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 »
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 »
Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,-- Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,... Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,-- Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves, Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood, Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good;--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 »
"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 »
Being resigned is no good; it amounts to the same as being discouraged. It breaks your two arms, and you wait around for miracles ...and for Providence, holding your rosary, doing nothing. You pray for rain, you pray for the harvest, you do your litanies to the saints and to the loas. But, let me tell you, Providence is nothing but man's will not to accept hardship, to tame, day to day, the earth's bad will, to bend the water's whims to fit his needs. Then the earth calls him 'Dear Master', and the water too calls him 'Dear Master', and there is no other Providence than his work as a serious peasant, no other miracle than the fruits of his hands.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 »
I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the Walton of this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, England, with his... son,--the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. A straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method,--for youth and age then went a-fishing together,--full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »