Amos Bronson Alcott

“ Virtue sure Were blind as fortune, should she choose the poor Rough cottage man to live in, and despise To dwell in woman's stately edifice; Woman's approved the fairer sex, and we Mean men repent our pedigree. Why choose the father's name, when we may take The mother's a more honor'd blood to make, Woman's of later, though of nobler birth, For she of man was made, man made of earth, The son of dust, and though her sin did breed His fall, again she raised him in her seed; Who had he not her blest creation seen, An Anchorite in Paradise had been. ”

“ Its standing pleasure and intrinsic wealth, The body's virtue, and the soul's good fortune, health. The tree of life when it in Eden stood, Did its immortal head to heaven rear; It lasted a tall cedar till the flood, Now a small thorny shrub it doth appear, Nor will it thrive too everywhere; It always here is freshest seen, 'Tis only here an evergreen: If, through the strong and beauteous fence Of temperance and innocence, And wholesome labors and a quiet mind, Diseases passage find, They must fight for it, and dispute it hard Before they can prevail ”

“ Our standards are ideas, those things of the mind and originals of words.
Thought's winged hand, Marshals in trope and tone The ideal band. Genius alone Holds fast in eye The fleeing God— Brings Beauty nigh— Senses descry Footsteps he trod, Figures he drew, Shapes old and new, The fair, the true, In soul and sod.
Nature is thought immersed in matter, and seen differently as viewed from the one or the other. To the laborer it is a thing of mere uses; to the scholar a symbol and a muse. The same landscape is not the same as seen by poet and plowman. ”

“ The very name of woman becomes soiled if we seek to be related to her by the coarse ties of appetite, instead of the tender threads of affection, the charm of ideas. There are pleasures for keeping as enjoying,—for using delicately, the zest lasting long, the more affluent when tasted with moderation and seldom.
"Who can to love more rich gift make Than to love's self, for love's own sake? Love, that imports in every sense delight, Is fancied in the soul, not appetite: Why love among the virtues is scarce known Is that love is them all contract in one." ”

“ But if a man's soul be once sunk by evil fate or desert, from the sense of this high and heavenly truth into the cold conceit that the original of all lies either in shuffling chance or in the stark root of unknowing nature and brute necessity, all the subtle cords of reason, without the timely recovery of that divine torch within the hidden spirit of his heart, will never be able to draw him out of that abhorred pit of atheism and infidelity. So much better is innocency and piety than subtle argument, and sincere devotion than curious dispute. ”

“ An orchard in bloom is one of the most pleasing sights the eye beholds; as if the firmament had stooped to the tree-tops and touched every twig with spangles, and man had mingled his essence with the seasons, in its flushing tokens. And how rich the spectacle at the autumnal harvest:
"Behold the bending boughs, with store of fruit they tear, And what they have brought forth, for weight, they scarce can bear."
Apples are general favorites. Every eye covets, every hand reaches to them. It is a noble fruit: the friend of immortality, its virtues blush to be tasted. ”

“ The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, Nor yet in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home."
None of us remember when we did not remember, when memory was nought, and ourselves were unborn. Memory is the premise of our sensations, it dates our immortality. Nestling ever in the twilight of our earliest recollections, it cradles our nativity, canopies our hopes, and bears us babes, out of our bodies as into them ”

“ The country, as discriminated from the woods, is of man's creation. The savage has no country. Nor are farms and shops, trade, cities, but civilization in passing and formation. Civilization begins with persons, ideas; the garden and orchard showing the place of their occupants in the scale; these dotting the earth with symbols of civility wherever they ornament its face. Thus by mingling his mind with nature, and so transforming the landscape into his essence, Man generates the homestead, and opens a country to civilization and the arts. ”

“ An elegant abstinence is complimentary to any one, as, fed from the virgin essences of the season, his genius, dispositions, tastes, have no shame to blush for, and modestly claim the honor of being well bred. And one's table, like Apelles', may be fitly pictured with the beauty of sobriety on the one side, the deformity of excess on the other, the feast substantial as it is lyrical, praising itself and those who partake; and his guests as ready to compliment him, as Timotheus did Plato, when he said: "They who dine with the philosopher never complain the next morning." ”

“ A well-clothed soul that's not oppressed, Nor choked with what she should be dressed; A soul sheathed in a crystal shrine, Through which all her bright features shine, As when a piece of wanton lawn, A thin, aerial veil is drawn O'er beauty's face, seeming to hide, More sweetly shows the blushing bride: A soul, whose intellectual beams No mists do mask, no lazy streams: A happy soul that all the way To heaven rides in a summer's day? Wouldst see a man whose well-warmed blood Bathes him in a genuine flood,— A man whose tuned humors be A seat of rarest harmony? ”

“ The Genius trims our lamps while we sleep. It plumbs us by day and levels us by night. Here recumbent as at nature's navel, her energies flood the spirits with puissance, restoring tone and tension for the coming day's occupations. Then what varying scenes rise to fancy's eye, while the mind lapses out of the globe of thought, the house of the senses, into the palaces of memory through the gate of dreams! Under the sway of occult forces we partake of preternatural insights, having access to sources of information unopened to us in our wakeful hours. ”

“ We enter bodies of our bodies, souls of our soul, successively; each organ our prisoner, we in turn the prisoner of each, till by chance the bewildered occupant recover the key to the wards of his apartments, and forth issues into the haunts of his consciousness, the world of natural things. For never is the sleep so profound, the dream so distracting, as to obliterate all sense of the personality,—despite these vagaries of the night, these opiates of the senses, memory sometime dispels the oblivious slumber, and recovers for the mind recollections of its descent and destiny. ”

“ I find books like persons more attractive as they are the more suggestive, more mythical and difficult to render at once to the senses, and enjoy them the more for this blending of nature with mind,—the text sparkling with the author's personality. What is thus implied is more gracefully delivered than if written literally; it piques then the fancy more and calls the higher gifts into play; and an author best serves me who, speaking alike to imagination and reason, arms with figures apt for occasions, thus pluming the genius for discourse. ”

“ The fountains of my hidden life, Are through thy friendship fair."
How handsome our friends are! Say they were not moulded at the celestial potteries, we paint them fair behind the plain exterior they wear to indifferent eyes, and as they appear in our gallery of enamels. For who has not seen the plainest features light with a beauty the eyes had not conceived at the rise of a tender sentiment? a lively thought, the recollection of a noble deed, effacing every trace of ancestral meanness; the friend we love all there without blemish or spot, the image we clasp to our breast and cannot forget. ”

“ Nature his globed thought, Without him she were not, Cosmos from chaos were not spoken, And God bereft of visible token.
A theometer—an instrument of instruments—he gathers in himself all forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being the Spirit's acme, and culmination in nature. A quickening spirit and mediator between mind and matter, he conspires with all souls, with the Soul of souls, in generating the substance in which he immerses his form, and wherein he embosoms his essence. ”

“ A man's speech is the measure of his culture; a graceful utterance the first born of the arts.
Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly; books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon, of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars: actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as these rise and roll. And whoever will strike bold strokes for institutions and literature, must be often afoot with nature and thought in his eye for grasping the select rhetoric for his theme. ”

“ Where sleep the gods There mob-rule sways the state, Treason hath plots and fell debate, Brother doth brother darkly brand, Few faithful midst sedition's storm do stand, The whole of virtue theirs to stay the reeling land.
"States are destroyed, not so much from want of courage as for want of virtue, and the most pernicious of all ignorance is, when men do not love what they approve; written laws being but images of, or substitutes for those true laws which ought to be present in every human soul through a perfect insight into good." ”

“ The compliment thus bestowed upon the sentiment of friendship is most deserved, and suggestive of the magic of its influence at every age, throughout every period of our existence; our life, properly speaking, opening with the birth of fancy and the affections, and maintaining its freshness only as we are under their sway. A friendship formed in childhood, in youth,—by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood,—becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. ”

“ The poet, awakened from the sleep of things, beholds beauty in essence and form, being thus admitted to the secret of causes, the laws of pure Being.
The like of Persons. Every one's glass reflects his bias. If the thinker views men as troglodytes—like Plato's groundlings, unconscious of the sun shining overhead; men of the senses, and mere makeweights—they in turn pronounce him the dreamer, sitting aloof from human concerns, an unproductive citizen and waste power in the world. Still, thought makes the world and sustains it; atom and idea alike being its constituents. ”

“ There are times nevertheless in one's history when abstinence from this first privilege of a freeman and republican, seems a duty best performed in its non-performance, the true means of preserving self-respect, by standing magnanimously as a protest for the right against the wrong—a vote less on the wrong side of a mixed issue, being as two cast on the right side, the silent significance of a name known as the representative of honor and justice, showing where lies the wrong and the shame—the blush of a defeat on the cheek of an ill-gotten victory. ”

“ Yet simple as this duty seems, society with all its aims and appliances, has not as yet attained the refinement of culture needful to the receiving of a child into its bosom, and of educating it to the full demands of its endowments. With the child comes the seed of states; the family being the nursery of the citizen, the measure of a people's civilization. As the homes, so the state; as the parents, so the children. Nor has society fathered its functions till all children, befriended from the first, are fashioned into the image each is capable of attaining. ”

“ If this fresh score of years did not deceive us, shall a life of threescore, with its deeper glances into the mystery, lead us to doubt the longevity of a sentiment of whose imperishableness that life itself is the best evidence we need ask? Are we to be left orphans when taken from nature's arms, robbed of all that made life desirable before? Nature cared for us; Persons failed us, and all unawares we lapsed out of our paradise, its gates barred against us. ”

“ Centuries of culture pass into pure power; piety and genius are parents of piety and genius. But less discriminating than were the ancient carvers in wood and ivory, who, when they had an order for a head of Hermes, or any ordinary god even, searched carefully for substances adapted to receive the proper form, states attempt to fashion saints and rulers out of any materials that chance brings to hand. Omitting mind, or overriding it in our haste to come at immediate and superficial results, we ignore ideas and principles altogether. Aiming at little we attain little. ”

“ So the orchard of Academus suggests the ripest wisdom and most elegant learning of accomplished Greece.
Thus we associate gardens and orchards with the perfect condition of mankind. Gardeners ourselves by birthright, we also mythologize and plant our Edens in the East of us, like our ancestors; the sacredness of earth and heaven still clinging to the tiller of the ground. Him we esteem the pattern man, the most favored of any. His labors have a charming innocency. They yield the gains of a self-respect denied to other callings. His is an occupation friendly to every virtue ”

“ Nor need we wonder at their scarcity or the value we set upon them; life, the essence of good letters as of friendship, being its own best biographer, the artist that portrays the persons and thoughts we are, and are becoming. And the most that even he can do, is but a chance stroke or two at this fine essence housed in the handsome dust, but too fugitive and coy to be caught and held fast for longer than the passing glance; the master touching ever and retouching the picture he leaves unfinished. ”

“ Far from treating the human being with anything like the subtlety and skill displayed by the ancient masters, we wait for the first hint of an institution for training youth into the fulness of their powers, by the genial touch of sensibility, the magnetism of thought. Left instead to the superficial culture of the sects, the traditions of the elders, the guidance of worldlings, they slide soon into vague conjectures, run adrift on the sea of doubt, the shoals of expediency, bereft of faith in themselves as in things unseen and ideal. ”

“ Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs. The passionless laws that sway our unseen Personality are not made lovely to us till thus clothed in human attributes and brought near to our hearts, person embracing person. Not some It in our friends, but the sentiment that transfigures the It into Him, into Her,—this alone makes them ours personally and beloved. Theists in our faith, we pay our vows to the Friend in our friend, thus becoming personally One with the Three, and alone no longer. ”