Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. - Walt Whitman

And your very flesh shall be a great poem

Clear and sweet is my soul . . . . and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is nor a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay — the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, not on a few coteries of writers.