And what are we coming to in our Middlesex towns? A bald, staring town-house, or meeting-house, and a bare liberty-pole, as leafle...ss as it is fruitless, for all I can see. We shall be obliged to import the timber for the last, hereafter, or splice such sticks as we have. And our ideas of liberty are equally mean with these.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is an old saying in the town that "most any fellow with a chaw in his jaw can sit on his front porch and spit down the chimney ...of a neighbor's house."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the consequence of this institution that not a school- house, a public pew, a bridge, a pound, a mill-dam, hath been set up,... or pulled down, or altered, or bought, or sold, without the whole population of this town having a voice in the affair. A general contentment is the result. And the people truly feel that they are lords of the soil. In every winding road, in every stone fence, in the smokes of the poor-house chimney, in the clock on the church, they read their own power, and consider, at leisure, the wisdom and error of their judgments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, an...d the town must save that the State may spend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring i...n the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Englishman, hidden behind his hedge or wall, is not interested in his neighbor's house, and the idea of wanting to read about ...houses bought, sold, or built by total strangers is not even funny; it is merely absurd.... But to an American, it is not only important, it is comforting, it is gratifying that other people are improving your home town; even people who have no personal economic stake in the rise of real-estate values feel the same kind of interest that makes a motherly woman smile with genuine amiability on the children of total strangers. The very linguistic difference between "house" and "home" is significant. All Americans who live in houses, not apartments, live in homes; the Englishman lives in his home but all his neighbors live in houses or flats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now the house shakes (it's in the very best suburb),... the town, the town-hall, the agora, the market-stalls; the whole place is besieged with a host of flying wings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boston is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult but is, rather, a specially organized small creature with... its small-creature's temperature, balance, and distribution of fat. In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark. Nearly every Bostonian is in his house or in someone else's house, dining at the home board, enjoying domestic and social privacy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sir, there is one Mrs. Macaulay in this town, a great republican. One day when I was at her house, I put on a very grave countenan...ce, and said to her, "Madam, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, Madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us." I thus, Sir, shewed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine. She has never liked me since. Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
here at midnight, in our little town A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,... Near the old court-house pacing up and down,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »