Though the words Canada East on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and unexplored wildernesses, the actual Canada, which m...ight be the colored portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the river, which one of those syllables would more than cover.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To a traveler from the Old World, Canada East may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me, coming... from New England and being a very green traveler withal,... it appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard of Europe and the Middle Ages. Even the names of humble Canadian villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities of antiquity. To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a village in sight, that it is St. Féreol or St. Anne, the Guardian Angel or the Holy Joseph's; or of a mountain, that it was Bélange or St. Hyacinthe! As soon as you leave the States, these saintly names begin ... and thenceforward, the names of mountains, and streams, and villages reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication of poetry,--Chambly, Longueuil, Pointe aux Trembles, Bartholomy, etc., etc.; as if it needed only a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at once. I began to dream of Provence and the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth. They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the woods towards Hudson's Bay were only as the forests of Germany. I could not at once bring myself to believe that the inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me, significant names lead as prosaic lives as we of New England. In short, the Canada which I saw was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in and for criminals to run to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The soldier here, as everywhere in Canada, appeared to be put forward, and by his best foot. They were in the proportion of the so...ldiers to the laborers in an African ant-hill.... On every prominent ledge you could see England's hands holding the Canadas, and I judged from the redness of her knuckles that she would soon have to let go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art... mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The warning given to Louis XVI: "No, sire, this is not a rebellion, it is a revolution," accents the essential difference. It mean...s precisely that "it is the absolute certainty of a new form of government." Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas. Specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas. While even the collective history of a movement of rebellion is always that of a fruitless struggle with facts, of an obscure protest which involves neither methods nor reasons, a revolution is an attempt to shape action to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame. That is why rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of cons...ent and not of rebellion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physica...l.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it... almost from the first day of settlement. The founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,--and no doubt it was a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,--but it chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced too, that a Lower Town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,--interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This universal exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the keeper of a menagerie showing his animals' c...laws. It was the English leopard showing his claws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least several... gentlemen or "squires," there is but one to a seigniory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »