We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little thi...s village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked,--goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure--if they are, indeed, so well off--to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look at your [English] ladies of quality--are they not forever parting with their husbands--forfeiting their reputations--and is t...heir life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls--who have politeness, sense and conversation--but these are few--and then look at your trademen's daughters--what are they?--poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Younger sisters are almost different beings from elder ones, but thank God it is quite and unaffectedly without repining or envy t...hat I see my elder sister gad about and visit, etc.--when I rest at home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anne of Austria (with great submission to a Crowned Head do I say it) was a B----. She had spirit and courage without parts, devot...ion without common morality, and lewdness without tenderness either to justify or to dignify it. Her two sons were no more Lewis the Thirteen's than they were mine.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 »