English AUTHORS TEST

‘Autobiography” - Benjamin FranklinPrinter, publisher, writer, scientist,inventor, businessman, philosopher,statesman—Benjamin Franklin’snumerous roles only hint at the man’stremendous versatility and talent. Asthe oldest founding father, Franklin hadalready lived a full life when at the ageof 70 he joined 40-year-old John Adamsand 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson todraft the Declaration of Independence.Soon afterward, he loaned Congress alarge sum of his own money and sailed ona leaky ship to France to arrange for moreloans and a crucial alliance to fight theBritish. His masterly efforts abroad onbehalf of the American cause earned hima reputation as one of the most successfulAmerican diplomats of all time. Onlya few years before he died, his presenceat the Constitutional Conventionhelped unify the delegates. So great washis influence that he is credited withconvincing them to approve the finaldocument by a vote of 39 to 3. A man ofgreat integrity, intelligence, and charm,Ben Franklin embodied the best ofthe new nation and became its firstcelebrity.Pulling Himself Up Born in Bostonas the youngest of 15 children,Franklin did not want to follow inhis father’s footsteps to become acandle and soap maker. Instead,he joined his brother in the printingbusiness as an apprentice. With onlytwo years of formal education, Franklintaught himself to write by imitating thegreat essayists of his day. At the age of 16,he was contributing satirical pieces to hisbrother’s newspaper. By his own account“too saucy and provoking” as a youth, hesoon quarreled with his brother and struckout on his own for Philadelphia. Franklindid very well in Philadelphia, prosperingin his own printing business, running thesuccessful Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper,writing his popular Poor Richard’sAlmanack for 26 years, and being active incolonial politics.Citizen of the World Franklin’s writing—from humorous satires and wise sayingsto serious political essays and scientificobservations on electricity—as well as hisdiplomacy and charismatic personalitymade him an international celebrity.Although respected by the great mindsof his age, he never lost his connectionto the common people. In the words ofJohn Adams: “His reputation is greaterthan that of Newton, Frederick the Greator Voltaire, his character more reveredthan all of them. There’s scarcely acoachman or a footman or scullery maidwho does not consider him a friend of allmankind.” As a young man, Benjamin Franklinbelieved that human beings couldactually achieve perfection in a givenarea. All you needed was a reasonableplan and a lot of self-discipline. Manypeople today also aim for perfection,although their quest may take adifferent path. Bookstores have wholesections devoted to self-improvementin a variety of areas, including diet,exercise, careers, and dating.It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving atmoral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; Iwould conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company mightlead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did notsee why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found Ihad undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my carewas employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another;habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong forreason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was ourinterest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; andthat the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established,before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct. Forthis purpose I therefore contrived the following method. aIn the various enumerations of the moral virtues I had met with in my reading,I found the catalogue more or less numerous, as different writers included more or fewer ideas under the same name. Temperance, for example, was by some confinedto eating and drinking, while by others it was extended to mean the moderatingevery other pleasure, appetite, inclination, or passion, bodily or mental, even toour avarice and ambition. I proposed to myself, for the sake of clearness, to userather more names, with fewer ideas annexed to each, than a few names with moreideas; and I included under thirteen names of virtues all that at that time occurredto me as necessary or desirable, and annexed to each a short precept, which fullyexpressed the extent I gave to its meaning.These names of virtues, with their precepts were:1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoidtrifling conversation.3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of yourbusiness have its time.4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without failwhat you resolve.5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself;i.e., waste nothing.6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful;cut off all unnecessary actions.7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly; and,if you speak, speak accordingly.8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefitsthat are your duty.9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much asyou think they deserve.10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common orunavoidable.12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never todulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’speace or reputation.13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.1 bMy intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged itwould be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, butto fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then toproceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone through the thirteen; and, asthe previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, Iarranged them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constantvigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremittingattraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations. This beingacquired and established, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being togain knowledge at the same time that I improved in virtue, and considering thatin conversation it was obtained rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue,and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into of prattling, punning,and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence thesecond place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time forattending to my project and my studies. Resolution, once become habitual, wouldkeep me firm in my endeavors to obtain all the subsequent virtues; Frugalityand Industry freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence andindependence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc.,etc. Conceiving then, that, agreeably to the advice of Pythagoras in his GoldenVerses,2daily examination would be necessary, I contrived the following methodfor conducting that examination. cI made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I ruledeach page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of theweek, marking each column with a letter for the day. I crossed these columns withthirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of oneof the virtues, on which line, and inits proper column, I might mark, bya little black spot, every fault I foundupon examination to have beencommitted respecting that virtueupon that day.I determined to give a week’sstrict attention to each of the virtuessuccessively. Thus, in the first week,my great guard was to avoid every3the least offense against Temperance,leaving the other virtues to theirordinary chance, only marking everyevening the faults of the day. Thus,if in the first week I could keep myfirst line, marked T, clear of spots, Isupposed the habit of that virtue somuch strengthened, and its oppositeweakened, that I might ventureextending my attention to include thenext, and for the following week keepboth lines clear of spots. Proceeding thus to the last, I could go through a course complete in thirteen weeks, and fourcourses in a year. And like him who, having a garden to weed, does not attempt toeradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength,but works on one of the beds at a time, and, having accomplished the first,proceeds to a second, so I should have, I hoped, the encouraging pleasure of seeingon my pages the progress I made in virtue, by clearing successively my lines oftheir spots, till in the end, by a number of courses, I should be happy in viewing aclean book, after thirteen weeks’ daily examination. . . . dThe precept of Order requiring that every part of my business should have its allottedtime, one page in my little book contained the following scheme of employmentfor the twenty-four hours of a natural day. I entered upon the execution of this plan for self-examination, and continuedit with occasional intermissions for some time. I was surprised to find myself somuch fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing themdiminish. To avoid the trouble of renewing now and then my little book, which, byscraping out the marks on the paper of old faults to make room for new ones in anew course, became full of holes, I transferred my tables and precepts to the ivoryleaves of a memorandum book, on which the lines were drawn with red ink, thatmade a durable stain, and on those lines I marked my faults with a black-lead pencil,which marks I could easily wipe out with a wet sponge. After a while I went throughone course only in a year, and afterward only one in several years, till at length Iomitted them entirely, being employed in voyages and business abroad, with amultiplicity of affairs that interfered; but I always carried my little book with me. eMy scheme of Order gave me the most trouble; and I found that, thoughit might be practicable where a man’s business was such as to leave him thedisposition of his time, that of a journeyman printer, for instance, it was notpossible to be exactly observed by a master, who must mix with the world, andoften receive people of business at their own hours. Order, too, with regard toplaces for things, papers, etc., I found extremely difficult to acquire. I had notbeen early accustomed to it, and, having an exceeding good memory, I was not sosensible of the inconvenience attending want of method. This article, therefore,cost me so much painful attention, and my faults in it vexed me so much, and Imade so little progress in amendment, and had such frequent relapses, that I wasalmost ready to give up the attempt, and content myself with a faulty character inthat respect, like the man who, in buying an ax of a smith, my neighbor, desiredto have the whole of its surface as bright as the edge. The smith consented to grindit bright for him if he would turn the wheel; he turned, while the smith pressedthe broad face of the ax hard and heavily on the stone, which made the turningof it very fatiguing. The man came every now and then from the wheel to seehow the work went on, and at length would take his ax as it was, without farthergrinding. “No,” said the smith, “turn on, turn on; we shall have it bright by-and-by; as yet, it is only speckled.” “Yes,” says the man, “but I think I like a speckled axbest.” And I believe this may have been the case with many, who, having, for wantof some such means as I employed, found the difficulty of obtaining good andbreaking bad habits in other points of vice and virtue, have given up the struggle,and concluded that “a speckled ax was best;” for something, that pretended to bereason, was every now and then suggesting to me that such extreme nicety as Iexacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals,4which, if it were known,would make me ridiculous; that a perfect character might be attended with theinconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allowa few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance. fIn truth, I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order; and now I amgrown old, and my memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it. But, onthe whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happierman than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it; as those whoaim at perfect writing by imitating the engraved copies, though they never reachthe wished-for excellence of those copies, their hand is mended by the endeavor,and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible. gIt may well be my posterity should be informed that to this little artifice, withthe blessing of God, their ancestor owed the constant felicity of his life, downto his 79th year, in which this is written. What reverses may attend the reminderis in the hand of Providence; but, if they arrive, the reflection on past happinessenjoyed ought to help his bearing them with more resignation. To Temperancehe ascribes his long-continued health, and what is still left to him of a goodconstitution; to Industry and Frugality, the early easiness of his circumstances andacquisition of his fortune, with all that knowledge that enabled him to be a usefulcitizen, and obtained for him some degree of reputation among the learned; toSincerity and Justice, the confidence of his country, and the honorable employs itconferred upon him; and to the joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues,even in the the imperfect state he was able to acquire them, all that evenness oftemper, and that cheerfulness in conversation, which makes his company stillsought for, and agreeable even to his younger acquaintance. I hope, therefore, thatsome of my descendants may follow the example and reap the benefit.<h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Analysis of the Text</h4>Subject: The life and philosophy of Benjamin Franklin.Key Themes:<ol><li>Versatility and Talent: Franklin's diverse roles highlight his multifaceted contributions to society.</li><li>Self-Improvement: His quest for moral perfection through a structured approach to virtues.</li><li>Influence and Legacy: Franklin's impact on American diplomacy and politics, as well as his lasting reputation.</li></ol>Structure:<ul><li>Biographical Overview: Franklin's early life, career, and significant achievements.</li><li>Philosophical Insights: His reflections on virtue, self-discipline, and the pursuit of moral excellence.</li><li>Practical Methodology: Description of his systematic approach to self-examination and virtue cultivation.</li></ul>Style:<ul><li>Narrative and Reflective: Combines storytelling with personal reflection, making it both informative and introspective.</li></ul>Conclusion: Franklin's life exemplifies the pursuit of knowledge and virtue, serving as an inspiration for future generations.“Rip Van Winkle” - Washington IrvingThe following Tale was found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York, who was very curious in the Dutch history of the province, and the manners of the descendants from its primitive settlers. His historical researches, however, did not lie so much among books as among men; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas he found the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary lore, so invaluable to true history. Whenever, therefore, he happened upon a genuine Dutch family, snugly shut up in its low-roofed farmhouse, under a spreading sycamore, he looked upon it as a little clasped volume of black-letter, and studied it with the zeal of a book-worm.The result of all these researches was a history of the province during the reign of the Dutch governors, which he published some years since. There have been various opinions as to the literary character of his work, and, to tell the truth, it is not a whit better than it should be. Its chief merit is its scrupulous accuracy, which indeed was a little questioned on its first appearance, but has since been completely established; and it is now admitted into all historical collections, as a book of unquestionable authority.The old gentleman died shortly after the publication of his work, and now that he is dead and gone, it cannot do much harm to his memory to say that his time might have been much better employed in weightier labors. He, however, was apt to ride his hobby his own way; and though it did now and then kick up the dust a little in the eyes of his neighbors, and grieve the spirit of some friends, for whom he felt the truest deference and affection; yet his errors and follies are remembered “more in sorrow than in anger,” and it begins to be suspected, that he never intended to injure or offend. But however his memory may be appreciated by critics, it is still held dear by many folk, whose good opinion is well worth having; particularly by certain biscuit-bakers, who have gone so far as to imprint his likeness on their new-year cakes; and have thus given him a chance for immortality, almost equal to the being stamped on a Waterloo Medal, or a Queen Anne’s Farthing.WHOEVERhas made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but, sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle-roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village, of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists in the early times of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant, (may he rest in peace!) and there were some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a few years, built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland, having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with weathercocks.In that same village, and in one of these very houses (which, to tell the precise truth, was sadly time-worn and weather-beaten), there lived, many years since, while the country was yet a province of Great Britain, a simple, good-natured fellow, of the name of Rip Van Winkle. He was a descendant of the Van Winkles who figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of Peter Stuyvesant, and accompanied him to the siege of Fort Christina. He inherited, however, but little of the martial character of his ancestors. I have observed that he was a simple, good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbor, and an obedient, hen-pecked husband. Indeed, to the latter circumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit which gained him such universal popularity; for those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation; and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.Certain it is, that he was a great favorite among all the good wives of the village, who, as usual, with the amiable sex, took his part in all family squabbles; and never failed, whenever they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children of the village, too, would shout with joy whenever he approached. He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them to fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of ghosts, witches, and Indians. Whenever he went dodging about the village, he was surrounded by a troop of them, hanging on his skirts, clambering on his back, and playing a thousand tricks on him with impunity; and not a dog would bark at him throughout the neighborhood.The great error in Rip’s composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor. It could not be from the want of assiduity or perseverance; for he would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar’s lance, and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble. He would carry a fowling-piece on his shoulder for hours together, trudging through woods and swamps, and up hill and down dale, to shoot a few squirrels or wild pigeons. He would never refuse to assist a neighbor even in the roughest toil, and was a foremost man at all country frolics for husking Indian corn, or building stone-fences; the women of the village, too, used to employ him to run their errands, and to do such little odd jobs as their less obliging husbands would not do for them. In a word, Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible.In fact, he declared it was of no use to work on his farm; it was the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole country; everything about it went wrong, and would go wrong, in spite of him. His fences were continually falling to pieces; his cow would either go astray, or get among the cabbages; weeds were sure to grow quicker in his fields than anywhere else; the rain always made a point of setting in just as he had some out-door work to do; so that though his patrimonial estate had dwindled away under his management, acre by acre, until there was little more left than a mere patch of Indian corn and potatoes, yet it was the worst conditioned farm in the neighborhood.His children, too, were as ragged and wild as if they belonged to nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness, promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father. He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother’s heels, equipped in a pair of his father’s cast-off galligaskins, which he had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her train in bad weather.Rip Van Winkle, however, was one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound. If left to himself, he would have whistled life away in perfect contentment; but his wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family. Morning, noon, and night, her tongue was incessantly going, and everything he said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence. Rip had but one way of replying to all lectures of the kind, and that, by frequent use, had grown into a habit. He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, cast up his eyes, but said nothing. This, however, always provoked a fresh volley from his wife; so that he was fain to draw off his forces, and take to the outside of the house—the only side which, in truth, belongs to a hen-pecked husband.Rip’s sole domestic adherent was his dog Wolf, who was as much hen-pecked as his master; for Dame Van Winkle regarded them as companions in idleness, and even looked upon Wolf with an evil eye, as the cause of his master’s going so often astray. True it is, in all points of spirit befitting an honorable dog, he was as courageous an animal as ever scoured the woods; but what courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman’s tongue? The moment Wolf entered the house his crest fell, his tail dropped to the ground, or curled between his legs, he sneaked about with a gallows air, casting many a sidelong glance at Dame Van Winkle, and at the least flourish of a broomstick or ladle, he would run to the door with yelping precipitation.Times grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle as years of matrimony rolled on; a tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use. For a long while he used to console himself, when driven from home, by frequenting a kind of perpetual club of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of the village; which held its sessions on a bench before a small inn, designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty George the Third. Herethey used to sit in the shade through a long lazy summer’s day, talking listlessly over village gossip, or telling endless sleepy stories about nothing. But it would have been worth any statesman’s money to have heard the profound discussions that sometimes took place, when by chance an old newspaper fell into their hands from some passing traveler. How solemnly they would listen to the contents, as drawled out by Derrick Van Bummel, the schoolmaster, a dapper learned little man, who was not to be daunted by the most gigantic word in the dictionary; and how sagely they would deliberate upon public events some months after they had taken place.The opinions of this junto were completely controlled by Nicholas Vedder, a patriarch of the village, and landlord of the inn, at the door of which he took his seat from morning till night, just moving sufficiently to avoid the sun and keep in the shade of a large tree; so that the neighbors could tell the hour by his movements as accurately as by a sun-dial. It is true he was rarely heard to speak, but smoked his pipe incessantly. His adherents, however (for every great man has his adherents), perfectly understood him, and knew how to gather his opinions. When any thing that was read or related displeased him, he was observed to smoke his pipe vehemently; and to send forth short, frequent and angry puffs; but when pleased, he would inhale the smoke slowly and tranquilly, and emit it in light and placid clouds; and sometimes, taking the pipe from his mouth, and letting the fragrant vapor curl about his nose, would gravely nod his head in token of perfect approbation.From even this stronghold the unlucky Rip was at length routed by his termagant wife, who would suddenly break in upon the tranquility of the assemblage and call the members all to naught; nor was that august personage, Nicholas Vedder himself, sacred from the daring tongue of this terrible virago, who charged him outright with encouraging her husband in habits of idleness.Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair; and his only alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm and clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand and stroll away into the woods. Here he would sometimes seat himself at the foot of a tree, and share the contents of his wallet with Wolf, with whom he sympathized as a fellow-sufferer in persecution.”Poor Wolf,” he would say, “thy mistress leads thee a dog’s life of it; but never mind, my lad, whilst I live thou shalt never want a friend to stand by thee!” Wolf would wag his tail, look wistfully in his master’s face, and if dogs can feel pity I verily believe he reciprocated the sentiment with all his heart.In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day, Rip had unconsciously scrambled to one of the highest parts of the Kaatskill mountains. He was after his favorite sport of squirrel shooting, and the still solitudes had echoed and re-echoed with the reports of his gun. Panting and fatigued, he threw himself, late in the afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with mountain herbage, that crowned the brow of a precipice. From an opening between the trees he could overlook all the lower country for many a mile of rich woodland. He saw at a distance the lordly Hudson, far, far below him, moving on its silent but majestic course, with the reflection of a purple cloud, or the sail of a lagging bark, here and there sleeping on its glassy bosom, and at last losing itself in the blue highlands.On the other side he looked down into a deep mountain glen, wild, lonely, and shagged, the bottom filled with fragments from the impending cliffs, and scarcely lighted by the reflected rays of the setting sun. For some time Rip lay musing on this scene; evening was gradually advancing; the mountains began to throw their long blue shadows over the valleys; he saw that it would be dark long before he could reach the village, and he heaved a heavy sigh when he thought of encountering the terrors of Dame Van Winkle.As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a distance, hallooing, “Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!” He looked round, but could see nothing but a crow winging its solitary flight across the mountain. He thought his fancy must have deceived him, and turned again to descend, when he heard the same cry ring through the still evening air; “Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!”—at the same time Wolf bristled up his back, and giving a low growl, skulked to his master’s side, looking fearfully down into the glen. Rip now felt a vague apprehension stealing over him; he looked anxiously in the same direction, and perceived a strange figure slowly toiling up the rocks, and bending under the weight of something he carried on his back. He was surprised to see any human being in this lonely and unfrequented place; but supposing it to be some one of the neighborhood in need of his assistance, he hastened down to yield it.On nearer approach he was still more surprised at the singularity of the stranger’s appearance. He was a short square-built old fellow, with thick bushy hair, and a grizzled beard. His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion—a cloth jerkin strapped round the waist—several pair of breeches, the outer one of ample volume, decorated with rows of buttons down the sides, and bunches at the knees. He bore on his shoulder a stout keg, that seemed full of liquor, and made signs for Rip to approach and assist him with the load. Though rather shy and distrustful of this new acquaintance, Rip complied with his usual alacrity; and mutually relieving one another, they clambered up a narrow gully, apparently the dry bed of a mountain torrent. As they ascended, Rip every now and then heard long rolling peals, like distant thunder, that seemed to issue out of a deep ravine, or rather cleft, between lofty rocks, toward which their rugged path conducted. He paused for an instant, but supposing it to be the muttering of one of those transient thunder-showers which often take place in mountain heights, he proceeded. Passing through the ravine, they came to a hollow, like a small amphitheatre, surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees shot their branches, so that you only caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright evening cloud. During the whole time Rip and his companion had labored on in silence; for though the former marvelled greatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe and checked familiarity.On entering the amphitheatre, new objects of wonder presented themselves. On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins. They were dressed in a quaint outlandish fashion; some wore short doublets, others jerkins, with long knives in their belts, and most of them had enormous breeches, of similar style with that of the guide’s. Their visages, too, were peculiar: one had a large beard, broad face, and small piggish eyes: the face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugar-loaf hat, set off with a little red cock’s tail. They all had beards, of various shapes and colors. There was one who seemed to be the commander. He was a stout old gentleman, with a weather-beaten countenance; he wore a laced doublet, broad belt and hanger, high crowned hat and feather, red stockings, and high-heeled shoes, with roses in them. The whole group reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish painting, in the parlor of Dominie Van Shaick, the village parson, and which had been brought over from Holland at the time of the settlement.What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed. Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene but the noise of the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder.As Rip and his companion approached them, they suddenly desisted from their play, and stared at him with such fixed, statue-like gaze, and such strange, uncouth, lack-lustre countenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees smote together. His companion now emptied the contents of the keg into large flagons; and made signs to him to wait upon the company. He obeyed with fear and trembling; they quaffed the liquor in profound silence, and then returned to their game.By degrees Rip’s awe and apprehension subsided. He even ventured, when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the beverage, which he found had much of the flavor of excellent Hollands. He was naturally a thirsty soul, and was soon tempted to repeat the draught. One taste provoked another; and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep.On waking, he found himself on the green knoll whence he had first seen the old man of the glen. He rubbed his eyes—it was a bright sunny morning. The birds were hopping and twittering among the bushes, and the eagle was wheeling aloft, and breasting the pure mountain breeze.”Surely,” thought Rip, “I have not slept here all night.” He recalled the occurrences before he fell asleep. The strange man with a keg of liquor—the mountain ravine—the wild retreat among the rocks—the woe-begone party at ninepins—the flagon—”Oh! that flagon! that wicked flagon!” thought Rip,—”what excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle!”He looked round for his gun, but in place of the clean, well-oiled fowling-piece, he found an old firelock lying by him, the barrel encrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stock worm-eaten. He now suspected that the grave roisters of the mountain had put a trick upon him, and, having dosed him with liquor, had robbed him of his gun. Wolf, too, had disappeared, but he might have strayed away after a squirrel or partridge. He whistled after him and shouted his name, but all in vain; the echoes repeated his whistle and shout, but no dog was to be seen.He determined to revisit the scene of the last evening’s gambol, and if he met with any of the party, to demand his dog and gun. As he rose to walk, he found himself stiff in the joints, and wanting in his usual activity.”These mountain beds do not agree with me,” thought Rip, “and if this frolic should lay me up with a fit of the rheumatism, I shall have a blessed time with Dame Van Winkle.” With some difficulty he got down into the glen: he found the gully up which he and his companion had ascended the preceding evening; but to his astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils or tendrils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of network in his path.At length he reached to where the ravine had opened through the cliffs to the amphitheatre; but no traces of such opening remained. The rocks presented a high impenetrable wall over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam, and fell into a broad deep basin, black from the shadows of the surrounding forest. Here, then, poor Rip was brought to a stand. He again called and whistled after his dog; he was only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows, sporting high in air about a dry tree that overhung a sunny precipice; and who, secure in their elevation, seemed to look down and scoff at the poor man’s perplexities. What was to be done? the morning was passing away, and Rip felt famished for want of his breakfast. He grieved to give up his dog and gun; he dreaded to meet his wife; but it would not do to starve among the mountains. He shook his head, shouldered the rusty firelock, and, with a heart full of trouble and anxiety, turned his steps homeward.As he approached the village he met a number of people, but none whom he knew, which somewhat surprised him, for he had thought himself acquainted with every one in the country round. Their dress, too, was of a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed. They all stared at him with equal marks of surprise, and whenever they cast their eyes upon him, invariably stroked their chins. The constant recurrence of this gesture induced Rip, involuntarily, to do the same, when, to his astonishment, he found his beard had grown a foot long!He had now entered the skirts of the village. A troop of strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him, and pointing at his gray beard. The dogs, too, not one of which he recognized for an old acquaintance, barked at him as he passed. The very village was altered; it was larger and more populous. There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared. Strange names were over the doors—strange faces at the windows—every thing was strange. His mind now misgave him; he began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched. Surely this was his native village which he had left but the day before. There stood the Kaatskill mountains—there ran the silver Hudson at a distance—there was every hill and dale precisely as it had always been. Rip was sorely perplexed.”That flagon last night,” thought he, “has addled my poor head sadly!”It was with some difficulty that he found his way to his own house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every moment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dog that looked like Wolf was sulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. This was an unkind cut indeed.”My very dog,” sighed poor Rip, “has forgotten me!”He entered the house, which, to tell the truth, Dame Van Winkle had always kept in neat order. It was empty, forlorn, and apparently abandoned. This desolateness overcame all his connubial fears—he called loudly for his wife and children—the lonely chambers rang for a moment with his voice, and then all again was silence.He now hurried forth, and hastened to his old resort, the village inn—but it too was gone. A large rickety wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted, “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.” Instead of the great tree that used to shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was reared a tall naked pole, with something on the top that looked like a red night-cap, and from it was fluttering a flag, on which was a singular assemblage of stars and stripes;—all this was strange and incomprehensible. He recognized on the sign, however, the ruby face of King George, under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe; but even this was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON.There was, as usual, a crowd of folk about the door, but none that Rip recollected. The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquillity. He looked in vain for the sage Nicholas Vedder, with his broad face, double chin, and fair long pipe, uttering clouds of tobacco-smoke instead of idle speeches; or Van Bummel, the schoolmaster doling forth the contents of an ancient newspaper. In place of these, a lean, bilious-looking fellow, with his pockets full of handbills, was haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens—elections—members of congress—liberty—Bunker’s Hill—heroes of seventy-six—and other words, which were a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle.The appearance of Rip, with his long grizzled beard, his rusty fowling-piece, his uncouth dress, and an army of women and children at his heels, soon attracted the attention of the tavern-politicians. They crowded around him, eyeing him from head to foot with great curiosity. The orator bustled up to him, and, drawing him partly aside, inquired “On which side he voted?” Rip stared in vacant stupidity. Another short but busy little fellow pulled him by the arm, and, rising on tiptoe, inquired in his ear, “Whether he was Federal or Democrat?” Rip was equally at a loss to comprehend the question; when a knowing, self-important old gentleman, in a sharp cocked hat, made his way through the crowd, putting them to the right and left with his elbows as he passed, and planting himself before Van Winkle, with one arm akimbo, the other resting on his cane, his keen eyes and sharp hat penetrating, as it were, into his very soul, demanded in an austere tone, “What brought him to the election with a gun on his shoulder, and a mob at his heels, and whether he meant to breed a riot in the village?”—”Alas! gentlemen,” cried Rip, somewhat dismayed, “I am a poor quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the King, God bless him!”Here a general shout burst from the by-standers—”A tory! a tory! a spy! a refugee! hustle him! away with him!” It was with great difficulty that the self-important man in the cocked hat restored order; and, having assumed a tenfold austerity of brow, demanded again of the unknown culprit, what he came there for, and whom he was seeking? The poor man humbly assured him that he meant no harm, but merely came there in search of some of his neighbors, who used to keep about the tavern.“Well—who are they—name them.”Rip bethought himself a moment, and inquired, “Where’s Nicholas Vedder?”There was a silence for a little while, when an old man replied, in a thin piping voice, “Nicholas Vedder! why, he is dead and gone these eighteen years! There was a wooden tombstone in the church-yard that used to tell all about him, but that’s rotten and gone too.”“Where’s Brom Dutcher?”“Oh, he went off to the army in the beginning of the war; some say he was killed at the storming of Stony Point—others say he was drowned in a squall at the foot of Antony’s Nose. I don’t know—he never came back again.”“Where’s Van Bummel, the schoolmaster?”“He went off to the wars too, was a great militia general, and is now in congress.”Rip’s heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in his home and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world. Every answer puzzled him too, by treating of such enormous lapses of time, and of matters which he could not understand: war—congress—Stony Point;—he had no courage to ask after any more friends, but cried out in despair, “Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle?”“Oh, Rip Van Winkle!” exclaimed two or three, “oh, to be sure! that’s Rip Van Winkle yonder, leaning against the tree.”Rip looked, and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as he went up to the mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly as ragged. The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man. In the midst of his bewilderment, the man in the cocked hat demanded who he was, and what was his name?“God knows,” exclaimed he, at his wit’s end; “I’m not myself—I’m somebody else—that’s me yonder—no—that’s somebody else got into my shoes—I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and every thing’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”The bystanders began now to look at each other, nod, wink significantly, and tap their fingers against their foreheads. There was a whisper, also, about securing the gun, and keeping the old fellow from doing mischief, at the very suggestion of which the self-important man in the cocked hat retired with some precipitation. At this critical moment a fresh comely woman pressed through the throng to get a peep at the gray-bearded man. She had a chubby child in her arms, which, frightened at his looks, began to cry.”Hush, Rip,” cried she, “hush, you little fool; the old man won’t hurt you.” The name of the child, the air of the mother, the tone of her voice, all awakened a train of recollections in his mind.”What is your name, my good woman?” asked he.“Judith Gardenier.”“And your father’s name?”“Ah, poor man, Rip Van Winkle was his name, but it’s twenty years since he went away from home with his gun, and never has been heard of since,—his dog came home without him; but whether he shot himself, or was carried away by the Indians, nobody can tell. I was then but a little girl.”Rip had but one question more to ask; but he put it with a faltering voice:“Where’s your mother?”Oh, she too had died but a short time since; she broke a blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New-England peddler.There was a drop of comfort, at least, in this intelligence. The honest man could contain himself no longer. He caught his daughter and her child in his arms.”I’m your father!” cried he—”Young Rip VanWinkle once—old Rip Van Winkle now!—Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle?”All stood amazed, until an old woman, tottering out from among the crowd, put her hand to her brow, and peering under it in his face for a moment, exclaimed, “Sure enough! it is Rip Van Winkle—it is himself! Welcome home again, old neighbor. Why, where have you been these twenty long years?”Rip’s story was soon told, for the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night. The neighbors stared when they heard it; some were seen to wink at each other, and put their tongues in their cheeks: and the self-important man in the cocked hat, who, when the alarm was over, had returned to the field, screwed down the corners of his mouth, and shook his head—upon which there was a general shaking of the head throughout the assemblage.It was determined, however, to take the opinion of old Peter Vanderdonk, who was seen slowly advancing up the road. He was a descendant of the historian of that name, who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the province. Peter was the most ancient inhabitant of the village, and well versed in all the wonderful events and traditions of the neighborhood. He recollected Rip at once, and corroborated his story in the most satisfactory manner. He assured the company that it was a fact, handed down from his ancestor the historian, that the Kaatskill mountains had always been haunted by strange beings. That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half-moon; being permitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise, and keep a guardian eye upon the river, and the great city called by his name. That his father had once seen them in their old Dutch dresses playing at nine-pins in a hollow of the mountain; and that he himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of their balls, like distant peals of thunder.To make a long story short, the company broke up, and returned to the more important concerns of the election. Rip’s daughter took him home to live with her; she had a snug, well-furnished house, and a stout cheery farmer for a husband, whom Rip recollected for one of the urchins that used to climb upon his back. As to Rip’s son and heir, who was the ditto of himself, seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work on the farm; but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend to anything else but his business.Rip now resumed his old walks and habits; he soon found many of his former cronies, though all rather the worse for the wear and tear of time; and preferred making friends among the rising generation, with whom he soon grew into great favor.Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived at that happy age when a man can be idle with impunity, he took his place once more on the bench at the inn door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times “before the war.” It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war,—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England,—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was—petticoat government. Happily that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle. Whenever her name was mentioned, however, he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and cast up his eyes; which might pass either for an expression of resignation to his fate, or joy at his deliverance.He used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr. Doolittle’s hotel. He was observed, at first, to vary on some points every time he told it, which was, doubtless, owing to his having so recently awaked. It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related, and not a man, woman, or child in the neighborhood, but knew it by heart. Some always pretended to doubt the reality of it, and insisted that Rip had been out of his head, and that this was one point on which he always remained flighty. The old Dutch inhabitants, however, almost universally gave it full credit. Even to this day they never hear a thunderstorm of a summer afternoon about the Kaatskill, but they say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game of ninepins; and it is a common wish of all hen-pecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life hangs heavy on their hands, that they might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle’s flagon.<h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">NOTE</h4>The foregoing Tale, one would suspect, had been suggested to Mr. Knickerbocker by a little German superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart, and the Kypphauser mountain: the subjoined note, however, which he had appended to the tale, shows that it is an absolute fact, narrated with his usual fidelity:“The story of Rip Van Winkle may seem incredible to many, but nevertheless I give it my full belief, for I know the vicinity of our old Dutch settlements to have been very subject to marvellous events and appearances. Indeed, I have heard many stranger stories than this, in the villages along the Hudson; all of which were too well authenticated to admit of a doubt. I have even talked with Rip Van Winkle myself, who, when last I saw him, was a very venerable old man, and so perfectly rational and consistent on every other point, that I think no conscientious person could refuse to take this into the bargain; nay, I have seen a certificate on the subject taken before a country justice and signed with a cross, in the justice’s own handwriting. The story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt.<h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Analysis of "Rip Van Winkle"</h4><ol><li>Author and Context: Written by Washington Irving, the story reflects early American literature's fascination with folklore and the American identity post-Revolution.</li><li>Themes:<ul><li>Change and Time: Rip's 20-year slumber symbolizes the transformation of America from colonial rule to independence.</li><li>Idleness vs. Responsibility: Rip's aversion to work contrasts with the expectations of a husband and father, highlighting societal roles.</li></ul></li><li>Characterization:<ul><li>Rip Van Winkle: Portrayed as a passive, good-natured man, he embodies the struggle between personal desires and societal obligations.</li><li>Dame Van Winkle: Represents the nagging voice of responsibility, contrasting Rip's carefree nature.</li></ul></li><li>Symbolism:<ul><li>Kaatskill Mountains: Serve as a backdrop for transformation and the supernatural, representing both escape and the passage of time.</li><li>The Flagons: Symbolize temptation and the consequences of indulgence.</li></ul></li><li>Style: The narrative employs a whimsical tone, rich descriptions, and a blend of realism with fantasy, characteristic of Irving's storytelling.</li><li>Cultural Reflection: The story captures the essence of early American life, the tension between tradition and progress, and the quest for identity in a new nation.</li></ol>“The Declaration of Independence” - Thomas JeffersonWhen, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident:-That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable10rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,' it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity that constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain' is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct 30 object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. Toprove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.He has refused his assent to laws' the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.He has forbidden his Governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless these people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature- a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measure.He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of 50 annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining, in the meantime, exposed to all dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.He has endeavored to prevent the population* of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of 60 their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. &He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions,' and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:70For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States;For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;For imposing taxes on us without our consent;For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;For transporting us beyond the seas, to be tried for pretended offenses;For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province,® establishing there an arbitrary government, and enlarging 80 its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrumentfor introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies;For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, fundamentally, the forms of our governments;For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection, and waging war against us.He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns,' and destroyed the lives of our people.He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.He has constrained our fellow citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands. He has excited domestic insurrection amongst us, 1º and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless100Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned forredress, I in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.Image Credits: (t) @Universal Images Group/Getty Images; (bg) ©Odua Images/ShutterstockNor have we been wanting in our attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity; and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. 2 We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation; and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. WE, THEREFORE, THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude!' of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And, for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.The text is an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. It outlines the philosophical justification for the American colonies' separation from British rule. Key points include:<ul><li>Natural Rights: Asserts that all men are created equal and possess unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.</li><li>Government's Role: Governments are established to secure these rights, deriving power from the consent of the governed.</li><li>Right to Revolt: Citizens have the right to alter or abolish a government that becomes destructive to these ends.</li><li>Grievances Against the King: Lists specific abuses by King George III, illustrating a pattern of tyranny.</li><li>Declaration of Independence: Concludes with a formal declaration of independence from Britain, asserting the colonies' right to self-governance.</li></ul>“Nature” - Ralph Waldo EmersonTHERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water; it is cold flame; what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety,—and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving ryefield; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees to windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sittingroom,—these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance, but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most; he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments,—is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the State with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our works of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the mountains into an Aeolian harp,—and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some high-fenced grove which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places and to distant cities,—these make the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road,—a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which schoolmen called natura naturata, or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction: if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause before which all forms flee as the driven snows; itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spiculae through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed; then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of nature:—Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the end of the universe she has but one stuff,—but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also into organization. The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.'—'A very unreasonable postulate,' said the metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation of it?' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball; through all the races of creatures, and through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance a slight generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and without this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret;—how then? Is the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions,—an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves; that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that at least one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are to him burning and fragrant; he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with his tears; they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experience and yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do anything well who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity.In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock and file of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world are cities and governments of the rich; and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It is the same among the men and women as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it and report of the return of the curve. But it also appears that our actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual forces against hers we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their highest form.The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner; it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration of objects;—but nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities however we find our advantage, not less than in the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after a long time.Resistance to the Civil Government (1849) - Henry Thoreau The United States went to war against Mexico in May 1846. That July, while living at WaldenPond, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax as a protest against the conflict, for he saw the war asan effort to extend the realm of slavery. As a result, the local constable arrested him, and hespent the night in the Concord jail. The next day a relative—probably his aunt—paid the tax, andhe was released. As Thoreau continued his study of the woods and himself, he also contemplatedthe nature of government and the citizen's connection to it: out of this came his statementexplaining his act of protest. Published in 1849, his essay has since become the classicjustification for acts of civil disobedience. Mohandas K. Gandhi was inspired by its message andadopted Thoreau's principles in his lifelong campaign to gain Indian independence from GreatBritain. Thoreau's ideas also influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. in his campaign for racialequality in the 1950s and 1960s.I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least;" and I should like tosee it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, whichalso I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are preparedfor it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but anexpedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. . ..This American government,—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring totransmit itself unimpaired to posterity; but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not thevitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. . . . It does notkeep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent inthe American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhatmore, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient bywhich men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it ismost expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. . . .But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, Iask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make knownwhat kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtainingit.After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majorityare permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be inthe right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically thestrongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice,even as far as men understand it. . . . Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree,resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that weshould be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law,so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any timewhat I think right. . . .* * How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that hecannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that politicalorganization as my government which is the slave's government also.All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist thegovernment, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all saythat such is not the case now. . . . But when . . . oppression and robbery are organized, I say, letus not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nationwhich has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustlyoverrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not toosoon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact,that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. * . . . Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousandpoliticians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are moreinterested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to dojustice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with thosewho, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom thelatter would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; butimprovement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is notso important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodnesssomewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are inopinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them;who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands intheir pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone thequestion of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along withthe latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. . . . * Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, andobey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, undersuch a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority toalter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But itis the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse.Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wiseminority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens tobe on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it alwayscrucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington andFranklin rebels? * As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not ofsuch ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. I have other affairs to attendto. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be itgood or bad. A man has not every thing to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to bepetitioning the governor or the legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and, if theyshould not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided noway: its very Constitution is the evil. . . .I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectuallywithdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, andnot wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them.I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one.Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already. * Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and lessdesponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, asthey have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and theMexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should findthem; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who arenot with her but against her,—the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide withhonor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict theear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by howmuch truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combatinjustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip ofpaper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to themajority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. Ifthe alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will nothesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that wouldnot be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commitviolence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if anysuch is possible. . . . * I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs, to make finedistinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even anexcuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but too ready to conform to them. . . . Seenfrom a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and thecourts are very respectable; even this State and this American government are, in many respects,very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; butseen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higherstill, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking ofat all? However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewestpossible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in thisworld. . . . * *The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to,—for I will cheerfully obeythose who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know norcan do so well,—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consentof the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy,is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the lastimprovement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towardsrecognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightenedState, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, fromwhich all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myselfwith imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individualwith respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if afew were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all theduties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to dropoff as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a stillD. K.”<h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Analysis of Resistance to the Civil Government (1849) by Henry Thoreau</h4><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Context</h5><ul><li>Written during the Mexican-American War, Thoreau's essay reflects his beliefs about government, individual conscience, and civil disobedience, inspired by his own experience of incarceration.</li><li>The work has influenced thinkers and leaders such as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.</li></ul><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Key Themes</h5><ol><li>Minimal Government: Thoreau advocates for minimal government intervention, famously stating, "That government is best which governs least.” He views government as an unneeded constraint that hinders individual freedom and progress.</li><li>Civil Disobedience: He argues for the moral right to resist and refuse allegiance to a government that perpetuates injustice (e.g., slavery, war). His act of refusing to pay poll taxes serves as a personal example of civil disobedience.</li><li>Individual Conscience over Majority: Thoreau stresses the importance of individual conscience over societal norms and majority rule, arguing that citizens should prioritize right actions over adherence to unjust laws.</li><li>Critique of Society: He critiques not just distant politicians but also local citizens who prioritize commerce over justice, emphasizing the complicity of everyday people in systemic oppression.</li><li>Rights of the Individual: Thoreau envisions a truly just state that acknowledges and respects each person's rights as independent entities rather than mere subjects of the government.</li></ol><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Structure</h5><ul><li>The essay is divided into sections that explore various aspects of government and individual rights, progressing from a critique of current governance to a call for personal moral action.</li></ul><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Style</h5><ul><li>Thoreau uses rhetorical questions and philosophical reflections to engage readers, inviting them to contemplate their own relationship with government. His style is direct and confrontational, underscoring the urgency of his message.</li></ul><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Conclusion</h5><ul><li>Thoreau's work advocates for active resistance against unjust laws and systems and emphasizes the need for individuals to align their actions with their moral beliefs. His thoughts remain relevant to contemporary discussions of civil rights and individual responsibility.</li></ul><h2 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Walt Whitman’s Poems</h2>I celebrate myself, and sing myself I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume,<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fn178_197" download="true">[1]</a> For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loaf and invite my soul, I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance,<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fn178_198" download="true">[2]</a> Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.<h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Analysis of Walt Whitman's Poem</h4><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Context</h5>Written by Walt Whitman, this poem emphasizes the connection between the poet and the universe, and embodies the themes of individualism, nature, and transcendentalism.<h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Themes</h5><ol><li>Self-Celebration: The title and repeated phrasing "I celebrate myself" highlights the importance of self-identity and self-acceptance. Whitman finds value within himself and invites readers to recognize their own worth.</li><li>Unity of the Self and Nature: The line "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" emphasizes interconnectedness. Whitman suggests that individual existence is tied to the broader universe, conveying a sense of shared humanity.</li><li>Nature as a Source of Reflection: The phrase "I loaf and invite my soul" together with the imagery of "a spear of summer grass" suggests a meditative state, reflecting on nature as a source of inspiration and peace. Nature serves as a constant reminder of life’s simplicity and profound beauty.</li><li>Heritage and Continuity: By referencing his lineage—"Born here of parents born here from parents the same"—Whitman connects personal identity to a larger historical context, acknowledging the contributions of those before him. This continuity enriches his identity, furthering the theme of belonging.</li><li>Freedom from Convention: The mention of "Creeds and schools in abeyance" indicates a rejection of traditional systems of thought, suggesting that true understanding comes from engaging with nature and one’s original instincts rather than imposed doctrines.</li></ol><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Structure</h5><ul><li>The poem is free-verse, reflecting Whitman's belief in the lack of constraints in life and thought. This structure mirrors the natural ebb and flow of thought and experience.</li></ul><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Style</h5><ul><li>Distinctive Voice: Whitman's use of colloquial language creates an approachable and personal tone. He employs a rhythmic cadences that evoke a sense of spoken word, enhancing the intimacy of the poem.</li><li>Imagery: Vivid images related to nature (e.g., "spear of summer grass") serve to ground abstract ideas in tangible experiences, making philosophical concepts more relatable.</li></ul><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Conclusion</h5>This poem encapsulates Whitman’s philosophy of connecting individual identity to nature and the universe. It celebrates self-exploration and urges readers to appreciate their own existence while recognizing their shared bond with others and the world. Whitman's celebration of the self is both a personal and universal affirmation of life, reflecting his transcendental beliefs and his deep appreciation for nature. A child said What is the grass? A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fn179_199" download="true">[1]</a> And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fn179_200" download="true">[2]</a> I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps, And here you are the mothers’ laps. The grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.<h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Analysis of Walt Whitman's Poem</h4>Context: Written by Walt Whitman, this poem explores the significance of grass as a symbol connecting life, death, and the universe. The speaker reflects on the nature of existence and the interconnectedness of all beings.Key Themes:<ol><li>Nature and Identity: The repeated questioning of what grass is emphasizes individual and collective identity. The grass represents a shared existence transcending race and social status.</li><li>Life and Death: Grass serves as a metaphor for death and rebirth. The line “the smallest sprout shows there is really no death” implies continuity and the cyclical nature of life.</li><li>Universality: Whitman argues that everyone, regardless of background, is equal, represented by the grass growing in diverse environments. Terms such as “black folks as among white” highlight a democratic spirit and shared humanity.</li><li>Spiritual Connection: The speaker’s musings about grass as a “handkerchief of the Lord” and “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” evoke a sense of the divine, suggesting that nature holds sacred meaning.</li><li>Transcendence of Death: The closing lines suggest that death leads to new life and is not an end but a transformation. Whitman posits that understanding this can alleviate fear surrounding mortality.</li></ol>Structure:<ul><li>The poem employs free verse, reflecting a natural rhythm and embodying Whitman's transcendent views.</li></ul>Style:<ul><li>Colloquial Language: Whitman’s use of informal speech connects with readers, making profound philosophical concepts more accessible.</li><li>Imagery: Vivid nature imagery enhances the themes and draws readers into the sensory experience of the poem.</li></ul>Conclusion: This poem encapsulates Whitman’s philosophy of connection between self, nature, and the universe, encouraging readers to embrace life and acknowledge the eternal cycle of existence.I Hear America Singing I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. Analysis of I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman.Context: Written by Walt Whitman, this poem celebrates the diverse voices and labors of everyday Americans, emphasizing individual contributions to the collective identity of the nation.Key Themes:<ol><li>Celebration of Individuality: The poem presents various American workers—mechanics, carpenters, boatmen, and mothers—each singing their own unique songs. This highlights their individual identities and contributions to society.</li><li>Unity in Diversity: While celebrating individual voices, Whitman also illustrates a sense of collective identity. The varied carols come together to represent a harmonious America, encapsulating the unity formed by diverse contributions.</li><li>Labor and Pride: Each worker’s song mirrors their labor and showcases their pride. The act of singing while working emphasizes joy in labor and the importance of each role within the economy.</li><li>Gender and Family Roles: Whitman includes voices from both men and women, signifying the contributions of all members of society—including mothers and young wives—thus recognizing their essential roles alongside traditional laborers.</li><li>Temporal Rhythm: The poem captures the rhythms of daily life, moving from morning work to evening gatherings. This progression underscores the cyclical nature of labor and life in America.</li></ol>Structure:<ul><li>The poem is composed in free verse, reflecting Whitman’s style, which emphasizes organic flow and rhythm rather than strict meter or rhyme.</li><li>Repetition of “singing” ties the stanzas together, reinforcing the theme of joy and collective expression.</li></ul>Style:<ul><li>Imagery: Whitman uses vivid imagery to illustrate the various workers and their environments, inviting readers to visualize the American landscape.</li><li>Colloquial Language: The use of everyday language makes the poem accessible and relatable, allowing readers to connect with the experiences of the workers.</li></ul>Conclusion: Whitman’s I Hear America Singing encapsulates the essence of American life through the celebration of individual and collective identities, demonstrating how each person's contribution upholds the fabric of the nation and creates a rich, communal experience. The poem serves as both an ode to labor and a call to recognize the diverse voices that shape the American experience.A Noiseless Patient Spider A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fnCR40_74" download="true">[1]</a> it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fnCR40_75" download="true">[2]</a> anchor hold, Till the gossamer<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fnCR40_76" download="true">[3]</a> thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.A Noiseless Patient Spider A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fnCR40_74" download="true">[1]</a> it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fnCR40_75" download="true">[2]</a> anchor hold, Till the gossamer<a target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="footnote link" href="https://my.hrw.com/content/hmof/language_arts/hmhcollections2017/ca/gr11/ese_9780544529830/data/footnote/pagefootnote.xhtml#fnCR40_76" download="true">[3]</a> thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.<h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Analysis of "A Noiseless Patient Spider" by Walt Whitman</h4><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Context</h5>Written by Walt Whitman, this poem contrasts the solitary existence of a spider with the broader quest for meaning and connection in human life. Through the metaphor of the spider’s patient weaving, Whitman reflects on the human soul's search for understanding and connection in a vast and often isolating universe.<h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Key Themes</h5><ol><li>Isolation and Connection: The spider's solitude symbolizes the individual's separation in a vast universe, paralleling the human experience of seeking connection and understanding.</li><li>Creation and Exploration: The act of the spider launching filaments reflects creativity and the desire to explore the unknown, mirroring the soul's ventures into personal experiences and knowledge.</li><li>Endurance and Patience: The spider's patient and tireless work highlights the virtues of perseverance and determination, suggesting that meaningful connections take time to develop.</li><li>Metaphor of the Soul: Whitman directly addresses the soul, suggesting that just as the spider seeks to build connections, so too does the human spirit strive for deeper relationships and insights.</li><li>Infinite Quest: The idea of seeking connection across “measureless oceans of space” insinuates the daunting yet essential journey toward understanding one's purpose.</li></ol><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Structure</h5>The poem consists of free verse, aligning with Whitman’s characteristic style. This lack of formal structure allows for an organic flow of thoughts and emotions, mirroring the fluidity of the spider's silk and the intricate exploration of the soul's journey.<h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Style</h5><ul><li>Imagery: Vivid imagery of the spider in its environment creates a tangible sense of space and isolation. The repeated phrase “filament, filament, filament” evokes the endless nature of the spider's work and the continuity of life's journey.</li><li>Symbolism: The spider represents the creative spirit, while its threads symbolize the connections we strive to make in life. The “gossamer thread” emphasizes fragility and beauty in the pursuit of these connections.</li></ul><h5 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Conclusion</h5>In "A Noiseless Patient Spider," Whitman encapsulates the human condition of isolation in an expansive universe while simultaneously celebrating the deep-seated yearning for connection and understanding. This rich metaphor of the spider serves as an exploration of the complexities of the soul's journey, emphasizing endurance, creativity, and the intrinsic desire to find one's place in the cosmos.That very singular man, old Dr. Heidegger, once invited four venerable friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, and a withered gentlewoman, whose name was the Widow Wycherly. They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves. Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now little better than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years, and his health and substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other torments of soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil fame, or at least had been so till time had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation, and made him obscure instead of infamous. As for the Widow Wycherly, tradition tells us that she was a great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in deep seclusion, on account of certain scandalous stories which had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her. It is a circumstance worth mentioning that each of these three old gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, were early lovers of the Widow Wycherly, and had once been on the point of cutting each other's throats for her sake. And, before proceeding further, I will merely hint that Dr. Heidegger and all his foul guests were sometimes thought to be a little beside themselves,--as is not unfrequently the case with old people, when worried either by present troubles or woful recollections."My dear old friends," said Dr. Heidegger, motioning them to be seated, "I am desirous of your assistance in one of those little experiments with which I amuse myself here in my study."If all stories were true, Dr. Heidegger's study must have been a very curious place. It was a dim, old-fashioned chamber, festooned with cobwebs, and besprinkled with antique dust. Around the walls stood several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were filled with rows of gigantic folios and black-letter quartos, and the upper with little parchment-covered duodecimos. Over the central bookcase was a bronze bust of Hippocrates, with which, according to some authorities, Dr. Heidegger was accustomed to hold consultations in all difficult cases of his practice. In the obscurest corner of the room stood a tall and narrow oaken closet, with its door ajar, within which doubtfully appeared a skeleton. Between two of the bookcases hung a looking-glass, presenting its high and dusty plate within a tarnished gilt frame. Among many wonderful stories related of this mirror, it was fabled that the spirits of all the doctor's deceased patients dwelt within its verge, and would stare him in the face whenever he looked thitherward. The opposite side of the chamber was ornamented with the full-length portrait of a young lady, arrayed in the faded magnificence of silk, satin, and brocade, and with a visage as faded as her dress. Above half a century ago, Dr. Heidegger had been on the point of marriage with this young lady; but, being affected with some slight disorder, she had swallowed one of her lover's prescriptions, and died on the bridal evening. The greatest curiosity of the study remains to be mentioned; it was a ponderous folio volume, bound in black leather, with massive silver clasps. There were no letters on the back, and nobody could tell the title of the book. But it was well known to be a book of magic; and once, when a chambermaid had lifted it, merely to brush away the dust, the skeleton had rattled in its closet, the picture of the young lady had stepped one foot upon the floor, and several ghastly faces had peeped forth from the mirror; while the brazen head of Hippocrates frowned, and said,--"Forbear!"Such was Dr. Heidegger's study. On the summer afternoon of our tale a small round table, as black as ebony, stood in the centre of the room, sustaining a cut-glass vase of beautiful form and elaborate workmanship. The sunshine came through the window, between the heavy festoons of two faded damask curtains, and fell directly across this vase; so that a mild splendor was reflected from it on the ashen visages of the five old people who sat around. Four champagne glasses were also on the table."My dear old friends," repeated Dr. Heidegger, "may I reckon on your aid in performing an exceedingly curious experiment?"Now Dr. Heidegger was a very strange old gentleman, whose eccentricity had become the nucleus for a thousand fantastic stories. Some of these fables, to my shame be it spoken, might possibly be traced back to my own veracious self; and if any passages of the present tale should startle the reader's faith, I must be content to bear the stigma of a fiction monger.When the doctor's four guests heard him talk of his proposed experiment, they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of a mouse in an air pump, or the examination of a cobweb by the microscope, or some similar nonsense, with which he was constantly in the habit of pestering his intimates. But without waiting for a reply, Dr. Heidegger hobbled across the chamber, and returned with the same ponderous folio, bound in black leather, which common report affirmed to be a book of magic. Undoing the silver clasps, he opened the volume, and took from among its black-letter pages a rose, or what was once a rose, though now the green leaves and crimson petals had assumed one brownish hue, and the ancient flower seemed ready to crumble to dust in the doctor's hands."This rose," said Dr. Heidegger, with a sigh, "this same withered and crumbling flower, blossomed five and fifty years ago. It was given me by Sylvia Ward, whose portrait hangs yonder; and I meant to wear it in my bosom at our wedding. Five and fifty years it has been treasured between the leaves of this old volume. Now, would you deem it possible that this rose of half a century could ever bloom again?""Nonsense!" said the Widow Wycherly, with a peevish toss of her head. "You might as well ask whether an old woman's wrinkled face could ever bloom again.""See!" answered Dr. Heidegger.He uncovered the vase, and threw the faded rose into the water which it contained. At first, it lay lightly on the surface of the fluid, appearing to imbibe none of its moisture. Soon, however, a singular change began to be visible. The crushed and dried petals stirred, and assumed a deepening tinge of crimson, as if the flower were reviving from a deathlike slumber; the slender stalk and twigs of foliage became green; and there was the rose of half a century, looking as fresh as when Sylvia Ward had first given it to her lover. It was scarcely full blown; for some of its delicate red leaves curled modestly around its moist bosom, within which two or three dewdrops were sparkling."That is certainly a very pretty deception," said the doctor's friends; carelessly, however, for they had witnessed greater miracles at a conjurer's show; "pray how was it effected?""Did you never hear of the 'Fountain of Youth?'" asked Dr. Heidegger, "which Ponce De Leon, the Spanish adventurer, went in search of two or three centuries ago?""But did Ponce De Leon ever find it?" said the Widow Wycherly."No," answered Dr. Heidegger, "for he never sought it in the right place. The famous Fountain of Youth, if I am rightly informed, is situated in the southern part of the Floridian peninsula, not far from Lake Macaco. Its source is overshadowed by several gigantic magnolias, which, though numberless centuries old, have been kept as fresh as violets by the virtues of this wonderful water. An acquaintance of mine, knowing my curiosity in such matters, has sent me what you see in the vase.""Ahem!" said Colonel Killigrew, who believed not a word of the doctor's story; "and what may be the effect of this fluid on the human frame?""You shall judge for yourself, my dear colonel," replied Dr. Heidegger; "and all of you, my respected friends, are welcome to so much of this admirable fluid as may restore to you the bloom of youth. For my own part, having had much trouble in growing old, I am in no hurry to grow young again. With your permission, therefore, I will merely watch the progress of the experiment."While he spoke, Dr. Heidegger had been filling the four champagne glasses with the water of the Fountain of Youth. It was apparently impregnated with an effervescent gas, for little bubbles were continually ascending from the depths of the glasses, and bursting in silvery spray at the surface. As the liquor diffused a pleasant perfume, the old people doubted not that it possessed cordial and comfortable properties; and though utter sceptics as to its rejuvenescent power, they were inclined to swallow it at once. But Dr. Heidegger besought them to stay a moment."Before you drink, my respectable old friends," said he, "it would be well that, with the experience of a lifetime to direct you, you should draw up a few general rules for your guidance, in passing a second time through the perils of youth. Think what a sin and shame it would be, if, with your peculiar advantages, you should not become patterns of virtue and wisdom to all the young people of the age!"The doctor's four venerable friends made him no answer, except by a feeble and tremulous laugh; so very ridiculous was the idea that, knowing how closely repentance treads behind the steps of error, they should ever go astray again."Drink, then," said the doctor, bowing: "I rejoice that I have so well selected the subjects of my experiment."With palsied hands, they raised the glasses to their lips. The liquor, if it really possessed such virtues as Dr. Heidegger imputed to it, could not have been bestowed on four human beings who needed it more wofully. They looked as if they had never known what youth or pleasure was, but had been the offspring of Nature's dotage, and always the gray, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures, who now sat stooping round the doctor's table, without life enough in their souls or bodies to be animated even by the prospect of growing young again. They drank off the water, and replaced their glasses on the table.Assuredly there was an almost immediate improvement in the aspect of the party, not unlike what might have been produced by a glass of generous wine, together with a sudden glow of cheerful sunshine brightening over all their visages at once. There was a healthful suffusion on their cheeks, instead of the ashen hue that had made them look so corpse-like. They gazed at one another, and fancied that some magic power had really begun to smooth away the deep and sad inscriptions which Father Time had been so long engraving on their brows. The Widow Wycherly adjusted her cap, for she felt almost like a woman again."Give us more of this wondrous water!" cried they, eagerly. "We are younger--but we are still too old! Quick--give us more!""Patience, patience!" quoth Dr. Heidegger, who sat watching the experiment with philosophic coolness. "You have been a long time growing old. Surely, you might be content to grow young in half an hour! But the water is at your service."Again he filled their glasses with the liquor of youth, enough of which still remained in the vase to turn half the old people in the city to the age of their own grandchildren. While the bubbles were yet sparkling on the brim, the doctor's four guests snatched their glasses from the table, and swallowed the contents at a single gulp. Was it delusion? even while the draught was passing down their throats, it seemed to have wrought a change on their whole systems. Their eyes grew clear and bright; a dark shade deepened among their silvery locks, they sat around the table, three gentlemen of middle age, and a woman, hardly beyond her buxom prime."My dear widow, you are charming!" cried Colonel Killigrew, whose eyes had been fixed upon her face, while the shadows of age were flitting from it like darkness from the crimson daybreak.The fair widow knew, of old, that Colonel Killigrew's compliments were not always measured by sober truth; so she started up and ran to the mirror, still dreading that the ugly visage of an old woman would meet her gaze. Meanwhile, the three gentlemen behaved in such a manner as proved that the water of the Fountain of Youth possessed some intoxicating qualities; unless, indeed, their exhilaration of spirits were merely a lightsome dizziness caused by the sudden removal of the weight of years. Mr. Gascoigne's mind seemed to run on political topics, but whether relating to the past, present, or future, could not easily be determined, since the same ideas and phrases have been in vogue these fifty years. Now he rattled forth full-throated sentences about patriotism, national glory, and the people's right; now he muttered some perilous stuff or other, in a sly and doubtful whisper, so cautiously that even his own conscience could scarcely catch the secret; and now, again, he spoke in measured accents, and a deeply deferential tone, as if a royal ear were listening to his wellturned periods. Colonel Killigrew all this time had been trolling forth a jolly bottle song, and ringing his glass in symphony with the chorus, while his eyes wandered toward the buxom figure of the Widow Wycherly. On the other side of the table, Mr. Medbourne was involved in a calculation of dollars and cents, with which was strangely intermingled a project for supplying the East Indies with ice, by harnessing a team of whales to the polar icebergs.As for the Widow Wycherly, she stood before the mirror courtesying and simpering to her own image, and greeting it as the friend whom she loved better than all the world beside. She thrust her face close to the glass, to see whether some long-remembered wrinkle or crow's foot had indeed vanished. She examined whether the snow had so entirely melted from her hair that the venerable cap could be safely thrown aside. At last, turning briskly away, she came with a sort of dancing step to the table."My dear old doctor," cried she, "pray favor me with another glass!""Certainly, my dear madam, certainly!" replied the complaisant doctor; "see! I have already filled the glasses."There, in fact, stood the four glasses, brimful of this wonderful water, the delicate spray of which, as it effervesced from the surface, resembled the tremulous glitter of diamonds. It was now so nearly sunset that the chamber had grown duskier than ever; but a mild and moonlike splendor gleamed from within the vase, and rested alike on the four guests and on the doctor's venerable figure. He sat in a high-backed, elaborately-carved, oaken arm-chair, with a gray dignity of aspect that might have well befitted that very Father Time, whose power had never been disputed, save by this fortunate company. Even while quaffing the third draught of the Fountain of Youth, they were almost awed by the expression of his mysterious visage.But, the next moment, the exhilarating gush of young life shot through their veins. They were now in the happy prime of youth. Age, with its miserable train of cares and sorrows and diseases, was remembered only as the trouble of a dream, from which they had joyously awoke. The fresh gloss of the soul, so early lost, and without which the world's successive scenes had been but a gallery of faded pictures, again threw its enchantment over all their prospects. They felt like new-created beings in a new-created universe."We are young! We are young!" they cried exultingly.Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly-marked characteristics of middle life, and mutually assimilated them all. They were a group of merry youngsters, almost maddened with the exuberant frolicsomeness of their years. The most singular effect of their gayety was an impulse to mock the infirmity and decrepitude of which they had so lately been the victims. They laughed loudly at their old-fashioned attire, the wide-skirted coats and flapped waistcoats of the young men, and the ancient cap and gown of the blooming girl. One limped across the floor like a gouty grandfather; one set a pair of spectacles astride of his nose, and pretended to pore over the black-letter pages of the book of magic; a third seated himself in an arm-chair, and strove to imitate the venerable dignity of Dr. Heidegger. Then all shouted mirthfully, and leaped about the room. The Widow Wycherly--if so fresh a damsel could be called a widow--tripped up to the doctor's chair, with a mischievous merriment in her rosy face."Doctor, you dear old soul," cried she, "get up and dance with me!" And then the four young people laughed louder than ever, to think what a queer figure the poor old doctor would cut."Pray excuse me," answered the doctor quietly. "I am old and rheumatic, and my dancing days were over long ago. But either of these gay young gentlemen will be glad of so pretty a partner.""Dance with me, Clara!" cried Colonel Killigrew"No, no, I will be her partner!" shouted Mr. Gascoigne."She promised me her hand, fifty years ago!" exclaimed Mr. Medbourne.They all gathered round her. One caught both her hands in his passionate grasp another threw his arm about her waist--the third buried his hand among the glossy curls that clustered beneath the widow's cap. Blushing, panting, struggling, chiding, laughing, her warm breath fanning each of their faces by turns, she strove to disengage herself, yet still remained in their triple embrace. Never was there a livelier picture of youthful rivalship, with bewitching beauty for the prize. Yet, by a strange deception, owing to the duskiness of the chamber, and the antique dresses which they still wore, the tall mirror is said to have reflected the figures of the three old, gray, withered grandsires, ridiculously contending for the skinny ugliness of a shrivelled grandam.But they were young: their burning passions proved them so. Inflamed to madness by the coquetry of the girl-widow, who neither granted nor quite withheld her favors, the three rivals began to interchange threatening glances. Still keeping hold of the fair prize, they grappled fiercely at one another's throats. As they struggled to and fro, the table was overturned, and the vase dashed into a thousand fragments. The precious Water of Youth flowed in a bright stream across the floor, moistening the wings of a butterfly, which, grown old in the decline of summer, had alighted there to die. The insect fluttered lightly through the chamber, and settled on the snowy head of Dr. Heidegger."Come, come, gentlemen!--come, Madam Wycherly," exclaimed the doctor, "I really must protest against this riot."They stood still and shivered; for it seemed as if gray Time were calling them back from their sunny youth, far down into the chill and darksome vale of years. They looked at old Dr. Heidegger, who sat in his carved arm-chair, holding the rose of half a century, which he had rescued from among the fragments of the shattered vase. At the motion of his hand, the four rioters resumed their seats; the more readily, because their violent exertions had wearied them, youthful though they were."My poor Sylvia's rose!" ejaculated Dr. Heidegger, holding it in the light of the sunset clouds; "it appears to be fading again."And so it was. Even while the party were looking at it, the flower continued to shrivel up, till it became as dry and fragile as when the doctor had first thrown it into the vase. He shook off the few drops of moisture which clung to its petals."I love it as well thus as in its dewy freshness," observed he, pressing the withered rose to his withered lips. While he spoke, the butterfly fluttered down from the doctor's snowy head, and fell upon the floor.His guests shivered again. A strange chillness, whether of the body or spirit they could not tell, was creeping gradually over them all. They gazed at one another, and fancied that each fleeting moment snatched away a charm, and left a deepening furrow where none had been before. Was it an illusion? Had the changes of a lifetime been crowded into so brief a space, and were they now four aged people, sitting with their old friend, Dr. Heidegger?"Are we grown old again, so soon?" cried they, dolefully.In truth they had. The Water of Youth possessed merely a virtue more transient than that of wine. The delirium which it created had effervesced away. Yes! they were old again. With a shuddering impulse, that showed her a woman still, the widow clasped her skinny hands before her face, and wished that the coffin lid were over it, since it could be no longer beautiful."Yes, friends, ye are old again," said Dr. Heidegger, "and lo! the Water of Youth is all lavished on the ground. Well--I bemoan it not; for if the fountain gushed at my very doorstep, I would not stoop to bathe my lips in it--no, though its delirium were for years instead of moments. Such is the lesson ye have taught me!"But the doctor's four friends had taught no such lesson to themselves. They resolved forthwith to make a pilgrimage to Florida, and quaff at morning, noon, and night, from the Fountain of Youth.<h3 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Analysis of "Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment"</h3><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Context</h4><ul><li>Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne</li><li>Setting: Dr. Heidegger's dim, antique study, filled with magical curiosity and signs of past life and death.</li><li>Characters: Dr. Heidegger and four aging friends, each embodying the consequences of past choices and regrets.</li></ul><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Key Themes</h4><ol><li>The Illusion of Youth: The narrative centers on the quest for eternal youth, ultimately suggesting that the desire for rejuvenation can lead to folly and chaos.</li><li>Regret and Reflection: The characters are portrayed as haunted by past mistakes, leading to a deep sense of melancholy and longing for a time they cannot reclaim.</li><li>Nature of Life and Death: The withering rose symbolizes the transient nature of beauty and life, serving as a reminder of mortality and the inevitable decay that follows youth.</li><li>Human Folly: The characters' immediate embrace of joy after drinking the rejuvenating liquid leads to reckless behavior, emphasizing the foolishness that often accompanies the pursuit of lost youth.</li><li>Interconnectedness of Time: The shift between youth and age highlights the fluidity of time and how actions reverberate through one's life, suggesting a cyclical understanding of existence.</li></ol><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Structure</h4><ul><li>Narrative Structure: The story unfolds through a framing device, with Dr. Heidegger’s experiment serving as a vehicle for moral and philosophical exploration.</li><li>Imagery and Symbolism: Hawthorne employs rich imagery in describing the study and the characters' transformations, using elements like the vase and the rose as central symbols to convey deeper meanings about existence and human desire.</li></ul><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Style</h4><ul><li>Tone: The tone is reflective and somber, saturated with irony. Hawthorne combines a critical view of the characters’ desires with a sense of sympathy for their plight.</li><li>Characterization: The aging characters are vividly drawn, each with a distinct background that informs their current despondency. Their interactions showcase the complexities of human relationships and the frailty of ego.</li></ul><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Conclusion</h4><ul><li>Dr. Heidegger's Experiment serves as a cautionary tale about the folly of human desires for renewal. Hawthorne skillfully illustrates how the craving for lost youth can lead to destructive choices, reinforcing the wisdom that true rejuvenation comes from a deeper understanding of oneself and acceptance of the natural course of life.</li></ul><h2 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">“The Raven”</h2>BY <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" class="link" href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edgar-allan-poe" download="true">EDGAR ALLAN POE</a>Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.”Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrowFrom my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore.And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtainThrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;— This it is and nothing more.” Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;— Darkness there and nothing more.Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”— Merely this and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;— ’Tis the wind and nothing more!”Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door— Perched, and sat, and nothing more.Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;For we cannot help agreeing that no living human beingEver yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as “Nevermore.”But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke onlyThat one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before—On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.” Then the bird said “Nevermore.” Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and storeCaught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful DisasterFollowed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore Of ‘Never—nevermore’.”But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linkingFancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressingTo the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease recliningOn the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er, She shall press, ah, nevermore!Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censerSwung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent theeRespite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sittingOn the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!<h3 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Analysis of "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe</h3><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Context</h4><ul><li>Author: Edgar Allan Poe</li><li>Themes: The poem delves into themes of mourning, memory, and the supernatural, suggesting a profound psychological landscape that explores grief and despair.</li><li>Setting: A dark, oppressive chamber during a bleak December night, contributing to the poem's gothic atmosphere.</li></ul><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Key Themes</h4><ol><li>Grief and Loss: The speaker is mourning the loss of Lenore, a symbol of unattainable idealization and perfect love. His sorrow amplifies through the poem, leading to despair.</li><li>The Supernatural: The arrival of the raven introduces an element of the supernatural, serving as a messenger that evokes fear and fascination.</li><li>Madness and Despair: The speaker's descent into madness is marked by repetition and obsession with the raven's reply, underscoring his internal conflict and emotional turmoil.</li><li>Memory and Reminiscence: Memories of Lenore haunt the speaker, representing the inescapable nature of grief and how it clings to the mind.</li><li>Inevitability of Death: The refrain "nevermore" signifies despair and the finality of death, leaving the speaker with unresolved anguish.</li></ol><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Structure</h4><ul><li>Form: The poem consists of 18 stanzas of varying lengths, utilizing internal rhyme, alliteration, and repetition, which creates a lyrical, haunting quality.</li><li>Rhyme Scheme: The consistent rhyme scheme (ABCBBB) creates a musicality that reinforces the themes of obsession and mind-twisting loss.</li></ul><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Style</h4><ul><li>Tone: The poem retains a melancholic tone, making use of dark imagery and a rhythmic cadence that enhances the overall atmosphere of despair.</li><li>Imagery: Vivid imagery complements the poem’s themes. References to darkness, the raven, and decaying beauty add to the haunting ambiance.</li><li>Symbolism: The raven symbolizes mournful reflection and this continuous refrain emphasizes the theme of inevitability in life and death.</li></ul><h4 collapsed="false" seolevelmigrated="true">Conclusion</h4>In "The Raven," Poe creates a complex interplay of language and emotion, illustrating how grief can engulf the human spirit, leading to a perpetual state of mourning. The poem remains a poignant exploration of loss and the human condition, engaging readers with its unsettling beauty and profound depth.THERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water; it is cold flame; what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety,—and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving ryefield; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees to windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sittingroom,—these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance, but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most; he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments,—is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the State with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our works of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the mountains into an Aeolian harp,—and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some high-fenced grove which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places and to distant cities,—these make the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road,—a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which schoolmen called natura naturata, or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction: if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause before which all forms flee as the driven snows; itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spiculae through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed; then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of nature:—Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the end of the universe she has but one stuff,—but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also into organization. The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.'—'A very unreasonable postulate,' said the metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation of it?' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball; through all the races of creatures, and through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance a slight generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and without this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret;—how then? Is the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions,—an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves; that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that at least one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are to him burning and fragrant; he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with his tears; they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experience and yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do anything well who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity.In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock and file of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world are cities and governments of the rich; and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It is the same among the men and women as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it and report of the return of the curve. But it also appears that our actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual forces against hers we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their highest form.The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner; it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration of objects;—but nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities however we find our advantage, not less than in the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after a long time.

Analysis of Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Context

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Theme: The essay explores the intimate relationship between humanity and nature, emphasizing the idea that nature is a source of beauty, wisdom, and solace.
Setting: Emerson reflects on the natural world through vivid descriptions of landscapes, seasons, and the interconnectedness of life.

Key Themes:

Harmony with Nature: Emerson articulates a vision of harmony where nature nurtures the soul, asserting that true satisfaction comes from the environment rather than human constructs.
Beauty and Transcendence: The beauty of nature is portrayed as transformative and healing, providing an escape from the artificial constraints of society. The imagery of phenomena like the fall of snowflakes and the glow of sunset captures this beauty.
Nature as a Teacher: Emerson suggests that nature is a mentor that offers insight into the human condition, prompting self-reflection and growth. He argues that true wisdom can be gleaned from experiences in the natural world.
Critique of Society: Emerson criticizes the constraints of societal institutions, claiming they often distance individuals from the purity and inspiration of nature. He emphasizes a return to simple, natural pleasures, contrasting with the complexity of urban life.
Connection to the Universe: The essay posits humanity's relationship with nature as fundamentally linked to the cosmos. Emerson believes this connection is vital to understanding one’s place in the universe, highlighting the spiritual dimensions of nature.

Structure:

The essay flows seamlessly, moving from general observations to personal reflection and broader philosophical insights.
Use of vivid imagery and metaphor creates a rich tapestry of ideas, enhancing the reader's connection to nature.

Style:

Emerson employs poetic language and a reflective tone, inviting readers to engage deeply with the text.
The use of rhetorical questions engages the audience, prompting them to ponder their own relationship with nature.
His writing style balances simplicity with profound philosophical inquiry, emphasizing both accessibility and depth.

Conclusion: Emerson's insights reinforce the importance of nature in human life, serving as both a source of beauty and a guide for moral and spiritual fulfillment. His essay remains a foundational text in Transcendentalism, advocating for a harmonious existence with the natural world.

Knowt

0.0(0)

Generate Practice test

Chat with Kai

undefined Flashcards

0 Cards0.0(0)