But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandston...e and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,--here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge... Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Universal Soul, as it is called, has an interest in the stacking of hay, the foddering of cattle, and the draining of peat-mea...dows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragil...e flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and rustics; that is selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages. A civilized ...man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Come to me, pretty peat, let me embrace thee! Though thou be fair and feat, do not disgrace me;... For I will constant prove (make no denial!) And be thy dearest love--proof maketh trial. If ought do breed thy pain, I can procure thy gain; Yet, bootless, I complain-- Phyllida flouts me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Deathlessness should be arrived at in a ... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the ...shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »