I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the an...tique and future worlds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not generally remembered, if known, by the descendants of the Pilgrims, that when their forefathers were spending their firs...t memorable winter in the New World, they had for neighbors a colony of French no further off than Port Royal (Annapolis, Nova Scotia) ... where, in spite of many vicissitudes, they had been for fifteen years.... Though these founders of Acadie endured no less than the Pilgrims, and about the same proportion of them ... died the first winter at St. Croix, 1604-1605, sixteen years earlier, no orator, to my knowledge, has ever celebrated their enterprise ... while the trials which their successors and descendants endured at the hands of the English have furnished a theme for both the historian and poet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy nig...ht for me that follow'd, And else when I carous'd, or when my plans were accomplish'd, still I was not happy, But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh'd, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all l...ife, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing the kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway--they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman if she have not suffered, still less a woman if she have not sinned. Fall at ...the feet of your idol as you wish, but drag her down to your level after that--the only level she should ever reach, that of your heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ...ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reason I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I the...refore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore ...useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had thought to observe on this carry when we crossed the dividing line between the Penobscot and St. John, but as my feet had ha...rdly been out of water the whole distance, and it was all level and stagnant, I began to despair of finding it. I remembered hearing a good deal about the "highlands" dividing the waters of the Penobscot from those of the St. John, as well as the St. Lawrence, at the time of the northeast boundary dispute.... I thought that if the commissioners themselves, and the King of Holland with them, had spent a few days here, with their packs upon their backs, looking for that "highland," they would have had an interesting time, and perhaps it would have modified their views of the question somewhat. The King of Holland would have been in his element.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »