Every large and extended estate, be it this very farm, or the court at the capital, has its vassals, its servants, its parasites, its willing subjects. The world is the same everywhere.
Peasant life is not the elegant world, but there must be plow horses as well as carriage horses.
To live out of one's self, to give full sway to one's native temperament, to remain unmoved by external influences:--thus may one learn to know himself and that which is highest. It is in the desert waste that God reveals himself to the individual heart. The bush burns and yet is not consumed.
Whenever I look at the mountains, I am impressed anew with their sublimity.
The world below me is covered by a sea of mist from which the mountain peaks here and there protrude. With every day, as it were, I behold the first day of creation.
I am beginning to understand the idea of the sublime. It is the awe of greatness, not the awe of fear. I feel as if dwelling in a temple.