Many a play is like a painted backdrop, something to be looked at from the front. An Ibsen play is like a black forest, something ...you can enter, something you can walk about in. There you can lose yourself: you can lose yourself. And once inside, you find such wonderful glades, such beautiful, sunlit places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The solid and well-defined fir-tops, like sharp and regular spearheads, black against the sky, gave a peculiar, dark, and sombre l...ook to the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trees lay at full length, four or five feet deep, and crossing each other in all directions, all black as charcoal, but perfec...tly sound within, still good for fuel or for timber; soon they would be cut into lengths and burnt again. Here were thousands of cords, enough to keep the poor of Boston and New York amply warm for a winter, which only cumbered the ground and were in the settler's way. And the whole of that solid and interminable forest is doomed to be gradually devoured thus by fire, like shavings, and no man warmed by it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples,... a country diversified with innumerable lake...s and rapid streams, peopled with trout ... salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. Such is the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I now first began to be seriously molested by the black fly, a very small but perfectly formed fly of that color, about one tenth ...of an inch long, which I first felt, and then saw, in swarms about me, as I sat by a wider and more than usually doubtful fork in this dark forest path. The hunters tell bloody stories about them,--how they settle in a ring about your neck, before you know it, and are wiped off in great numbers with your blood. But remembering that I had a wash in my knapsack,... I made haste to apply it to my face and hands, and was glad to find it effectual ... not only against black flies, but all the insects that molested us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of high...ways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. I have looked after the wild stock of the town,... and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm.... I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons. In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »