The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table, Volume 2Houghton Mifflin, 1889 - 442 pages |
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Popular passages
Page 135 - Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil ; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Page 135 - This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main, — The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Page 156 - s done brown enough by this time " ? What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over ! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed ; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or horny-shelled, — turtle-bugs one wants to call them, some...
Page 158 - Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy ? Don't know what that means ? — Well, I will tell you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.
Page 17 - I will tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything else;— long arguments on special points between people who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written...
Page 125 - But then observe this : if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very well ; but if that is all there is in a -man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility ; one is wind-power, and the other waterpower ; that is all.
Page 59 - Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself ; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
Page 103 - Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with something like it in books, — somewhere in Bulwer's novels, I think, and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know. Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other channel.
Page 183 - I like books, — I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses.
Page 129 - ... in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving : To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, — but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one very sad thing in old friendships, to every mind which is really moving onward.