MR. BLAKE,--I received your letter just as I was rushing to Fire Island beach to recover what remained of Margaret Fuller, and rea...d it on the way. That event and its train, as much as anything, have prevented my answering it before. It is wisest to speak when you are spoken to. I will now endeavor to reply, at the risk of having nothing to say. I find that actual events, notwithstanding the singular prominence which we all allow them, are far less real than the creations of my imagination. They are truly visionary and insignificant,--all that we commonly call life and death,--and affect me less than my dreams. This petty stream which from time to time swells and carries away the mills and bridges of our habitual life, and that mightier stream or ocean on which we securely float,--what makes the difference between them? I have in my pocket a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,--an actual button,--and yet all the life that it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but ...brings danger to the many.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. [John] Barrymore's smile was the smile of an actor who hates actors, and who knows that he is going to kill two or three befor...e the play is over. I am not an actor-killer, but I like my Hamlets to dislike actors, if you know what I mean, and I think you don't.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He's always been king of his world, but we'll teach him fear.... Why in a few months it'll be up in lights on Broadway: Kong, the ...Eighth Wonder of the World.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for, of late years?... All their speeches put to...gether and boiled down ... do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper's Ferry engine-house,--that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
John Brown's career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of ...nothing so miraculous in our history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He gathers all the parish there; Points out the place of either yew,... Here Baucis, there Philemon, grew. Till once a parson of our town, To mend his barn, cut Baucis down; At which, 'tis hard to be believed How much the other tree was grieved, Grew scrubby, died a-top, was stunted: So the next parson stubbed and burnt it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »