MR. BLAKE,--I received your letter just as I was rushing to Fire Island beach to recover what remained of Margaret Fuller, and rea...d it on the way. That event and its train, as much as anything, have prevented my answering it before. It is wisest to speak when you are spoken to. I will now endeavor to reply, at the risk of having nothing to say. I find that actual events, notwithstanding the singular prominence which we all allow them, are far less real than the creations of my imagination. They are truly visionary and insignificant,--all that we commonly call life and death,--and affect me less than my dreams. This petty stream which from time to time swells and carries away the mills and bridges of our habitual life, and that mightier stream or ocean on which we securely float,--what makes the difference between them? I have in my pocket a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,--an actual button,--and yet all the life that it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is still a great deal of legalism in the Old Testament idea of sin. The emphasis in the Sermon on the Mount is very differen...t from that in the commandments that Moses brought down from Sinai. The commandments have been translated into beatitudes. "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth," is not a sentence one could read in the Old Testament without a jolt, but by the time we reach it in the New Testament, we have been prepared for it. It is set in the context of the rest of Christ's life and teaching. Without that example the sentence carries little conviction because there is no evidence that the meek do or ever will inherit the earth. We have been turned away from a concern merely with our outward acts, to contemplate what lies most deep in our innermost selves, hidden from all but ourselves and God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abando...n the trunk and body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The children are all crying in their pens and the surf carries their cries away.... They are old men who have seen too much, their mouths are full of dirty clothes, the tongues poverty, tears like pus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He slipped his hand and ran away! He hadn't gone a yard when--Bang!... With open jaws, a lion sprang, And hungrily began to eat The boy: beginning at his feet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh! snatch'd away in beauty's bloom, On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;... But on thy turf shall roses rear Their leaves, the earliest of the year;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »