But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil... is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Punishment followed on a grand scale. For ten days, an unconscionable length of time, my father blessed the palms of his child's o...utstretched, four-year-old hands with a sharp switch. Seven strokes a day on each hand; that makes one hundred forty strokes and then some. This put an end to the child's innocence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tell a scoundrel, three or four times a day, that he is the pink of probity, and you make him at least the perfection of "respecta...bility" in good earnest. On the other hand, accuse an honorable man, too petinaciously, of being a villain, and you fill him with a perverse ambition to show you that you are not altogether in the wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two feathered guests from Alabama, two together, And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,... And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand, And every day the she-bird crouched on her nest, silent, with bright eyes, And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My Christian friends, in bonds of love, whose hearts in sweetest union join, Your friendship's like a drawing band, yet we mu...st take the parting hand. Your company's sweet, your union dear; Your words delightful to my ear, Yet when I see that we must part, You draw like cords around my heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since childhood, I have been enchanted by the fact and the symbolism of the right hand and the left--the one the doer, the other t...he dreamer. The right is order and lawfulness, le droit. Its beauties are those of geometry and taut implication. Reaching for knowledge with the right hand is science. Yet to say only that much of science is to overlook one of its excitements, for the great hypotheses of science are gifts carried in the right hand. Of the left hand we say that it is awkward and, while it has been proposed that art students can seduce their proper hand to more expressiveness by drawing first with the left, we nonetheless suspect this function. The French speak of the illegitimate descendent as being à main gauche, and, though the heart is virtually at the center of the thoracic cavity, we listen for it on the left. Sentiment, intuition, bastardy. And should we say that reaching for knowledge with the left hand is art? Again it is not enough, for as surely as the recital of a daydream differs from the well-wrought tale, there is a barrier between undisciplined fantasy and art. To climb the barrier requires a right hand adept at technique and artifice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One who has not only the four S's, which are required in every good lover, but even the whole alphabet; as for example ... Agreeab...le, Bountiful, Constant, Dutiful, Easy, Faithful, Gallant, Honourable, Ingenious, Kind, Loyal, Mild, Noble, Officious, Prudent, Quiet, Rich, Secret, True, Valiant, Wise; the X indeed, is too harsh a letter to agree with him, but he is Young and Zealous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are flood and drouth Over the eyes and in the mouth,... Dead water and dead sand Contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil Gapes at the vanity of toil, Laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »