"Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous and unwearied.

It is very natural in its methods, withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success.

I am very refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stories which go dispensing their odours all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, of Indian Oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.

I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf, .  .  ."

Henry Thoreau, Walden

(p. 102 of the 1927 edition)