| | 63 | Author: | Dyer, Frank Lewis and Thomas Commerford Martin | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Edison, His Life and Inventions, vol. 1  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE year 1847 marked a period of great territorial
acquisition by the American people, with incalculable
additions to their actual and potential wealth.
By the rational compromise with England in the dispute
over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured
during 1846, for undisturbed settlement, three
hundred thousand square miles of forest, fertile land,
and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia Valley.
Our active "policy of the Pacific'' dated from
that hour. With swift and clinching succession came
the melodramatic Mexican War, and February, 1848,
saw another vast territory south of Oregon and west
of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the United
States. Thus in about eighteen months there had
been pieced into the national domain for quick development
and exploitation a region as large as the
entire Union of Thirteen States at the close of the War
of Independence. Moreover, within its boundaries
was embraced all the great American gold-field, just
on the eve of discovery, for Marshall had detected the
shining particles in the mill-race at the foot of the
Sierra Nevada nine days before Mexico signed away
her rights in California and in all the vague, remote
hinterland facing Cathayward. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 64 | Author: | Eaton, Walter Prichard | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Painter of "Diana of the Tides" | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | GIVEN nearly three hundred
square feet of blank
wall space, and it takes
something of an artist to
fill it up with interesting
paint. Probably you
would not pick a miniature
painter for the task.
Yet, curiously, John Elliott, creator of "Diana
of the Tides," the great mural painting which
adorns the large gallery to the right of the
entrance of the new National Museum at Washington,
also paints on ivory. He works, likewise,
in silver point, that delicate and difficult
medium; he draws pastel illustrations for
children's fairy tales; he works in portraiture
with red chalk or oils. And, when the need
comes, he has shown that he can turn stevedore,
carpenter, and architect, to slave with
the relief party at Messina, finally to help
design and build, in four months, an entire
village for the stricken sufferers, including
a hotel, a hospital, three schoolhouses, and
a church. The too frequent scorn of the
"practical man of affairs" for the artist and
dreamer, the world's sneaking tolerance for
the temperament which creates in forms of
ideal beauty rather than in bridges or
factories or banks, finds in the life and work of
such a man as John Elliott such complete, if
unconscious, refutation, that his story should
have its place in the history of the day. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 71 | Author: | Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Works of Henry Fielding, Volume Six: Miscellanies | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | WHEN it was determined to extend the
present edition of Fielding, not merely
by the addition of Jonathan Wild to the
three universally popular novels, but by two volumes
of Miscellanies, there could be no doubt about
at least one of the contents of these latter. The
Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, if it does not rank
in my estimation anywhere near to Jonathan Wild
as an example of our author's genius, is an invaluable
and delightful document for his character
and memory. It is indeed, as has been pointed
out in the General Introduction to this series, our
main source of indisputable information as to
Fielding dans son naturel, and its value, so far as
it goes, is of the very highest. The gentle and
unaffected stoicism which the author displays
under a disease which he knew well was probably,
if not certainly, mortal, and which, whether mortal
or not, must cause him much actual pain and discomfort
of a kind more intolerable than pain itself;
his affectionate care for his family; even little
personal touches, less admirable, but hardly
less pleasant than these, showing an Englishman's
dislike to be "done'' and an Englishman's
determination to be treated with proper respect, are
scarcely less noticeable and important on the biographical
side than the unimpaired brilliancy of
his satiric and yet kindly observation of life and
character is on the side of literature. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 77 | Author: | Gale, Zona | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Friday | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | HEMPEL had watched the hands of the clock make all the motions of
the hour, from the trim segment of eleven to the lazy down-stretch of
twenty minutes past, the slim erectness of the half-hour, the
promising angles of the three quarters, ten, five to twelve, and last
the unanimity and consummation of noon. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
|
