O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea and the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in t...he Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Concord had rarely been a river, or rivus, but barely fluvius, or between fluvius and lacus. This Merrimack was neither rivus ...nor fluvius nor lacus, but rather amnis here, a gently swelling and stately rolling flood approaching the sea. We could even sympathize with its buoyant tied, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and anticipating the time when "being received within the plain of its freer water," it should "beat the shore for banks."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Greeks would not have called the ocean atrugetos, or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by th...e light of modern science, for naturalists now assert that "the sea, and not the land, is the principal seat of life,"Mthough not of vegetable life.... The dry land itself came through and out of the water in its way to the heavens, for, "in going back through the geological ages, we come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with water." We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as atrugetos, or unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the "laboratory of continents."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have just come from the beach (to find your letter), and I like it much. Everything there is on a grand and generous scale,--sea...weed, water, and sand; and even the dead fishes, horses, and hogs have a rank, luxuriant odor; great shad-nets spread to dry; crabs and horseshoes crawling over the sand; clumsy boats, only for service, dancing like sea-fowl over the surf, and ships afar off going about their business.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who ...had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under the pretense of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his r...ule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are several natural phenomena which I shall have to have explained to me before I can keep on going as a resident member of ...the human race. One is the metamorphosis which hats and suits undergo exactly one week after their purchase, whereby they are changed from smart, intensely becoming articles of apparel into something children use when they want to "dress up like daddy."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are certain things--as, a spider, a ghost, The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three--... That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most Is a thing they call the Sea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display of manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulne...ss--has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »