England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

Strange country, this...England.

The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, in the winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, the cultivated, is hidden or negatived.

This is the porcelain clay of humankind.