For these Canadian houses have no front door, properly speaking. Every part is for the use of the occupant exclusively, and no par...t has reference to the traveler or to travel. Every New England house, on the contrary, has a front and principal door opening to the great world, though it may be on the cold side, for it stands on the highway of nations, and the road which runs by it comes from the Old World and goes to the far West; but the Canadian's door opens into his backyard and farm alone, and the road which runs behind his house leads only from the church of one saint to that of another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nearest beach to us on the other side, whither we looked, due east, was on the coast of Galicia, in Spain, whose capital is Sa...ntiago, though by old poets' reckoning it should have been Atlantis or the Hesperides; but heaven is found to be farther west now.... A little south of east was Palos, where Columbus weighed anchor, and farther yet the pillars which Hercules set up; concerning which when we inquired at the top of our voices what was written on them,--for we had the morning sun in our faces, and could not see distinctly,--the inhabitants shouted Ne plus ultra (no more beyond), but the wind bore to us the truth only, plus ultra (more beyond), and over the Bay westward was echoed ultra (beyond). We spoke to them through the surf about the Far West, the true Hesperia, heos peras or end of the day, the This Side Sundown, where the sun was extinguished in the Pacific, and we advised them to pull up stakes and plant those pillars of theirs on the shore of California, whither all our folks were gone,--the only ne plus ultra now. Whereat they looked crestfallen on their cliffs, for we had taken the wind out of all their sails.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Far less brilliant, original, and versatile than the Greeks, the Romans were content to borrow most of their culture from them. Th...ey gave it their own practical bent, however, translating it into terms more suitable for universal use. They were able to transmit it to the barbaric West and thereby to lay the foundations of modern Europe. Then they systematized education, bequeathing the seven liberal arts to the Middle Ages. They adapted Greek philosophy to daily needs, applying it to government and recasting it into a philosophy of life available to men without high gifts. They developed the type of cultivated gentleman--the type of Cicero, Horace, and Pliny the Younger, who were less spontaneous and exciting than the Greeks but more moderate, urbane and sensible.... The practical sense of the Romans also led to some original contributions, notably their monumental architecture. While the Greeks stuck to their simple post and lintel, the Romans exploited the possibilities of the arch, the dome, and the vault to erect baths, palaces, amphitheaters, and government buildings.... Their architecture was more humanistic than the Greek in that it contributed much more to civic life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone... Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When it is all over and the blood Runs out, do not bury this man... By the far river (where never stood His fathers) flowing to the West, But take him East where life began.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all nations the English undoubtedly proved hitherto that they had the most business here. Yet I am not sure but I have most sym...pathy with that spirit of adventure which distinguished the French and Spaniards of those days, and made them especially the explorers of the American Continent,--which so early carried the former to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the north, and the latter to the same river in the south. It was long before our frontiers reached their settlements in the West. So far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise of traders.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was evident that they had not advanced since the settlement of the country, that they were quite behind the age, and fairly rep...resented their ancestors in Normandy a thousand years ago. Even in respect to the common arts of life, they are not so far advanced as a frontier town in the West three years old. They have no money invested in railroad stock, and probably never will have. If they have got a French phrase for a railroad, it is as much as you can expect of them. They are very far from a revolution, have no quarrel with Church or State, but their vice and their virtue is content. As for annexation, they have never dreamed of it; indeed, they have not a clear idea what or where the States are. The English government has been remarkably liberal to its Catholic subjects in Canada, permitting them to wear their own fetters, both political and religious, as far as was possible for subjects. Their government is even too good for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends but the worms or fishes. Their owners were coming to the New World, as... Columbus and the Pilgrims did; they were within a mile of its shores; but, before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there is far more universal and convincing evidence--though it has not yet been discovered by science--than Columbus had of this: not merely mariners' tales and some paltry driftwood and seaweed, but a continual drift and instinct to all our shores. I saw their empty hulks that came to land; but they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some shore yet further west, toward which we are all tending, and which we shall reach at last, it may be through storm and darkness, as they did. No doubt, we have reason to thank God that they have not been "shipwrecked into life again."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »