¹ Praise the Lord, my soul.
Lord my God, you are very great;
    you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
² The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
    he stretches out the heavens like a tent
³ and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
    and rides on the wings of the wind.
⁴ He makes winds his messengers,
    flames of fire his servants.

¹⁴ He makes grass grow for the cattle,
    and plants for people to cultivate—
    bringing forth food from the earth:

¹⁶ The trees of the Lord are well watered,
    the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
¹⁷ There the birds make their nests;
    the stork has its home in the junipers.

³³ I will sing to the Lord all my life;
    I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
³⁴ May my meditation be pleasing to him,
    as I rejoice in the Lord.

Psalm 104:1-4,14,16-17, 33-34 NIV

Thinking this afternoon of the prospect of my writing lectures and going abroad to read them the next winter, I realized how incomparably great the advantages of obscurity and poverty which I have enjoyed so long (and may still perhaps enjoy). I thought with what more than princely, with what poetical, leisure I had spent my years hitherto, without care or engagement, fancy-free. I have given myself up to nature, I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me; I have spent a couple of years, for instance, with the flowers chiefly, having none other so binding engagement as to observe when they opened; I could have afforded to spend a whole fall observing the changing tints of the foliage. Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and poverty! I cannot overstate this advantage. I do not see how I could have enjoyed it, if the public had been expecting as much of me as there is danger now that they will. If I go abroad lecturing, how shall I ever recover the lost winter? It has been my vacation, my season of growth and expansion, a prolonged youth.

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Volume VII, September 19, 1854, Page 46

Photo courtesy if Jeff Anderson