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 »
While American men are fighting to rid the old world of autocracy let American women set to and rid the new world of this intolera...ble old burden of sex ignorance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My parents were very Old World. They come from Brooklyn, which is the heart of the Old World. Their values in life are God and car...peting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Still, after many years, in distant lands, Still nourishing in thy bewildered brain... That wild, unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain-- Say, will it never heal?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, th...e landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the morning I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and eve...n the dear old devil not far off. If we shall take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here is the mistake of the cut-and-dried man of culture. He goes about with the secret of having learned to appreciate the "grand ...style." He has lived in Homer till he can recall the roll of that many-sounding sea. He has pored over the lofty and pictorial thought of Plato till he begins to pique himself upon its grandeur. His fancy has been fed on the quaint old-world genius of Herodotus, his judgment on the melancholy wisdom of Tacitus and the complacent cynicism of Gibbon--and of all this he is conscious and proud.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism, ...in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Universal manhood suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel... despotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »