And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys. X

Put the lights out, we shall see better.

The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.

The ability to read opened up a new and magic world for him, a world he had never dreamed of before. It changed him. It broadened his horizon and gave him vision; and, for a quarter of a century, reading remained the dominant passion of his life.

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls. -from Song of the Open Road

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry

O the blest eyes, the happy hearts, That see, that know the guiding thread so fine, Along the mighty labyrinth. -from Song of the Universal

The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.

We can never know either the hatefulness of sin or the treachery of our self-nature until there is that flash of God upon us. I speak not of a sensation but of an inward revelation of the Lord Himself through His Word. Such a breaking in of divine light does for us what doctrine alone can never do.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.