How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to... begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bugle-call to arms again sounded in my war-trained ear, the bayonets gleamed, the sabres clashed, and the Prussian helmets and... the eagles of France stood face to face on the borders of the Rhine.... I remembered our own armies, my own war-stricken country and its dead, its widows and orphans, and it nerved me to action for which the physical strength had long ceased to exist, and on the borrowed force of love and memory, I strove with might and main.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skins... and furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On desperate seas long wont to roam, The hyacinth hair, thy classic face,... Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Farewell? a long farewell to all my greatness. This is the state of man; today he puts forth... The tender leaves of hopes, tomorrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls as I do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thank you and Mrs. Emerson for your long kindness to me.... I have been your pensioner for nearly two years, and still left free a...s under the sky. It has been as free a gift as the sun or the summer, though I have sometimes molested you with my mean acceptance of it,--I who have failed to render even those slight services of the hand which would have been for a sign at least; and, by the fault of my nature, have failed of many better and higher services. But I will not trouble you with this, but for once thank you as well as Heaven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am pleased to think of Channing as an inhabitant of the gray town. Seven cities contended for Homer dead. Tell him to remain at ...least long enough to establish Concord's right and interest in him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We visited Whitman the next morning ... and were much interested and provoked. He is apparently the greatest democrat the world ha...s seen. Kings and aristocracy go by the board at once, as they have long deserved to. A remarkably strong though coarse nature, of a sweet disposition, and much prized by his friends. Though peculiar and rough in his exterior, his skin ... red, he is essentially a gentleman. I am still somewhat in a quandry about him,--feel that he is essentially strange to me, at any rate; but I am surprised by the sight of him. He is very broad, but, as I have said, not fine. He said that I misapprehended him. I am not quite sure that I do. He told us that he loved to ride up and down Broadway all day on an omnibus, sitting beside the driver, listening to the roar of the carts, and sometimes gesticulating and declaiming Homer at the top of his voice. He has long been an editor and writer for the newspapers,... but now has no employment but to read and write in the forenoon, and walk in the afternoon, like the rest of the scribbling gentry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefac...tor of our race. He brought death into the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »