, est la neuvième partie de l’homme 26, c’est aussi bien le prédicateur, le commerçant et le fermier.

Minott is, perhaps, the most poetical farmer—who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer’s life—that I know. He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labor, and takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not looking forward to the sale of his crops or any pecuniary profit, but he is

“Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” said the poet William Wordsworth.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the

Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there.

Les hommes d’affaires et même les fermiers ne pensaient qu’à ma solitude et à mon oisiveté, à la grande distance qui me séparait d’une chose ou d’une autre ; et ils avaient beau dire qu’ils adoraient se promener à l’occasion dans les bois, on voyait bien que ce n’était pas le cas. Des hommes agités, préoccupés, qui consacraient tout leur temps à

Unlike this businessman, unlike most people, I have no ball to push forward, no project to advance, no future I am building toward. I could work at this job for thirty years and I will make no progress, per se. The public will gain no surer sense of where the mummies or the toilets are. They’ll continue to ask me for King Tut’s tomb, and they won’t

The shade of each departed day falls upon our graves, and the worm exults as he beholds it, to know that we are hastening thither. Daughters, is there no better way to pass the fleeting hours?"