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

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

The house was full of the sound of the gale. It was a winter northeaster, furious with wind and snow, and driving down against us from the dark and desolate North Atlantic and a thousand miles of whitecaps and slavering foam.

— Henry Beston

Every year at the farm I watch the insect kingdom come into its northern being, flourish in what we have of heat and sun, live out its myriad life, and disappear almost as if it had never been.

— Henry Beston

On his own land or on others', he sought the company of rural people. In their husbandry he found the "poignant and poetic recognition of the long continuity of man" that was his own real calling.

— Henry Beston

His Maine books, like Northern Farm, sing of harmonious, self-reliant country living: uncramped, governed by seasonal rhythms, connected to all the generations who’d farmed the land before them.

— Henry Beston

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.

— Henry Beston