Quite different from them [abstractions of animal nature] in origin and intent, but confused with them in form, are those other co...mpanions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where has it all gone? I remember that twenty years ago there were geese and cranes and ducks and grouse here, clouds of them!... ...And there are far fewer animals. Wolf and fox are rare, brother, not to mention bears or mink. There used even to be moose!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They shall yet belie thy happy years That say thou art a man. Diana's lip... Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman's part.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival c...an ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the roo...m. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author...--detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So, Willy, let you and me be wipers Of scores out with all men--especially pipers;... And, whether they pipe us free, from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »