Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Peric...lean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers' back pages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature predominates over the human will in all works of even the fine arts, in all that respects their material and external circu...mstances. Nature paints the best part of the picture, carves the best of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing--to do just t...hat; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of... the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection--the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we thus swept along, our Indian repeated in a deliberate and drawling tone the words "Daniel Webster, great lawyer," apparently... reminded of him by the name of the stream, and he described his calling on him once in Boston, at what he supposed was his boarding-house. He had no business with him, but merely went to pay his respects, as we should say. In answer to our questions, he described his person well enough. It was on the day after Webster delivered his Bunker Hill oration, which I believe Polis heard. The first time he called he waited till he was tired without seeing him, and then went away. The next time, he saw him go by the door of the room in which he was waiting several times, in his shirt-sleeves, without noticing him. He thought that if he had come to see Indians, they would not have treated him so. At length, after very long delay, he came in, walked toward him, and asked in a loud voice, gruffly, "What do you want?" and he, thinking at first, by the motion of his hand, that he was going to strike him, said to himself, "You'd better take care; if you try that I shall know what to do." He did not like him, and declared that all he said "was not worth talk about a musquash." We suggested that probably Mr. Webster was very busy, and had a great many visitors just then.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It appeared that he had once represented his tribe at Augusta, and also once at Washington, where he had met some Western chiefs. ...He had been consulted at Augusta, and gave advice, which he said was followed, respecting the eastern boundary of Maine, as determined by highlands and streams, at the time of the difficulties on that side. He was employed with the surveyors on the line. Also he called on Daniel Webster in Boston, at the time of his Bunker Hill oration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »