Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burden of Anxiety greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about. The courage as well as cowardice of fools proceeds from not knowing what is or what is not the proper object of fear; we may account for the extreme hardiness of some men in the same manner as for the terrors of children at a bugbear. The child knows not but that the bugbear is the proper object of fear, the blockhead knows not that a cannonball is so. Fear brings one into more dangers than the caution that goes along with it delivers one form. Something must be done by a man who refuses a challenge to let a challenger see that he has better motives than fear for a refusal.  Parents who never showed their love, complain of want of natural affection in their children; children who never showed their duty, complain of want of natural feeling in their parents; lawmakers who find both so miserable that their affections have never had enough of life’s Sun to develop them, are loud in their moralizings over parents and children too, and cry that the very ties of nature are disregarded. When applied to the purposes of indulgence and debauchery, opium rends the nerves, destroys the strength, weakens the intellect, and undermines life. However, fear not to use its virtues in the rime of need, for the wise man warms him by the same firebrand with which the madman burneth the tent. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its official course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; freewill still free to ply its shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions modified by freewill, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before. And how far a body can hear on the water such nights! I heard people talking at the ferry land. I heard what they said, too, every word of it. God’s own presence is felt lingering yet, as if, in love with his own work, he stayed to touch it again—creating new charms in multiple duration. Prove to a man that his will is governed by something outside of himself, and you have lost all hold on his moral and religious nature. There is nothing bad men want to believe so much as that they are governed by necessity. Necessities usually are odious. However, women meet them. Men evade them and shirk them. To be reduced to necessity is to be wicked; for necessity is not only the temptation, but is such a temptation as human nature is not empowered to resist. Why should a man want to be better than his neighbors? Let him be thankful is he is no worse.  My friends, we are now in the mansions of the rich and great. Why are we now in the mansions of the rich and great, my friends? Is it because we are invited? Because we are invited? Because we are bidden to feast with them, because we are bidden to rejoice with them, because we are bidden to play the lute with them, because we are bidden to dance with them? No. Then why are we here, my friends? Air we in possession of a sinful secret, and doe [sic] we require corn, and cranberry juice, and oil—or, what is much the same thing, money—for the keeping thereof. Probably so, my friends. The most innocent echo has an impish mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker. Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of the outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.