The Blog of Henry David Thoreau: sympathy with morning and spring...Thoreau's Journal: 25-Feb-1859

2.25.2014

sympathy with morning and spring
...Thoreau's Journal: 25-Feb-1859

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature,—if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you,—know that the morning and the spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

2 comments:

michael jameson said...: i have never walked outside in the morning without saying good morning to the world! it should be greeted as it greets me! stop for a moment and listen and watch it greet you ! michael jameson oldantiqueguy@hotmail.com; Feb 28, 2010, 4:45:00 PM
vanjulio said...: I returned from a foreign travel and find myself waking up at 5am because of the time change. I used to wake up around 7:30am and rush straight to work with hardly any notice of the morning.....

what a difference and increase of the quality to me life. You don't need to be bathing in the glow of a TV at night. You should be in bed and wake up with the sun.

This fulfills my soul.; Feb 25, 2011, 4:26:00 PM

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one of the native forces

“Thoreau was a surprising fellow—he is not easily grasped—is elusive: yet he is one of the native forces—stands for a fact, a movement, an upheaval: Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters: then he is an outdoor man: all outdoor men everything else being equal appeal to me. Thoreau was not so precious, tender, a personality as Emerson: but he was a force—he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame.”

~Walt Whitman as recorded by Horace Traubel

the simple print

The text is from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis Allen, 14 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906).

Each blog post is an excerpt from that day's entry in the Journal, and although not necessarily the complete entry, it is an integral and intact section thereof.

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.... One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great." -Emerson