America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual inte...rval of civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares an...d works which have no direct bearing on it;Mis then lost, for months or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says [in Le dernier jour d'un condamné]:... we have an interval, and then our place k...nows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the "enthusiasm of humanity" [in Auguste Comte's Le système de politique positive]. Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry is creative expression; poetry is constructive expression. That, in a sentence, is the real distinction.... In poetry the w...ords are born or re-born in the act of thinking. The words are, in Bergsonian phraseology, a becoming; they develop in the mind pari passu with the development of the thought. There is no time interval between the words and the thought. The thought is the word and the word is the thought, and both the thought and the word are Poetry. "Constructive" implies ready-made materials; words stacked round the builder, ready for use. Prose is a structure of ready-made words. Its "creative" function is confined to plan and elevation--functions these, too, of Poetry, but in Poetry subsidiary to the creative function.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[I have] been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persu...aded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever we awoke in the night, still eking out our dreams with half-awakened thoughts, it was not till after an interval, when th...e wind breathed harder than usual, flapping the curtains of the tent, and causing its cords to vibrate, that we remembered that we lay on the bank of the Merrimack, and not in our chamber at home. With our heads so low in the grass, we heard the river whirling and sucking, and lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went, sometimes rippling louder than usual, and again its mighty current making only a slight limpid, trickling sound, as if our water-pail had sprung a leak, and the water were flowing into the grass by our side. The wind, rustling the oaks and hazels, impressed us like a wakeful and inconsiderate person up at midnight, moving about, and putting things to rights, occasionally stirring up whole drawers full of leaves at a puff. There seemed to be a great haste and preparation throughout Nature, as for a distinguished visitor.... And then the wind would lull and die away, and we like it fell asleep again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even according to the Mosaic account, without borrowing any years from ...the geologist. From Adam and Eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through Babylon and Thebes, Brahma and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts; whence we might start again with Orpheus, and the Trojan war, the Pyramids and the Olympic games, and Homer and Athens, for our stages; and after a breathing space at the building of Rome, continue our journey down through Odin and Christ to--MAmerica. It is a wearisome while. And yet the lives of but sixty old women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother. A respectable tea-party merely,--whose gossip would be Universal History. The fourth old woman from myself suckled Columbus,--the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror,--the nineteenth was the Virgin Mary--the twenty-fourth was the Cumæan Sibyl,--the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and Helen her name,--the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis,--the sixtieth was Eve, the mother of mankind. So much for the "Old woman that lives under the hill, And if she's not gone she lives there still." It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at the death of Time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »