To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It's easy to say no, even... if it means dying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He carried no change of clothing, but putting on a stout, thick jacket, which he laid aside in the canoe, and seizing a full-sized... axe, his gun and ammunition, and a blanket, which would do for a sail or knapsack, if wanted, and strapping on his belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked off at once, ready to be gone all summer. This looked very independent; a few simple and effective tools, and no india-rubber clothing. He was always the first ready to start in the morning, and if it had not held some of our property, would not have been obliged to roll up his blanket.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We had got a loaf of home-made bread, and musk and water melons for dessert. For this farmer, a clever and well-disposed man, cult...ivated a large patch of melons for the Hooksett and Concord markets. He hospitably entertained us the next day, exhibiting his hop-fields and kiln and melon-patch, warning us to step over the tight rope which surrounded the latter at a foot from the ground, while he pointed to a little bower at one corner, where it connected with the lock of a gun ranging with the line, and where, he informed us, he sometimes sat in pleasant nights to defend his premises against thieves. We stepped high over the line, and sympathized with our host's on the whole quite human, if not humane, interest in the success of his experiment. That night especially thieves were to be expected, from rumors in the atmosphere, and the priming was not wet. He was a Methodist man, who had his dwelling between the river and Uncannunuc Mountain; who there belonged, and stayed at home there, and by the encouragement of distant political organizations, and by his own tenacity, held a property in his melons, and continued to plant. We suggested melon seeds of new varieties and fruit of foreign flavor to be added to his stock. We had come away up here among the hills to learn the impartial and unbribable influence of Nature. Strawberries and melons grew as well in one man's garden as another's, and the sun lodges as kindly under his hillside,--when we had imagined that she inclined rather to some few earnest and faithful souls whom we know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their a...gility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All that is necessary to do with this drink is to place it in an open saucer on the window sill and inhale deeply from across the ...room. In about eight seconds the top of the inhaler's head rises slowly and in a dignified manner until it reaches the ceiling where it floats, bumping gently up and down. The teeth then drop out and arrange themselves on the floor to spell "Portage High School, 1930" the eyes roll upward and backward, and a strange odor of burning rubber fills the room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not all bad, this getting old, ripening. After the fruit has got its growth it should juice up and mellow. God forbid I shou...ld live long enough to ferment and rot and fall to the ground in a squash.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Draw up the dew. Swell with pacific violence. Take shape in silence. Grow as the clouds grew.... Beautiful brood the cornlands, and you are heavy; Leafy the boughs--they also hide big fruit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fruit cannot drop through this thick air... fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he i...s capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Amongst the learned the lawyers claim first place, the most self-satisfied class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphus an...d string together six hundred laws in the same breath, no matter whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »