We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip our feet ...with, and all are tripped up first and last. But the mighty Mother who had been so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some great joys.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A young person is a person with nothing to learn One who already knows that ice does not chill and fire does not burn . . ....r />It knows it can spend six hours in the sun on its first day at the beach without ending up a skinless beet, And it knows it can walk barefoot through the barn without running a nail in its feet. . . . Meanwhile psychologists grow rich Writing that the young are ones' should not undermine the self-confidence of which.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Olympe was the first to enter the circle, generously lifting her dress on each side, as if to signify that she opened her belly, h...er chest to the group. Round, full, she brought to mind a curly-leafed breadfruit, and as soon as she began to dance, she was the breadfruit that a pole has dropped from the tree and that starts to roll down the hill, past paths and roads, descending and ascending from a powerful impulse, to the point of making us forget that the ground beneath her feet was flat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The square dance fiddler's first concern is to carry a tune, but he must carry it loud enough to be heard over the noise of stampi...ng feet, the cries of the "caller," and the shouts of the dancers. When he fiddles, he "fiddles all over"; feet, hands, knees, head, and eyes are all busy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From the foundation of a wooden observatory ... we could see Monadnock, in simple grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thou...sand feet higher, still the "far blue mountain," though with an altered profile. The first day the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like looking into the sky again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aerial Polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees and hear the lowing of kine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The river ... banks were seven or eight feet high, and densely covered with white and black spruce,--which, I think, must be the c...ommonest trees thereabouts,--fir, arbor-vitæ, canoe, yellow and black birch, rock, mountain, and a few red maples, beech, black and mountain ash, the large-toothed aspen, many civil-looking elms, now imbrowned, along the stream, and at first a few hemlocks also.... The immediate shores were also densely covered with the speckled alder, red osier, shrubby willows or sallow, and the like. There were a few yellow lily pads still left, half-drowned, along the sides, and sometimes a white one. Many fresh tracks of moose were visible where the water was shallow, and the lily stems were freshly bitten off by them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While my companions were seeking a suitable spot ... I improved the little daylight that was left in climbing the mountain alone....... I began to work my way, scarcely less arduous than Satan's anciently through Chaos, up the nearest though not the highest peak, at first scrambling on all fours over the tops of ancient black spruce trees (Abies nigra), old as the flood, from two to ten or twelve feet in height, their tops flat and spreading, and their foliage blue, and nipped with cold, as if for centuries they had ceased growing upward against the bleak sky, the solid cold.... This was the sort of garden I made my way over, for an eighth of a mile, at the risk, it is true, of treading on some of the plants, not seeing any path through it,--certainly the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled. "Nigh foundered on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Standing on the snow-covered plain ... I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under ...my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy ruptu...re, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank,--for the sun acts on one side first,--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,--had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the gutteral g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feather and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »