Nearer yet to town, you come to ... ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a... prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who comes first in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family,--ââ¬âew-England Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cle...ans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect.... We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of "the sheltered life." Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the spectres of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »