To live is to love, and to think, and to dream, and to believe, and 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 earth.  If we attempt to explain, the very process implies the generation of new ideas and the modification of old, so that long before the explanation of what we meant by the use of a given word is finished, the meaning has undergone a change, and we perceive that what we thought we meant by no means included all that lurked in the mind.