When he took refuge in a cave near Mecca, being on his flight (Hegira) to Medina, “by the time that the Koreishites [who were close behind][160] reached the mouth of the cavern, an acacia tree had sprung up before it, in the spreading branches of which a pigeon had made its nest, and laid its eggs, and over the whole a spider had woven its web.”
He said of himself, “I am no king, but the son of a Koreishite woman, who ate flesh dried in the sun.”
He exacted “a tithe of the productions of the earth, where it was fertilized by brooks and rain; and a twentieth part where its fertility was the result of irrigation.”
April 22. Had mouse-ear in blossom for a week. Observed the crowfoot on the Cliffs in abundance, and the saxifrage. The wind last Wednesday, April 16th, blew down a hundred pines on Fair Haven Hill.
Having treated my friend ill, I wished to apologize; but, not meeting him, I made an apology to myself.
It is not the invitation which I hear, but which I feel, that I obey.
April 26. The judge whose words seal the fate of a man for the longest time and furthest into eternity is not he who merely pronounces the verdict of the law, but he, whoever he may be, who, from a love of truth and unprejudiced by any custom or enactment of men, utters a true opinion or sentence concerning him. He it is that sentences him.[161] More fatal, as affecting his good or ill fame, is the utterance of the least inexpugnable truth concerning him, by the humblest individual, than the sentence of the supremest court in the land.
Gathered the mayflower and cowslips yesterday, and saw the houstonia, violets, etc. Saw a dandelion in blossom.
Are they Americans, are they New-Englanders, are they inhabitants of Concord,—Buttricks and Davises and Hosmers by name,—who read and support the Boston Herald, Advertiser, Traveller, Journal, Transcript, etc., etc., Times? Is that the Flag of our Union?
Could slavery suggest a more complete servility? Is there any dust which such conduct does not lick and make fouler still with its slime? Has not the Boston Herald acted its part well, served its master faithfully? How could it have gone lower on its belly? How can a man stoop lower than he is low? do more than put his extremities in the place of that head he has? than make his head his lower extremity? And when I say the Boston Herald I mean the Boston press, with such few and slight exceptions as need not be made. When I have taken up this paper or the Boston Times, with my cuffs turned up, I have heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column; I have felt that I was handling a paper picked out of the public sewers, a leaf from the gospel of the gambling-house, the groggery, and the brothel, harmonizing with the gospel of the Merchants’ Exchange.[162]