“ Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. ”
Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1851). copy citation
Author | Henry David Thoreau |
---|---|
Source | Walking |
Topic | personality |
Date | 1851 |
Language | English |
Reference | |
Note | |
Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1022/1022-h/1022-h.htm |
Context
“For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested.”
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