Rural Essays

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G.A. Leavitt, 1869 - 557 pages
 

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Page 319 - Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and of an high stature ; and his top was among the thick boughs.
Page 125 - I praise the Frenchman*, his remark was shrewd — How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude! But grant me still a friend in my retreat, Whom I may whisper — solitude is sweet.
Page 65 - Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.
Page 339 - A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.
Page 15 - In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.
Page lviii - Uncared for, gird the windy grove, And flood the haunts of hern and crake; Or into silver arrows break The sailing moon in creek and cove; Till from the garden and the wild A fresh association blow, And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger's child ; As year by year the laborer tills His wonted glebe, or lops the glades ; And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills.
Page 7 - God might have made the earth bring forth Enough for great and small, The oak tree and the cedar tree, Without a flower at all.
Page 150 - Where would be found so fitting a position for noble works of art, the statues, monuments and buildings1 commemorative at once of the great men of the nation, of the history of the age and country, and the genius of our highest artists? In the broad area of such a verdant zone would gradually grow up, as the wealth of the city increases winter gardens of glass, like the great Crystal Palace, where the whole people could luxuriate in groves of the palms and spice trees of the tropics, at the same...
Page 198 - Above, below, aerial murmurs swell, From hanging wood, brown heath, and bushy dell ! A thousand nameless rills, that shun the light, Stealing soft music on the ear of night. So oft the finer movements of the soul, That shun the sphere of Pleasure's gay control, In the still shades of calm Seclusion rise, And breathe their sweet, seraphic harmonies...
Page xxviii - Angry volumes of politics have we written none: but peaceful books, humbly aiming to weave something more into the fair garland of the beautiful and useful that encircles this excellent old earth." His image in my mind was idyllic. I looked upon him as a kind of pastoral poet. I had fancied a simple, abstracted cultivator, gentle and silent. We left the boat and drove to his house. The open gate admitted us to a smooth avenue. We had glimpses of an arbor-vitse hedge, — a small and exquisite lawn...

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