And Now a Few Words

"That Felicity, when I reflected on it, has induc'd me sometimes to say, that were it offer'd to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from it's Beginning, only asking the Advantage of Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first."

"A slave, by escaping to a free state, acquires certain important rights and privileges. When he reaches our territory, we regard him as a man and not as property."

"Margaret Perd and another said they smelt brimstone; I and others said we did not smell any; then they said they did not know what it was: This Margaret said, she wish'd she had been here when Mr. Mather was here; and another attendant said, if you had been here you might not have been permitted in, for her own mother was not suffered to be present."

"More familiar is Cole's Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), painted in 1836 and viewed from the top of Mount Holyoke.  Holyoke was one of the first of the mountaintops to be frequented by tourists; a hut to accommodate travelers was erected there as early as 1821.  As in the previous work, Cole organizes the main axis of the composition along a diagonal line of sight starting from the left foreground and culminating in the right middle ground.  Cole again deploys the left foreground in a repoussoir fashion, standing for the wilderness past with its desolate blasted trees, while beyond this darkened zone lies the sun-filled valley of the Connecticut River with its fertile meadow and terraced fields leading 'to one of the most sunny and cheerful villages in Massachusetts.'"

"Inevitably the seeds of destruction are present even at the moment of the empire's triumph.  The returning victor's subjugation of neighbouring states indicates an empire acquired through territorial aggression (in contrast, perhaps, to the expansion of the United States at least in part by treaties and by financial transactions such as the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but prefiguring the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, which Cole abhorred) and liable to future rebellion."

"The alternatives of summer do not remove
us from this place. The fainting into skies
from a diving board, the express train to
Detroit's damp bars, the excess of affection
on the couch near an open window or a Bauhaus
fire escape, the lazy regions of stars, all
are strangers. Like Mayakovsky read on steps
of cool marble, or Yeats danced in a theatre
of polite music. The classroon day of dozing
and grammar, the partial eclipse of the head
in the row in front of the head of poplars,
sweet Syrinx! last out the summer in a stay
of iron. Workmen loiter before urinals, stare
out windows at girders tightly strapped to clouds.
And in the morning we whimper as we cook
an egg, so far from fluttering sands and azure!"

"Buffalo Bill 's
defunct
           who used to
           ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                 stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                          Jesus
he was a handsome man
                                     and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death"

"Unfortunately, there were men in the new world, of a sterner faith than these May-Pole worshippers. Not far from Merry Mount was a settlement of Puritans, most dismal wretches, who said their prayers before daylight, and then wrought in the forest or the cornfield, till evening made it prayer time again. Their weapons were always at hand, to shoot down the straggling savage. When they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, or to proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians. Their festivals were fast-days, and their chief pastime the singing of psalms. Woe to the youth or maiden, who did but dream of a dance! The selectman nodded to the constable; and there sat the light-heeled reprobate in the stocks; or if he danced, it was round the whipping-post, which might be termed the Puritan May-Pole."

"Yet the state is nothing artificial, nothing made, that may or may not be adopted. It is necessary, and therefore natural, grown, and indispensable. It is a necessary manifestation of society. If we now call right, that which indicates man's relation to the state, or that which is the necessary consequence of his relations founded on the just, toward others, that which the state is bound to grant him, punishment is the right between society and the offender, or, however paradoxical it may appear at first glance, the right both of the society and the offender. But why is it so? Merely because it is necessary, and farther we cannot go? By no means. In order to prove that punishment be what we have asserted it to be, we have to show first that it be just, secondly that it be necessary. All idea of the just is essentially founded upon equality; without it, as its first foundation, justice cannot be imagined. Every individual in the state must grant to others the right he claims for himself: if he interferes with the rightful state of others, he grants them the abstract right to interfere with his."

"But I shall no longer detain my reader from his expected entertainment in the a brief account of the trials which have passed upon some of the malefactors lately executed at Salem, for the witchcrafts whereof they stood convicted."

"Bjurman hesitated.  he disliked intensely the idea of having to be at the mercy of a stranger.  But it was a necessity.  He reminded himself that he was not alone in having a grudge against Salander.  It was a question of recruiting allies.  In a low voice he explained his business."

"...Mr. Cotton Mather dined with us, and was with me in the new Kitchen when this was; He had just been mentioning that more Minister Houses that others proportionably had been smitten with Lightening; enquiring what the meaning of God should be in it."

"Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it's sad, but I don't think it's so sad myself."

"Notwithstanding the good offices of the Doctor, and the strenuous exertions of the association to get itself into notice, it met with no very great success until I joined it. The truth is, the members indulged in too flippant a tone of discussion. The papers read every Saturday evening were characterized less by depth than buffoonery. They were all whipped syllabub. There was no investigation of first causes, first principles. There was no investigation of any thing at all. There was no attention paid to that great point, the "fitness of things." In short there was no fine writing like this. It was all low--very! No profundity, no reading, no metaphysics--nothing which the learned call "spirituality," and which the unlearned choose to stigmatize as "cant." (Dr. M. says I ought to spell "cant" with a capital "K"--but I know better.)"

"What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening!  I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days.  I chafed against the work of school.  At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read."

"He can be very agreeable companion, of course, but there times when he shows that particularly beefy arrogant English insensibility...and there is certainly one thing that jars on me—his great eagerness for prizes.  The sloop's discipline is more like that of a starving privateer than a King's ship."

"Very likely more than half the population of the plantation is gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light-wood fire burns red before the door of the house and on the hearth. For some time one can hear, though at a good distance, the vociferous exhortation or prayer of the presiding elder or of the brother who has a gift that way, and who is not 'on the back seat,'--a phrase, the interpretation of which is, 'under the censure of the church authorities for bad behavior;'--and at regular intervals one bears the elder 'deaconing' a hymn-book hymn, which is sung two lines at a time, and whose wailing cadences, borne on the night air, are indescribably melancholy"

"These are the songs that are still heard upon the Mississippi steamboats--wild and strangely fascinating--one of which we have been so fortunate as to secure for this collection. This, too, is no doubt the music of the colored firemen of Savannah, graphically described by Mr. Kane O'Donnel, in a letter to the Philadelphia Press, and one of which he was able to contribute for our use. Mr. E. S. Philbrick was struck with the resemblance of some of the rowing tunes at Port-Royal to the boatmen's songs he had heard upon the Nile."