Construed ... as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certai...n set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses--those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was easy to recognize in him the anti-social animus of a born evangelist, but there was also something else--a kind of voluptuo...us delight in the shabby and preposterous, a perverted aestheticism like that of a latter-day movie or radio fan, a wild will to roll in and snuffle balderdash as a cat rolls in and snuffles catnip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day... In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O Sword, you are the younger brother, the latter-born,... your Triumph, however exultant, must one day be over, in the beginning was the Word.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What art can paint or gild any object in afterlife with the glow which Nature gives to the first baubles of childhood. St. Peter's... cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed. How the imagination cleaves to the warm glories of that tinsel even now! What entertainments make every day bright and short for the fine freshman!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chanuka and St. Nicholas Day came almost together this year--just one day's difference. We didn't make much fuss about Chanuka: we... just gave each other a few little presents and then we had the candles. Because of the shortage of candles we only had them alight for ten minutes, but it is all right as long as you have the song.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"What may this mean? Language of Man pronounced By tongue of brute, and human sense expressed!... The first at least of these I thought denied To beasts, whom God on their creation-day Created mute to all articulate sound; The latter I demur, for in their looks Much reason, and in their actions, oft appears.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 »