It is a sign of a dull nature to occupy oneself deeply in matters that concern the body; for instance, to be over much occupied ab...out exercise, about eating and drinking, about easing oneself, about sexual intercourse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At length, by mid-afternoon, after we had had two or three rainbows over the sea, the showers ceased, and the heavens gradually cl...eared up, though the wind still blowed as hard and the breakers ran as high as before. Keeping on, we soon after came to a charity-house, which we looked into to see how the shipwrecked mariners might fare. Far away in some desolate hollow by the seaside, just within the bank, stands a lonely building on piles driven into the sand, with a slight nail put through the staple, which a freezing man can bend, with some straw, perchance, on the floor on which he may lie, or which he may burn in the fireplace to keep him alive. Perhaps this hut has never been required to shelter a shipwrecked man, and the benevolent person who promised to inspect it annually, to see that the straw and matches are here, and that the boards will keep off the wind, has grown remiss and thinks that storms and shipwrecks are over; and this very night a perishing crew may pry open its door with their numbed fingers and leave half their number dead here by morning. When I thought what must be the condition of the families which alone would ever occupy or had occupied them, what must have been the tragedy of the winter evenings spent by human beings around their hearths, these houses, though they were meant for human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. They appeared but a stage to the grave. The gulls flew around and screamed over them; the roar of the ocean in storms, and the lapse of its waves in calms, alone resounds through them, all dark and empty within, year in, year out, except, perchance, on one memorable night. Houses of entertainment for shipwrecked men! What kind of sailor's homes were they?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This noon his mind was occupied with a law question, and I referred him to my companion, who was a lawyer. It appeared that he had... been buying land lately (I think it was a hundred acres), but there was probably an incumbrance to it, somebody else claiming to have bought some grass on it for this year. He wished to know to whom the grass belonged, and was told that if the other man could prove that he bought the grass before he, Polis, bought the land, the former could take it, whether the latter knew it or not. To which he only replied, "Strange!" He went over this several times, fairly sat down to it, with his back to a tree, as if he meant to confine us to this topic henceforth; but as he made no headway, only reached the jumping-off place of his wonder at white men's institutions after each explanation, we let the subject die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound off with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians t...hat it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening.... It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in which the word "beauteous" was over-fondled, and human experience referred to as "life's page," was up to the usual average.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods... over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »