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Updated: May 8, 2025
"Don't you want to preserve old things?" "But you can't, Anthony. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them.
In his fine apologia, The Cutting of an Agate, he states and restates his creed: "Literature decays when it no longer makes more beautiful, or more vivid, the language which unites it to all life, and when one finds the criticism of the student, and the purpose of the reformer, and the logic of the man of science, where there should have been the reveries of the common heart, ennobled into some raving Lear or unabashed Don Quixote.... I have been reading through a bundle of German plays, and have found everywhere a desire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that ever came into the world, but politics or social passion, a veiled or open propaganda.... If Homer were alive today, he would only resist, after a deliberate struggle, the temptation to find his subject not in Helen's beauty, that every man has desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance of Odysseus that has been the desire of every woman that has come into the world, but in what somebody would describe, perhaps, as 'the inevitable contest, arising out of economic causes, between the country-places and small towns on the one hand, and, upon the other, the great city of Troy, representing one knows not what 'tendency to centralization."
"Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone;" barren, useless, and truly dead to the rest of the world around it, because it is shut up in itself, and its hidden life, with all its wondrous powers of growth and fertility, remains undeveloped, and will remain so, till it decays away, a worthless thing, into worthless dust.
"And then the moss decays and makes soil for the ferns?" "I suppose so." Daisy stood looking with a countenance of delighted intelligence at the great boulder, which was now to her a representative and witness of natural processes she had had no knowledge of before. The mosses, the brakes, the lichen, had all gained new beauty and interest in her eyes.
She never went abroad, except in visits to a French chapel in the neighbourhood; she refused the proffered assistance of our adventurer with equal obstinacy and politeness, and with pleasure saw herself wasting towards that period of mortality which was the consummation of her wish. Yet her charms, far from melting away with her constitution, seemed to triumph over the decays of nature.
They have both more sense and less, than those who are not in contact with a multitude. Wisdom forms empires, but folly dissolves them; and a great capital, which dictates to the rest of the community, is always the last to perceive the decays of the whole, because it takes its own greatness for health.
The assumption is that a radio-active substance, like uranium, "decays," or passes into many other substances, of which radium is one, finally producing lead in 1,000,000,000 years or more. From this theory, Prof. Russell concludes that the earth is 4,000,000,000 to 8,000,000,000 years old, and the sun is older still.
We see old folks, who have outlived all the comforts of life, desire to continue in it, and nothing can wean us from the folly of preferring a mortal being, subject to great infirmity and unavoidable decays, before an immortal one, and all the glories that are promised with it. Is this not very like preaching? Well, 'tis too good for you; you shall have no more on't.
On this subject, as on that of the inter-state slave trade, we misinterpret Virginia and Maryland, by not considering, how unlike was their temper in relation to slavery, amidst the decays and dying throes of that institution half a century ago, to what it is now, when slavery is not only revivified, but has become the predominant interest and giant power of the nation.
Under the trees the imagination plays unchecked, and calls up the past as if yew bow and broad arrow were still in the hunter's hands. So little is changed since then. The deer are here still. The oak was there then, young and strong; it is here now, ancient, but sturdy. Rarely do you see an oak fall of itself. It decays to the last stump; it does not fall.
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