to act as one loves and thinks and dreams and believes, that
is life; and, therefore, no man's life is bounded by physical
confines, no man lives in this place or that, in this house or
that; but every man lives in the world he has conquered for
himself, and no one knows the limits of the domains of another.

The farmer's boy who sows the seed and watches the tender blades
part with volcanic force the surface of the earth, making it to
heave and tremble, who sees the buds and flowers of the spring
ripen into the fruit and foliage of autumn, who follows with
sympathetic vision all the mysterious processes of nature, lives a
broader and nobler life than the merchant who sees naught beyond
the four walls of his counting-room, or the traveller whose
superficial eye marks only the strange and the curious.

In the eyes of those about them Hawthorne "lived" a scant mile
from Emerson; in reality they did not live in the same spheres;
the boundaries of their worlds did not overlap, but, like two
far-separate stars, each felt the distant attraction and admired the
glow of the other, and that was all. The real worlds of Thoreau and
Alcott and Emerson did at times so far overlap that they trod on
common ground, but these periods were so brief and the spaces in
common so small that soon they wandered apart, each circling by
himself in an orbit of his own.

Words at best are poor instruments of thought; the more we use
them the more ambiguous do they become; no man knows exactly what
another means from what he says; every word is qualified by its
context, but the context of every word is eternity. How long shall
we listen to find out what a speaker meant by his opening
sentence?--an hour, a day, a week, a month?--these periods are all
too short, for with every added thought the meaning of the first
is changed for him as well as for us.

"Life" in common speech may mean either mere organic existence or
a metaphysical assumption; we speak of the life of a tree, and the
life of a man, and the life of a soul, of the life mortal and the
life immortal. Who can tell what we have in mind when we talk of
life? No one, for we cannot tell ourselves. We speak of life one
moment with a certain matter in mind, possibly the state of our
garden; in the infinitesimal fraction of a second additional cells
of our brain come into activity, additional areas are excited, and
our ideas scale the walls of the garden and scatter over the face
of the ea