I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is.
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd / And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, / I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.... [T]he wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; But in my soul I plainly heard. Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs - out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time - chant, not of the past only, but of the future.
Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.