Henry Beston - The Outermost House (1928)

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The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.

Henry Beston
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars—pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time.

Henry Beston
The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer.

Henry Beston
As well expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair.

Henry Beston
It is dark to-night, and over the plains of ocean the autumnal sky rolls up the winter stars.

Henry Beston
A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual.

Henry Beston
The seas are the heart's blood of the earth.

Henry Beston
The adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature's sustaining and poetic spirit.

Henry Beston
On flocks of birds flying up before him as he walks the beach: "Standing on the beach, I watch the lovely sight of the group instantly turned into a constellation of birds, into a fugitive Pleiades whose living stars keep their chance positions."

Henry Beston
When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness nor integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.

Henry Beston
To know only artificial night is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.

Henry Beston
The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.

Henry Beston
Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man.

Henry Beston
Poor body, time and the long years were the first tailors to teach you the merciless use of clothes. Though some scold today because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful.

Henry Beston
Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself.

Henry Beston
Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.

Henry Beston
Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

Henry Beston