The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. The...y are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone's concern and like vampires they suck our life's blood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are flood and drouth Over the eyes and in the mouth,... Dead water and dead sand Contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil Gapes at the vanity of toil, Laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When one is very young, to read is as it were to pour a continuous stream of water on a parched and virginal plain. The soil seems... to have an endless capacity to drink up the stream, sometimes with prolonged perpetual rapture, sometimes with impartial calm indifference.... But when one is no longer young, to read is a very different matter. The parched plain has become a luxuriant forest with lakes and streams in the midst of it. Every image which enters it evokes ancient visions from the depth of its waters, and every tone rustles among the trees with a music so rich in haunting memories that one grows faint beneath their burden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a fruitful island of the sea-world, a great Ithaca, there parched and stony and here trodden by flocks and curly- headed bul...ls and heavy with thick-set grain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at all,--the Puritans. It would be in v...ain to kill him. He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here. Why should he not? Some of the Puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in New England. They were a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathers' day, and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time. They were neither Democrats nor Republicans, but men of simple habits, straightforward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear God, not making many compromises, nor seeking after available candidates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched upla...nds; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,--from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,--heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festal board,--may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'But where can we draw water,' Said Pearse to Connolly,... 'When all the wells are parched away? O plain as plain can be There's nothing but our own red blood Can make a right Rose Tree.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation makin...g such a claim. The pursuit of happiness ... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase "the pursuit of happiness" is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »