We were soon at the Aboljacarmegus Falls.... It seemed as if it needed only a little familiarity, and a little more skill, to navi...gate down such falls as Niagara itself with safety. At any rate, I should not despair of such men in the rapids above Table Rock, until I saw them actually go over the falls, so cool, so collected, so fertile in resources are they. One might have thought that these were falls, and that falls were not to be waded through with impunity, like a mud-puddle. There was really danger of their losing their sublimity in losing their power to harm us. Familiarity breeds contempt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The tract you have ceded will soon be surveyed and sold, and immediately afterwards will be occupied by a white population. You wi...ll soon be in a state of starvation. You will commit depredations upon the property of our citizens. You will be resisted, punished, perhaps killed. Now, is it not better peaceably to remove to a fine, fertile country, occupied by your own kindred, and where you can raise all the necessaries of life, and where game is yet abundant?... You have no right to stay, and you must go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Insurrection:... insurrection as soon as circumstances allow: insurrection, strenuous, ubiquitous: the insurrection of the masses:... the holy war of the oppressed: the republic to make republicans: the people in action to initiate progress. Let the insurrection announce with its awful voice the decrees of God: let it clear and level the ground on which its own immortal structure shall be raised. Let it, like the Nile, flood all the country that it is destined to make fertile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In 1694 a law was passed "that every settler who deserted a town for fear of the Indians should forfeit all his rights therein." B...ut now, at any rate, as I have frequently observed, a man may desert the fertile frontier territories of truth and justice, which are the State's best lands, for fear of far more insignificant foes, without forfeiting any of his civil rights therein. Nay, townships are granted to deserters, and the General Court, as I am sometimes inclined to regard it, is but a deserters' camp itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We noticed several other sandy tracts in our voyage; and the course of the Merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by it...s yellow sand-banks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. Lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. Railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prarie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes, si...nce they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed. The countless shoals which annually coast the shores of Europe and America are not so interesting to the student of nature as the more fertile law itself ... from which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or lesser numbers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The horned pout (Pimelodus nebulosus), sometimes called Minister, from the peculiar squeaking noise it makes when drawn out of the... water, is a dull and blundering fellow, and, like the eel, vespertinal in his habits and fond of the mud. It bites deliberately, as if about its business.... They are extremely tenacious of life, opening and shutting their mouths for half an hour after their heads have been cut off; a bloodthirsty and bullying race of rangers, inhabiting the fertile river bottoms, with ever a lance in rest, and ready to do battle with their nearest neighbor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were very few houses along the road, yet they did not altogether fail, as if the law by which men are dispersed over the glo...be were a very stringent one, and not to be resisted with impunity or for slight reasons. There were even the germs of one or two villages just beginning to expand. The beauty of the road itself was remarkable. The various evergreens, many of which are rare with us,... lined its sides, in some places, like a long front yard, springing up from the smooth grass-plots which uninterruptedly border it, and are made fertile by its wash; while it was but a step on either hand to the grim, untrodden wilderness, whose tangled labarynth of living, fallen, and decaying trees only the deer and moose, the bear and wolf can easily penetrate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they ar...e in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; an...d we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »