What do we want with this vast and worthless area, of this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and wh...irlwinds, of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs; to what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, or those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their very base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of 3,000 miles, rockbound, cheerless, uninviting and not a harbor in it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And midway We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its... Being able to stop us in the headlong night Toward the nothing of the coast.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradicti...ons, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior--these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Forced from home, and all its pleasures, Afric's coast I left forlorn;... To increase a stranger's treasures, O'er the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, Paid my price in paltry gold; But, though theirs they have enroll'd me, Minds are never to be sold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Swift while the woof is whole, turn now my spirit, swift,... and tear the pattern there, the flowers so deftly wrought, the border of sea-blue, the sea-blue coast of home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your eyes have pardoned our faults, your hands have touched us... you have leaned forward a little and the waves can never thrust us back from the splendour of your ragged coast.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »