Positively I sit here, and look at Europe sink, first one deck disappearing, then another, and the whole ship slowly plunging bow-...down into the abyss; until the nightmare gets to be howling. The Roman Empire was a trifle to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My silks and fine array, My smiles and languish'd air,... By Love are driv'n away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Go, throng each other's drawing-rooms, Ye idols of a petty clique:... Strut your brief hour in borrowed plumes, And make your penny-trumpets squeak: Deck your dull talk with pilfered shreds Of learning from a noble time, And oil each other's little heads With mutual Flattery's golden slime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly lik...eable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The learned professors have been at considerable pains in their attempts to make a distinction between tools and implements on the... one hand, and machinery on the other. Nor have they arrived much of anywhere. The one is continually shading into the other. Here is an ordinary shovel used by a day labourer in a ditch; here is the same shovel with a somewhat thicker handle, containing a pneumatic attachment which is said to improve its digging power; here is a very much larger shovel with curved ends and steel teeth, hitched to an arm that is hitched to a steam engine, which can gobble up a cartload of dirt at one mouthful. Where does the tool stop and the machine begin? A grindstone is widely held to be a primitive tool; a turret lathe is widely held to be a machine. Both spin around. What is the essential difference? The employment of nonhuman power, steam, oil, gas, has been defined as the difference. Well and good. Then everything worked by human hands and legs is a tool only, and bicycles, typewriters, adding machines, sewing machines, foot lathes, clocks, hand-pumps--are not machines. Which is absurd. And what is one to do with treadmills for grinding corn, whose motive power is said by some to be the donkey, and by some the carrot in front of his nose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In yonder Grave a Druid lies Where slowly winds the Stealing Wave!... The Year's best Sweets shall duteous rise To deck its Poet's sylvan Grave!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »