To have one event operate in several places, — as, for example, if a man’s head were to be cut off in one town, men’s heads to drop off in several towns.
Follow out the fantasy of a man taking his life by instalments, instead of at one payment, — say ten years of life alternately with ten years of suspended animation.
Sentiments in a foreign language, which merely convey the sentiment without retaining to the reader any graces of style or harmony of sound, have somewhat of the charm of thoughts in one’s own mind that have not yet been put into words. No possible words that we might adapt to them could realize the unshaped beauty that they appear to possess. This is the reason that translations are never satisfactory, — and less so, I should think, to one who cannot than to one who can pronounce the language.
A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate, — he having made himself one of the personages.
It is a singular thing, that, at the distance, say, of five feet, the work of the greatest dunce looks just as well as that of the greatest genius, — that little space being all the distance between genius and stupidity.
Mrs. Sigourney says, after Coleridge, that “poetry has been its own exceeding great reward.” For the writing, perhaps; but would it be so for the reading?
Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.
Salem, August 31st, 1836. — A walk, yesterday, down to the shore, near the hospital. Standing on the old grassy battery, that forms a semicircle, and looking seaward. The sun not a great way above the horizon, yet so far as to give a very golden brightness, when it shone out. Clouds in the vicinity of the sun, and nearly all the rest of the sky covered with clouds in masses, not a gray uniformity of cloud. A fresh breeze blowing from land seaward. If it had been blowing from the sea, it would have raised it in heavy billows, and caused it to dash high against the rocks. But now its surface was not at all commoved with billows; there was only roughness enough to take off the gleam, and give it the aspect of iron after cooling. The clouds above added to the black appearance. A few sea-birds were flitting over the water, only visible at moments, when they turned their white bosoms towards me, — as if they were then first created. The sunshine had a singular effect. The clouds would interpose in such a manner that some objects were shaded from it, while others were strongly illuminated. Some of the islands lay in the shade, dark and gloomy, while others were bright and favored spots. The white lighthouse was sometimes very cheerfully marked. There was a schooner about a mile from the shore, at anchor, laden apparently with lumber. The sea all about her had the black, iron aspect which I have described; but the vessel herself was alight. Hull, masts, and spars were all gilded, and the rigging was made of golden threads. A small white streak of foam breaking around the bows, which were towards the wind. The shadowiness of the clouds overhead made the effect of the sunlight strange, where it fell.
September. — The elm-trees have golden branches intermingled with their green already, and so they had on the first of the month.
To picture the predicament of worldly people, if admitted to paradise.
As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.
“Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it,” — an extempore prayer by a New England divine.
In old times it must have been much less customary than now to drink pure water. Walker emphatically mentions, among the sufferings of a clergyman’s wife and family in the Great Rebellion, that they were forced to drink water, with crab-apples stamped in it to relish it.
Mr. Kirby, author of a work on the History, Habits, and Instincts of Animals, questions whether there may not be an abyss of waters within the globe, communicating with the ocean, and whether the huge animals of the Saurian tribe — great reptiles, supposed to be exclusively antediluvian, and now extinct — may not be inhabitants of it. He quotes a passage from Revelation, where the creatures under the earth are spoken of as distinct from those of the sea, and speaks of a Saurian fossil that has been found deep in the subterranean regions. He thinks, or suggests, that these may be the dragons of Scripture.
The elephant is not particularly sagacious in the wild state, but becomes so when tamed. The fox directly the contrary, and likewise the wolf.
A modern Jewish adage, — ”Let a man clothe himself beneath his ability, his children according to his ability, and his wife above his ability.”
It is said of the eagle, that, in however long a flight, he is never seen to clap his wings to his sides. He seems to govern his movements by the inclination of his wings and tail to the wind, as a ship is propelled by the action of the wind on her sails.
In old country-houses in England, instead of glass for windows, they used wicker, or fine strips of oak disposed checkerwise. Horn was also used. The windows of princes and great noblemen were of crystal; those of Studley Castle, Holinshed says, of beryl. There were seldom chimneys; and they cooked their meats by a fire made against an iron back in the great hall. Houses, often of gentry, were built of a heavy timber frame, filled up with lath and plaster. People slept on rough mats or straw pallets, with a round log for a pillow; seldom better beds than a mattress, with a sack of chaff for a pillow.
October 25th. — A walk yesterday through Dark Lane, and home through the village of Danvers. Landscape now wholly autumnal. Saw an elderly man laden with two dry, yellow, rustling bundles of Indian corn-stalks, — a good personification of Autumn. Another man hoeing up potatoes. Rows of white cabbages lay ripening. Fields of dry Indian corn. The grass has still considerable greenness. Wild rosebushes devoid of leaves, with their deep, bright red seed-vessels. Meetinghouse in Danvers seen at a distance, with the sun shining through the windows of its belfry. Barberry-bushes, — the leaves now of a brown red, still juicy and healthy; very few berries remaining, mostly frostbitten and wilted. All among the yet green grass, dry stalks of weeds. The down of thistles occasionally seen flying through the sunny air.
In this dismal chamber FAME was won. (Salem, Union Street.)
Those who are very difficult in choosing wives seem as if they would take none of Nature’s ready-made works, but want a woman manufactured particularly to their order.
A council of the passengers in a street: called by somebody to decide upon some points important to him.
Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
A Thanksgiving dinner. All the miserable on earth are to be invited, — as the drunkard, the bereaved parent, the ruined merchant, the broken-hearted lover, the poor widow, the old man and woman who have outlived their generation, the disappointed author, the wounded, sick, and broken soldier, the diseased person, the infidel, the man with an evil conscience, little orphan children or children of neglectful parents, shall be admitted to the table, and many others. The giver of the feast goes out to deliver his invitations. Some of the guests he meets in the streets, some he knocks for at the doors of their houses. The description must be rapid. But who must be the giver of the feast, and what his claims to preside? A man who has never found out what he is fit for, who has unsettled aims or objects in life, and whose mind gnaws him, making him the sufferer of many kinds of misery. He should meet some pious, old, sorrowful person, with more outward calamities than any other, and invite him, with a reflection that piety would make all that miserable company truly thankful.
Merry, in “merry England,” does not mean mirthful; but is corrupted from an old Teutonic word signifying famous or renowned.
In an old London newspaper, 1678, there is an advertisement, among other goods at auction, of