But parents can be understanding and accept the more difficult stages as necessary times of growth for the child. Parents can appr...eciate the fact that these phases are not easy for the child to live through either; rapid growth times are hard on a child. Perhaps it's a small comfort to know that the harder-to-live-with stages do alternate with the calmer times,so parents can count on getting periodic breaks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hounding of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the horizon may have first suggested the notes of the hunting-horn to alte...rnate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. This natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient world before the horn was invented.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the ...same time, it's just wonderful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The si...des are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very pleasing effect. When the artist has arranged his materials with an eye to just proportion--the small and the large flakes in alternate rows, and separated by carefully-considered intervals--I know of nothing more cheerful to look upon than a spirited Syrian fresco. Nothing in this world has such a charm for me as to stand and gaze for hours and hours upon the inspired works of these old masters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is t...ruly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold ...the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like ident...ical propositions.... Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakespeare's dramatic, Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shakespeare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakespeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A good swimmer c...an cross a wide river, a lake, even the English Channel; no one, as far as we know, has ever swum the Atlantic Ocean, or is likely to do so. Even a champion swimmer, if he had business which required to spend alternate weeks in Paris and London, would not make the trip regularly by swimming the English Channel. Although we can force ourselves through water by skill and main strength, for all practical purposes our ability to traverse water is only as good as our ships or our airplanes. And so with the activities of our brains. Thinking is probably as foreign to human nature as is water; it is an unnatural element into which we throw ourselves with hesitation, and in which we flounder once we are there. We have learned, during the millenniums, to do rather well with thinking, but only if we buoy ourselves up with words. Some thinking of a simple sort we can do without words, but difficult and sustained thinking, presumably, is completely impossible without their aid, as traversing the Atlantic Ocean is presumably impossible without instruments or supramarine transportation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Germany is a queer country: one can't regard it dispassionately. I alternate between hating it thoroughly, stick, stock and stone,... and yearning over it fit to break my heart. I can't help feeling it a young and adorable country--adolescent--with the faults of adolescence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It might become a wheel spoked red and white In alternate stripes converging at a point... Of flame on the line, with a second wheel below, Just rising, accompanying, arranged to cross, Through weltering illuminations, humps Of billows, downward, toward the drift-fire shore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »