General [George] Crook gave me a very agreeable present this afternoon--a pair of his old brigadier-general straps. The stars are ...somewhat dimmed by hard service, but will correspond pretty well with my rusty old blouse. Of course I am very much gratified by the promotion. I know perfectly well that the rank has been conferred on all sorts of small people and so cheapened shamefully, but I can't help feeling that getting it at the close of a most bloody campaign on the recommendation of fighting generals like Crook and [Philip] Sheridan is a different thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake is very much like Beethoven in his artistic independence and universality. Like Beethoven, he is a pioneer Romantic of that ...heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters. Like Beethoven, he asserts the creative freedom of the imagination within his work and makes a new world of thought out of it. There sounds all through Blake's poetry ... that lyric despair mingled with quickness to exaltation, that sense of a primal intelligence fighting the mind's limitations, that brings Beethoven's last quartets so close to absolute meditation and the Ninth Symphony to a succession of triumphal marches. What is nearest and first in both men is so strong a sense of their own identity that they are always reaching beyond man's conception of his powers. In both there is a positive assertion against suffering, an impa tience with forms and means. As Beethoven said of the violinist who complained of the difficulty of one of the Rasumofsky quartets--"Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose something?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has be...come Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our frigate takes fire, The other asks if we demand quarter?... If our colors are struck and the fighting done? Now I laugh content for I hear the voice of my little captain, We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My grandfather fell on Vinegar Hill, And fighting was not his trade;... But his rusty pike's in the cabin still, With Hessian blood on the blade."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For government, though high, and low, and lower, Put into parts, doth keep in one consent,... Congreeing in a full and natural close, Like music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »