United States or Bhutan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is extremely spirit-crushing, this remorseless gray, with its icy heart; and the more to depress the whole family, U has taken what seems to be the Roman fever, by sitting down in the Palace of the Caesars, while Mrs. S sketched the ruins. . . . Hawthorne wrote no word of Journal. February 27th, 1859.
Alone in the drawing-room Irene longed for the end of so-called day, that she might shut out that spirit-crushing blotch of bare trees and ugly houses. She thought of a sudden, how much harder we make life than it need be, by dwelling amid scenes that disgust, in air that lowers vitality. There fell on her a mood of marvelling at the aims and the satisfactions of mankind.
Behind them San Juan drawn into the shadows of night but calling to them in mellow-toned cadences of sorrow, before them the sombre canons and iron flanks of Mt. Temple, and somewhere, still several hours away, Brocky Lane lying helpless and perhaps hopeless; grim by day the earth hereabouts was inscrutable by night, a mighty, primal sphinx, lip-locked, spirit-crushing.
Oh! it is grand and heart-stirring to see a stalwart youth imperilling life and limb for the sake of others; to see a powerful swimmer breasting the billows with a fixed purpose to do or die. But it is terrible and spirit-crushing to see such a one tossed by the breakers as if he were a mere baby, and hurled back helpless on the sand.
Then she left him to wait again alone. He could not bring himself to look at the canvases propped against the bare walls, they were witnesses of her toil, witnesses perhaps of a failure that hurt him even more than it must have hurt her. And to him who knew the spirit-crushing efforts of the unknown artist to win recognition, her failure was both natural and intelligible.
It is extremely spirit-crushing, this remorseless gray, with its icy heart; and the more to depress the whole family, U has taken what seems to be the Roman fever, by sitting down in the Palace of the Caesars, while Mrs. S sketched the ruins. . . . . Hawthorne wrote no word of Journal. February 27th, 1859.
If she elected to be at all wifely and cling to her husband in his misfortune, then he would assert the sovereign, and as readily gore her as he would Napoleon if, in his patriarchal wisdom, he judged national interests were at stake. His spirit-crushing rhetoric had a real ultra-monarchical ring about it.
At those intervals when King thought of her, it was to realize that she might quite naturally find discomfort in her bleak surroundings, being denied coal-grate and upholstered chair; it did not suggest itself to him that the chief discomfort would be a spirit-crushing, terrifying loneliness. She told herself, when he had gone, that she was glad to be alone.
The negro's docility appears in his aptitude to catch quickly the tone of his master's mind, and guide himself by it; in the readiness with which he yields to superior authority which may or may not be due to his spirit-crushing bondage, but which certainly has in it little of the stupidity we should expect to find if such were the case.
Few people read "Timon of Athens"; and I do not blame the neglect, for it is a spirit-crushing play, and a man must be bold if he cares to look at it twice. But in it it is plain to me that Shakspere lets us see a gleam from the boiling flood of scorn that raged far under his serene exterior. The words bite; the abandonment of the satirist is complete.
Word Of The Day