American - Author | April 3, 1837 - March 29, 1921
The type of mind of Whitman's, which seldom or never emerges as a mere mentality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as a personality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself, because its operations are synthetic and not analytic; its mainspring is love and not mere knowledge.
John Burroughs
LoveKnowledgePersonalityMind
Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.
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I have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life. Where country life is safe and enjoyable, where many of the conveniences and appliances of the town are joined to the large freedom and large benefits of the country, a high state of civilization prevails.
LifeGoodFreedomBestThoughtTest
A plump, well-fed stream is as satisfying to behold as a well-fed animal or a thrifty tree. One source of charm in the English landscape is the full, placid stream the season through; no desiccated watercourses will you see there, nor any feeble, decrepit brooks, hardly able to get over the ground.
TreeAnimalLandscapeYouWillSee
Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities - political, commercial, sociological, scientific - of the times in which I have lived.
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My books are, in a way, a record of my life - that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind.
LifeFlowerMindFruitMy LifeWay
Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist.
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Even in rugged Scotland, nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou.
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