Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A... smile has dried my tears.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r, Thou's met me in an evil hour;... For I maun crush amang the stoure Thy slender stem: To spare thee now is past my pow'r, Thou bonnie gem.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Her sheep follow'd her, as their tails did them. (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)... And this song is consider'd a perfect gem, And as to the meaning, it's what you please.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:... Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of... the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection--the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The service of philosophy, and of religion and culture as well, to the human spirit, is to startle it into a sharp and eager obser...vation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,--for that moment only.... How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses?... To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for habit is relative to a stereotypical world; meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The wanton snow flew to her breast, Like pretty birds into their nest,... But, overcome with whiteness there, For grief it thaw'd into a tear: Thence falling on her garments' hem, To deck her, froze into a gem.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »