I had thought to observe on this carry when we crossed the dividing line between the Penobscot and St. John, but as my feet had ha...rdly been out of water the whole distance, and it was all level and stagnant, I began to despair of finding it. I remembered hearing a good deal about the "highlands" dividing the waters of the Penobscot from those of the St. John, as well as the St. Lawrence, at the time of the northeast boundary dispute.... I thought that if the commissioners themselves, and the King of Holland with them, had spent a few days here, with their packs upon their backs, looking for that "highland," they would have had an interesting time, and perhaps it would have modified their views of the question somewhat. The King of Holland would have been in his element.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded th...eir crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Mum's Rudesheimer And the church of St. Geryon... Are the two things alone That deserve to be known In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might say, for example, that a patient has a kind of St Vitus's dance; a kind of dropsy; a kind of nerve fever; a kind of ague.... One would never say, however (to end once and for all the confusion of these names) "He has St. Vitus's dance," "He has nerve fever," "He has dropsy," "He has ague," since there simply are not any fixed, unchanging diseases to be known by such names.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as t...hrough a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christians are to be taught that the pope would and should wish to give of his own money, even though he had to sell the basilica ...of St. Peter, to many of those from whom certain hawkers of indulgences cajole money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two destitute lives. Two sickly bachelors, chaste though without vows, deprived of all daily affection, suffering all the torments... of poetic passion, but for the Idea--adventurers of the mind only. Two existences virtually devoid of external vicissitudes. For one, the breaking-off of an engagement, the final attack against the Church, and death at forty-two. For the other, still less: a few years' professorship, a long wandering solitude, madness at forty-four. Each produced in some fifteen years his difficult, seminal work, and attracted only in extremis, by scandal, the attention of a few contemporaries. This external nakedness, contrasting with so much inner pathos, renders these lives exemplary; two pure tensions. In them the action of the mythic powers perfectly reveals its slow movements of approach, of alternating emergence and eclipse. These two chaste men meditated much on love, on women, and on marriage. Nietzsche has certainly written less on these subjects than Kierkegaard, but his work is no less rich in brief, often brazenly contradictory judgments on these three themes. It is remarkable that Nietzsche's contradictions afford a faithful epitome of Kierkegaard's, which in their turn repeat those of St. Paul himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The inhabitants of St. John's and vicinity are described by an English traveler as "singularly unprepossessing," and before comple...ting his period he adds, "besides, they are generally very much disaffected to the British crown." I suspect that that "besides" should have been a "because."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The traveller on the prarie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of ...St. Mary a fisherman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »