“The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrelsWith her meagre pale demoralized daughter.Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sunAnd saying that when she was first marriedShe lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.(It is empty now, the roof has fallenBut the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoodsHave all been cut down, the oaks are standing;The place is now more solitary than ever before.)"When I was nursing my second babyMy husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brakeAnd brought it; I put its mouth to the breastRather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.I had more joy from that than from the others."Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad roadWith market-wagons, mean cares and decay.She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skinSoon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows,I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.”

“What is this thing called life? I believeThat the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,Only we do not call it so--I speak of the lifeThat oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energyMakes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things growFrom a chemical reaction?I think they were here already, I think the rocksAnd the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxieshave their various consciousness, all things are conscious;But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brainBring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glassTo concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearthFrom which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animalsBorn howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryardPrefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,Like the cells of a man's body making one being,They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.”

“They say an infant can't see when it is as young as your sister was, but she opened her eyes, and she looked at me. She was such a little bit of a thing. But while I was holding her, she opened her eyes. I know she didn't really study my face. Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I'm glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, not that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face...You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.”

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, I And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Qut of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother. You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic. But for my children. I would have them keep their dis-tance from the thickening center; corruption.Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountajns. And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught -–they say--God, when he walked on earth.”

“I'm my mother's first child, born when she was almost fourteen years old."Think of it," I said to Laura when I turned twelve. "I'm almost Mother Sarah's age when she was married."Laura looked at me, her squinty eyes even more narrowed. "You could have your own old man as a husband," she said."Shut up," I had said.And she had laughed.”

“The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,The blue pool in the old garden,More than five thousand years has drunk sacrificeOf ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfsNor any future world-quarrel of westeringAnd eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the grey sea-smokeInto pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulgingEyeball of water, arched over to Asia,Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleepingEye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars.”

“I believed, from the solitary and thoughtful way in which my mother murmured her song, that she was alone. And I went softly into the room. She was sitting by the fire, suckling an infant, whose tiny hand she held against her neck. Her eyes were looking down upon its face, and she sat singing to it. I was so far right, that she had no other companion. I spoke to her, and she started, and cried out. But seeing me, she called me her dear Davy, her own boy! and coming half across the room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and laid my head down on her bosom near the little creature that was nestling there, and put its hand up to my lips. I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling in my Heart! I should have been more fit for Heaven than I ever have been since.”