All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship--entirely dependent on the judgment of the two Durbeyfield adults fo...r their pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under their hatches compelled to sail with them--six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of "Nature's holy plan."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... what a strange time it was! Who knew his neighbor? Who was a traitor and who a patriot? The hero of to-day was the suspected o...f to-morrow.... There were traitors in the most secret council-chambers. Generals, senators, and secretaries looked at each other with suspicious eyes.... It is a great wonder that the city of Washington was not betrayed, burned, destroyed a half-dozen times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since I came to Virginia in July, I have not shaved; for weeks at a time I have slept in all clothes except boots (occasionally in... boots and sometimes with spurs), a half dozen times on the ground without shelter, once on the snow. I have wore no white clothing (shirts, drawers, etc.) for four months; no collar or neckerchief or tie of any sort for two months; and have not been the least unwell until since I have taken winter quarters here in a comfortable house. Now I have but a slight cold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That other one wanted to think his way to life, Sure that the ultimate poem was the mind,... Or of the mind, or of the mind in these Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind; Half sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky, Half desire for indifference about the sky.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I picked up a bottle half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but stoppled tight, and half full of red ale, which stil...l smacked of juniper,--all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world,--that great salt sea on the one hand, and this little sea of ale on the other, preserving their separate characters. What if it could tell us its adventures over countless ocean waves! Man could not be man through such ordeals as it had passed. But as I poured it slowly out on to the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances, but destined ere-long to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his serv...ice, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library,--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature. I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some of these men had become abstrusely entangled with the spying departments of other nations and would give an amusing jump if y...ou came from behind and tapped them on the shoulder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study... to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »