When one is very young, to read is as it were to pour a continuous stream of water on a parched and virginal plain. The soil seems... to have an endless capacity to drink up the stream, sometimes with prolonged perpetual rapture, sometimes with impartial calm indifference.... But when one is no longer young, to read is a very different matter. The parched plain has become a luxuriant forest with lakes and streams in the midst of it. Every image which enters it evokes ancient visions from the depth of its waters, and every tone rustles among the trees with a music so rich in haunting memories that one grows faint beneath their burden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The forest waves, the morning breaks, The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,... Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be And life pulsates in rock or tree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fish in neighboring streams and lakes are so voracious, it is said, that fishermen have to stand out of sight behind trees whi...le baiting their hooks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm... nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The future of America may or may not bring forth a black President, a woman President, a Jewish President, but it most certainly a...lways will have a suburban President. A President whose senses have been defined by the suburbs, where lakes and public baths mutate into back yards and freeways, where walking means driving, where talking means telephoning, where watching means TV, and where living means real, imitation life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus roving on In confus'd march forlorn, th' adventrous Bands,... With shuddring horror pale, and eyes agast View'd first thir lamentable lot, and found No rest: through many a dark and drearie Vale They pass'd, and many a Region dolorous, O'er many a Frozen, many a fierie Alpe, Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd, Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And God said, Let the waters generate, Reptile with spawn abundant, living soul:... And let fowl fly above the earth, with wings Displayed on the open firmament of heaven. And God created the great whales, and each Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously The waters generated by their kinds, And every bird of wing after his kind; And saw that it was good, and blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, multiply, and in the seas And lakes and running streams the waters fill; And let the fowl be multiplied on the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes, hills and streams and plains; the mountains over our land and nature's wealth... deep under the earth, are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot... Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »