mid-ground

Updated: July 18, 2025

Forty or fifty figures, perhaps more, in full finish and detail in the mid-ground, with three times that number, or more, through the rest swarms upon swarms of savage Sioux, in their war-bonnets, frantic, mostly on ponies, driving through the background, through the smoke, like a hurricane of demons. A dozen of the figures are wonderful.

Walt Whitman - Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy

There is a vale between expediency and the convenience of posterity, a mid-ground which enables men surely to benefit the hereafter people by valiantly advancing the present; and the point is that, if some laborers live in unhealthy tenements in Cornwall, one is likely to view with incomplete satisfaction the record of long and patient labor and thought displayed by an eight-foot drain for a nonexistent, impossible rivulet in the North.

Stephen Crane - Men, Women, and Boats