We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees.
The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary.
His result is a dead bird.
The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington.
The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance.
The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature.
Astrology interested us, for it tied a man to the system.
Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star.
However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul’s avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography.
Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct.
Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, prolong life, to arm with power,—was in the right direction.
All our science lacks a human side.
The tenant is more than the house.
Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses.
The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.
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