human feet, awaits us

  [begin leaf 1 recto]

[cut away] human feet, awaits you us perhaps at the next corner, or through the range of an ordinary boarding house.—

Noble as books and the writers of books are—the leaven of the ^true bread of the world ^life, the ladder stairs of humanity, the cables that holds to our us, as to a shore, the freighted ciphers ^{supply ship} of the past—there is something better than any and all books, and that is the real stuff whereof they are the artificial transcript.—^{and portraiture.—}

There are plenty who do not own books, but where is the man who every ^all maen and womaen posesses the in fee simple the vast ^{curbless and bottomless} mine itself, of which ^whence books are but the dust and ^of scraps.—

I remember at an evening party once at an up-town palace, we were with great caution. You may not ^^be on visiting towns terms with the grand family in the up-town palace who paid a great sum for ^{I you have not the great pictures and sculpture of the world—the memoirs of art;} You I have not yet ^never seen the fragment of the true cross ^{in Rome,} or ^^{the Last Judgment, that} that magnolia of art ^^{the Last Judgment;} the Last Judgment; but where, under the sun by day or the stars by night, ^{what grade of latitude and longitude,} will you need ^{I on the sea or on the land,} be without the autograph of God?—What black and stupid hour is that, while the unspeakable sSomething in man's eyes any where beams upon you ^me that you ^I do not feel the hint ^^{and the extasy of the presence} of God?— himself?—

You ^We are ^{I am} not on visiting terms with the rich connoisseur at his palace up town, who shows his envying visitors through his ^sumptuous galleries ^of — ^of Rich work ^{from Italy and France, that} they all are, and I too love to see them with [cut away] many many thousand dollars. [cut away] a quarter of a million.—X

  [begin leaf 1 verso]