...there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root gro...ws old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time he'll give him sixp...ence. But the second time it'll only be a threepenny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he'll have him cold-bloodedly handed over to the police.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'T is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine stump. With it co...mes a Latin grammar,--and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we should swap a good library for a second-rate stump speech and not ask for boot, it would be thoroughly in tune with our hear...ts. For deep within each of us lies politics. It is our football, baseball, and tennis rolled into one. We enjoy it; we will hitch up and drive for miles in order to hear and applaud the vitriolic phrases of a candidate we have already reckoned we'll vote against.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rub a half potato on your wart and wrap it in a damp cloth. Close... your eyes and whirl three times and throw. Then bury rag and spud exactly where they fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the... infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe,--these are the onl...y traces of man, a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the "South Sea"; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its st...ump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ...ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »