There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and the stunted trees, a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its ...falling flower-bordered terraces. There were splashing fountains, and the sound of flutes; and its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together; and these groups of elders paused, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of the children--the blue-eyed, fair-skinned children of the North playing hand in hand with the bronze-skinned, dark-eyed children of the South. Yes, they smiled and approved these many-fathered children, running and playing among the flowers and the terraces, through the white pillars and tall trees of this fabulous and ancient city.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Prot...estants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red;... If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes there is more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go: My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet by heaven I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mackerel gulls were all the while flying over our heads and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one; quit...e at home in the storm, though they are as delicate organizations as sea-jellies and mosses; and we saw that they were adapted to their circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. Theirs must be an essentially wilder, that is, less human, nature, than that of larks and robins. Their note was like the sound of some vibrating metal and harmonized well with the scenery and roar of the surf, as if one had rudely touched the strings of the lyre, which ever lies on the shore; a ragged shred of ocean music tossed aloft on the spray.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women an...d girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers' wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher's ear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The morning was a bright one, and perfectly still and serene, the lake as smooth as glass, we making the only ripple as we paddled... into it. The dark mountains about it were seen through a glaucous mist, and the brilliant white stems of canoe birches mingled with the other woods around it. The wood thrush sang on the distant shore, and the laugh of some loons, sporting in a concealed western bay, as if inspired by the morning, came distinct over the lake to us, and, what was more remarkable, the echo which ran round the lake was much louder than the original note; probably because, the loon being in a regularly curving bay under the mountain, we were exactly in the focus of many echoes, the sound being reflected like light from a concave mirror.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The note of the white-throated sparrow, a very inspiriting but almost wiry sound, was first heard in the morning, and with this al...l the woods rang. This was the prevailing bird in the northern part of Maine. The forest generally was alive with them at this season, and they were proportionally numerous and musical about Bangor. They evidently breed in that State.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, I observed, p...artly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. It was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or scarlet, like a coal, but a white and slumbering light, like the glow-worm's. I could tell it from the fire only by its whiteness. I saw at once that it must be phosphorescent wood, which I had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. Putting my finger on it, with a little hesitation, I found that it was a piece of dead moose-wood (Acer striatum).... Using my knife, I discovered that the light proceeded from that portion of the sap-wood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular ring at the end, which, indeed, appeared raised above the level of the wood, and when I pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it was all aglow along the log.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, when you're up there and you're all alone, see, it's just you and your ship and the sky. And you don't want anybody up there... with you, you don't want anybody to spoil it. Everything's kind of still, and you have a feeling that you're halfway to heaven. You don't even seem to hear the sound of your own motor, just a kind of a buzz, like the sky was calling you. Like the sky was singin' you a song.... Yeah. And somehow it's never eight o'clock up there, it's always now. And the earth is so far below you that it just doesn't matter anymore, the sky is the thing that's important. The sky is your pal. You feel like nudging it and saying, "Hiya sky, how are you today? And how was the old moon the last time you saw him?" The wind drift comes straight off the morning star and beautiful white clouds drift towards you. And they're like old friends. Friends you never want to say goodbye to. And you see a patch of clear air in between 'em and you duck in and out, like a porpoise rollin' in the ocean. And then you say to yourself, "Boy, oh boy, this is the only time a man is really ever alive. It's the only time he's really ever free." The old sky smiles back at you and says, "Boy, you're right. You're dead right."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only the white, tremendous foam of the street has any importance, The new white flowers that are beginning to shoot up about ...now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »