United States or Nigeria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On the whole, there is no harm, but rather good, in the new science of Cupid-and-Psychology. There are combinations for which no single word can suffice. The phrase belongs to the same class with Lowell's witty denunciation of a certain tiresome letter-writer, as being, not his incubus, but his "pen-and-inkubus."
Shall this man in his hut on the shores of Walden Pond assume to lay down the law and the gospel to his elders and betters, and pass unrebuked, no matter on what intimate terms he claims to be with the gods of the woods and mountains? This seems to be Lowell's spirit. "Thoreau's experiment," says Lowell, "actually presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured.
No line of Lowell's has been more often quoted in this hall than the line about the futility of attempting to open the "Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key." Those words were written in 1844.
"And Sir Launfal said, 'I behold in thee An image of Him who died on the tree Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns, Thou also hast had the world's buffets and scorns; And to thy life were not denied The wounds in thy hands and feet and side Mild Mary's son, acknowledge me; Behold, through Him I give to thee!" Lowell's Holy Grail.
A part of Lowell's full harvest of prose sprang from that habit of enormous reading which he had indulged since boyhood. He liked to think of himself as "one of the last of the great readers"; and though he was not that, of course, there was nevertheless something of the seventeenth century tradition in his gluttony of books. The very sight and touch and smell of them were one of his pieties.
He turned his hand to many things land-surveying, lecturing, magazine-writing, growing white beans, doing odd jobs at carpentering, whitewashing, fence-building, plastering, and brick-laying. Lowell's criticism amounts almost to a diatribe. He was naturally antagonistic to the Thoreau type of mind.
A part of Lowell's brigade, dismounted, was posted well to the front, the Michigan brigade, mounted, in its rear. While in this position, having occasion to ride up into the battery to speak to Captain Martin, a sharpshooter in Middletown took a shot at us. The bullet narrowly missed the captain and buried itself in my horse's shoulder.
In spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped the city would cut down Lowell's elms: his English elms, which his father had planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!
Lowell's Yankee satires will be perfectly intelligible to every one. The predictions of the English reviewer are fulfilled already. The prescribed century has not elapsed, and in a decade the 'Yankee satires' are comprehended as perhaps even their author failed to comprehend as he created them.
The pale buff does very well for large colonial mansions, like Lowell's or Longfellow's in Cambridge; but when you come, say, to see the great square houses built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; early in this century, and painted white, you find that white, after all, is the thing for our climate, even in the towns.
Word Of The Day