If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of ne...ws or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out the still night--the... first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.... The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I turned my head and saw the wind, Not far from where I stood,... Dragging the corn by her golden hair, Into a dark and lonely wood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The women were the meanest: they had truly gone wild. It is because they were the first to know that there was no food to cook, th...at the children cried with hunger, that they were wasting away, their limbs frail and knotty as dried wood, their enormous stomachs protruding. The women sometimes lost their heads over this and they quarrelled at times with words we are not allowed to use. But women's curses lead to nothing; they are just like the noise the wind makes. The most serious was the men's silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The houses were few and far between, besides being small and rusty, though they appeared to be kept in good repair, and their door...-yards, which were the unfenced Cape, were tidy; or, rather, they looked as if the ground around them was blown clean by the wind. Perhaps the scarcity of wood here, and the consequent absence of the wood-pile and other wooden traps, had something to do with this appearance. They seemed, like mariners ashore, to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of the land, without studying their postures or habiliments. To them it was merely terra firma and cognita, not yet fertilis and jucunda.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so... necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
what if a much of a which of a wind gives the truth to summer's lie;... bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are certain stereotypes that are offensive. Some of them don't worry me, though. For instance, I have always thought that Ma...mmy character in Gone with the Wind was mighty funny. And I just loved "Amos 'n' Andy" on the radio. So you see, I have enough confidence in myself that those things did not bother me. I could laugh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »