The birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe,--these are the onl...y traces of man, a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the "South Sea"; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The river ... banks were seven or eight feet high, and densely covered with white and black spruce,--which, I think, must be the c...ommonest trees thereabouts,--fir, arbor-vitæ, canoe, yellow and black birch, rock, mountain, and a few red maples, beech, black and mountain ash, the large-toothed aspen, many civil-looking elms, now imbrowned, along the stream, and at first a few hemlocks also.... The immediate shores were also densely covered with the speckled alder, red osier, shrubby willows or sallow, and the like. There were a few yellow lily pads still left, half-drowned, along the sides, and sometimes a white one. Many fresh tracks of moose were visible where the water was shallow, and the lily stems were freshly bitten off by them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The canoe and yellow birch, beech, maple, and elm are Saxon and Norman, but the spruce and fir, and pines generally, are Indian.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I did not know the exact route myself, but steered by the lay of the land, as I do in Boston, and I tried to enter into conversati...on with him, but as he was puffing under the weight of his canoe, not having the usual apparatus for carrying it, but, above all, was an Indian, I might as well have been thumping on the bottom of his birch the while. In answer to the various observations which I made by way of breaking the ice, he only grunted vaguely from beneath his canoe once or twice, so that I knew he was there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like a canoe route across the great lake on whose shore One is left trapped, grumbling not so much at bad luck as... Because only this one side of experience is ever revealed. And that meant something.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the family were a container, it would be a nest, an enduring nest, loosely woven, expansive, and open. If the family were a fru...it, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable--each segment distinct. If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles. If the family were a sport, it would be baseball: a long, slow, nonviolent game that is never over until the last out. If the family were a building, it would be an old but solid structure that contains human history, and appeals to those who see the carved moldings under all the plaster, the wide plank floors under the linoleum, the possibilities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States His laughter tinkled among the teacups.... I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees, And of Priapus in the shrubbery Gaping at the lady in the swing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »