If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O, better that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave;... Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail, And give her to the god of storms, The lightning and the gale!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll!... Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They say that in his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of Time... Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the Crier on his round Through the town.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree... In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bias, point of view, fury--are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours ...leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse t...o explore, a document to verify.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... my last work is no sooner on the stands than letters come, suggesting a subject. The grandmothers of strangers are crying from... the grave, it seems, for literary recognition; it is bewildering, the number of salty grandfathers, aunts and uncles that languish unappreciated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »