Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still the east end. A gr...eat field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore,--olit, olit, olit,--chip, chip, chip, che char,--che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore,--a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden is dead and is alive again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is... being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed a...nd would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the t...ongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down th...e palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Helen. In love, i'faith, to the very tip of the nose. Paris. He eats nothing but doves, love, and that breeds hot blood, and ...hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-...blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »