thy influences are some murmur ai ike want of system in e a a wilderness some in thy slip boxes and honey complain of � want of order i confess but not of in its highest sense who asks a guiding clue through this wide in love of nature such will surely find in live like the er a grove may tempt thy nor be by cares of colder disturbed � no frost the summer s bloom shall drive away nature s wide temple and the dome have plan enough for the free spirits home i the morning breeze ocean that lay like a sick child well nigh death now curl and in eternal play thy breath � sketches july but who the monarch who like who his thought in robes of snow severely and who but my � morning breaks � the inaccessible sun with rays of light the singer crowns whose thought and word are one s a sketch beside me sat one of the few one to draw some keen rays from the sun of truth and guide them to the hearts of men whose mind full ardent to his race o and by given to heavenly asked but one genial touch to wake to music and sing like of a fairer morning which knows no cloud nor leads to noon a sketch she is a thing all grace all loveliness a fragrant flower nursed in an arid waste a many toned and ever winning melody a wrought filled with enchanted wine a living speaking book of the shape revealed to in a dream from our lost star the only beam did you never admire anything your friend did merely because he did it never � you always had a better reason wise man you never knew what it b to love the dial vol i october no thoughts on modern literature there is no better illustration of the laws by which the world is governed than literature there is no luck in it it by fate every scripture is given by the inspiration of god every composition proceeds out of a greater or less depth of thought and this is the measure of its effect the highest class of books are those which express the moral element the next works of imagination and the next works of science � all dealing in realities � what ought to be what is and what appears these in proportion to the truth and beauty they involve remain the rest perish they proceed out of the silent living mind to be heard again by the living mind of the best books it is hardest to write the history those books which are for all time are written indifferently at any time for b h genius is a day without night a ocean which hath no tides and yet is literature in some sort a creature of time always the soul is the source of thought but always the occasion is administered by the low of circumstance religion love ambition war some fierce or it may be some petty annoyance must break the round of perfect circulation or no spark no joy no event can be the poet rambling through the fields or the forest absorbed in contemplation to that degree that his walk is but a pretty dream would never awake to precise thought if the scream of an eagle the cries of a crow or near his head did not break the vol i ho ii on modem sweet nay the finest of the poet come of this unequal the of matter such child on the soul fair daughter of god nature facts with thoughts to yield a poem but the gift of immortality is of the mother s side in the spirit in which they are written is the date of their duration and never in the magnitude of the facts everything lasts in proportion to its beauty in proportion as it was not by any of the writer but flowed from his mind after the divine order of cause and effect it was not his but nature s and shared the of the sea and sky that which is truly told nature herself takes in charge against the and injustice of men for ages was reckoned a gossip in his descriptions of africa and now the sublime silent desert through the mouths of to the truth of the historian and yet men imagine that books are and have no merit in their fortune that the trade and the favor of a few critics can get one book into circulation and defeat another and that in the production of these things the author has chosen and may choose to do thus and so society also wishes to subjects and methods to its writers but neither reader nor author may you cannot reason at will in this and that other vein but only as you must you cannot make quaint and bring to the and of truth things far fetched or fantastic or popular but your method and your subject are in all your nature and in all nature or ever the earth was or it has no worth all that gives still to any book advertised in the morning s newspaper in london or boston is the remains of faith in the breast of men that not book makers but the soul of the universe reports of itself in articulate discourse to day as of old the strongly expressed their sense of the of these words of the spirit by saying that the god made his priest insane took him hither and thither as leaves are whirled by the tempest but we sing as we are bid our are very and tame death and sin have whispered in the ear of the wild horse of heaven and he has become a and a hack and step by step with on modem literature the entrance of this era of 