Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for... the language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all... other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In France, and at the most important period of our history, Catherine de' Medici has suffered more from popular error than any oth...er woman, unless it be Brunehaut or Frédégonde; while Marie de' Medici, whose every action was prejudicial to France, has escaped the disgrace that should cover her name.... Catherine de' Medici ... saved the throne of France, she maintained [the] Royal authority under circumstances to which more than one great prince would have succumbed. Face to face with such leaders of the factions and ambitions of the houses of Guise and of Bourbon as the two Cardinals de Lorraine and the two "Balafrès," the two Princes de Condé, Queen Jeanne d'Albret, Henri IV, the Connétable de Montmorency, Calvin, the Colignys and Théodore de Bèze, she was forced to put forth the rarest fine qualities, the most essential gifts of statesmanship, under the fire of the Calvinist press.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Down in the living room I have a clock which is called a "four-hundred-day" clock, which is supposed to run 400 days without windi...ng. This feat seems to be accomplished by arranging four large cherries on a rotating stem which hangs out of the works of the clock (clearly visible through the glass cover) and they go slowly round one way and then slowly round the other until the person who is watching them has gone mad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The earth is covered thick with other clay, Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,... Rider and horse,--friend, foe,--in one red burial blent!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now folks, I hereby declare the first church of Tombstone, which ain't got no name yet or no preacher either, officially dedicated.... Now I don't pretend to be no preacher, but I've read the Good Book from cover to cover and back again, and I nary found one word agin dancin'. So we'll commence by havin' a dad blasted good dance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stripped of incidental ornaments, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are seen as the same dream dreamed twice over, the second time a...s nightmare; though, to be sure, the terror of the second dream is already at work in the first, whose euphoria persists strangely into the second. In both books, there is a pretended, a quasi-ritual death to the community and its moral codes; though in Tom Sawyer that death is a "lark" undertaken in childish pique, while in Huckleberry Finn it is a last desperate evasion, an act of self-defense. In both, there is a consequent spying on the community from cover to watch the effects of that death, the aftermath of regret: the childish dream of the suicide, who longs to be present at his own discovery, come true. In the one case, however, the spying is a prelude to a triumphant return, a revelation, in the other, to a further flight and concealment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In spring more mortal singers than belong To any one place cover us with song.... Thrush, bluebird, blackbird, sparrow, and robin throng....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »