Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, Sliding by semi-tones till I sink to a minor,--yes,... And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground, Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One thing is plain for all men of common sense and common conscience, that here, here in America, is the home of man. After all th...e deductions which are to be made of for our pitiful politics, which stake every gravest national question on the silly die, whether James or whether Jonathan shall sit in the chair and hold the purse; after all the deduction is made for our frivolities and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses its balance, redresses itself presently, which offers opportunity to the human mind not known in any other region.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To stand on common ground here and there gritty with pebbles... yet elsewhere 'fine and mellow-- uncommon fine for ploughing' there to labor planting the vegetable wordsLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the progress of politics, as in the common occurrences of life, we are not only apt to forget the ground we have travelled over..., but frequently neglect to gather up experiences as we go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one lives in this room without confronting the whiteness of the wall... behind the poems, planks of books, photographs of dead heroines. Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The common reader ... differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. ...He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole--a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure; his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »