Ever and anon something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of. The limits of the actual are set some thoughts further off. That which had seemed a rigid wall of vast thickness unexpectedly proves a thin and undulating drapery. The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations. The fact that a rare and beautiful flower which we never saw, perhaps never heard of, for which therefore there was no place in our thoughts, may at length be found in our immediate neighborhood, is very suggestive.
Nature is beautiful only as a place where a life is to be lived.
It is not beautiful to him who has not resolved on a beautiful life. He sees a flower or other object, and it is beautiful or affecting to him because it is a symbol of his thought, and what he indistinctly fells or perceives is matured in some other organization. The object I behold correspond to my mood. Here is the barber, sailing up the still, dark, cloud-reflecting river in the long boat he built so elaborately himself, with two large sails set. This is the season of small fruits.