Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his serv...ice, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library,--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature. I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our ow...n will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form,... The luster of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? MYes, but not this alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but--" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the t...ime would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It so happened that, a few weeks later, "Old Ernie" [Ernest Hemingway] himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from li...terary columnists and reporters during one of his rare stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and all the furniture has been repaired.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The women there do all they ought; The men observe the Rules of Thought;... They love the Good; they worship Truth; They laugh uproariously in youth; (And when they get to feeling old, They up and shoot themselves, I'm told). . .LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poor old Jonathan Bing Went home and addressed a short note to the King:... If you please will excuse me I won't come to tea; For home's the best place for All people like me!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither lemonade nor anything else can prevent the inroads of old age. At present, I am stoical under its advances, and hope I sha...ll remain so. I have but one prayer at heart; and that is, to have my faculties so far preserved that I can be useful, in some way or other, to the last.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »