Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. - Henry David Thoreau

The tree whose fruit we would obtain should not be too rudely shaken even. It is not a time of distress, when a little haste and violence even might be pardoned. It is worse than boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shadows us.

It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould! —painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of the living. So they troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky.

As for the sensuality in Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass, ” I do not so much wish that it was not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read it without harm.