| | 222 | Author: | Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle  | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | One afternoon of a cold winter's day, when the sun
shone forth with chilly brightness, after a long storm,
two children asked leave of their mother to run out and
play in the new-fallen snow. The elder child was a
little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest
disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her
parents, and other people who were familiar with her,
used to call Violet. But her brother was known by the
style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of
his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody
think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers. The father
of these two children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is
important to say, was an excellent but exceedingly matter
of fact sort of man, a dealer in hardware, and was
sturdily accustomed to take what is called the
common-sense view of all matters that came
under his consideration. With a heart about as tender as
other people's, he had a head as hard and impenetrable,
and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the iron pots
which it was a part of his business to sell. The
mother's character, on the other hand, had a strain of
poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty,—a delicate
and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her
imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the
dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 224 | Author: | Howells, W. D. | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | "Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's Stories." | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE critical reader of the story called The Wife of his Youth,
which appeared in these pages two years ago, must have noticed
uncommon traits in what was altogether a remarkable piece of work.
The first was the novelty of the material; for the writer dealt not
only with people who were not white, but with people who were not
black enough to contrast grotesquely with white people,—who in
fact were of that near approach to the ordinary American in race
and color which leaves, at the last degree, every one but the
connoisseur in doubt whether they are Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-African.
Quite as striking as this novelty of the material was the author's
thorough mastery of it, and his unerring knowledge of the life he
had chosen in its peculiar racial characteristics. But above all,
the story was notable for the passionless handling of a phase of
our common life which is tense with potential tragedy; for the
attitude, almost ironical, in which the artist observes the play of
contesting emotions in the drama under his eyes; and for his
apparently reluctant, apparently helpless consent to let the
spectator know his real feeling in the matter. Any one accustomed
to study methods in fiction, to distinguish between good and bad
art, to feel the joy which the delicate skill possible only from a
love of truth can give, must have known a high pleasure in the
quiet self-restraint of the performance; and such a reader would
probably have decided that the social situation in the piece was
studied wholly from the outside, by an observer with special
opportunities for knowing it, who was, as it were, surprised into
final sympathy. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 228 | Author: | Jewett, Sarah Orne | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | A Dunnet Shepherdess | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | EARLY one morning at Dunnet Landing, as if it were still
night, I waked, suddenly startled by a spirited conversation
beneath my window. It was not one of Mrs. Todd's morning
soliloquies; she was not addressing her plants and flowers in words
of either praise or blame. Her voice was declamatory though
perfectly good-humored, while the second voice, a man's, was of
lower pitch and somewhat deprecating. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 231 | Author: | Jewett, Sarah Orne | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | From A Mournful Villager | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | LATELY I have been thinking, with much sorrow, of the
approaching extinction of front yards, and of the type of New
England village character and civilization with which they are
associated. Formerly, because I lived in an old-fashioned New
England village, it would have been hard for me to imagine
that there were parts of the country where the front yard, as I
knew it, was not in fashion, and that grounds (however small) had
taken its place. No matter how large a piece of land lay in front
of a house in old times, it was still a front yard, in spite of
noble dimension and the skill of practiced gardeners. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 232 | Author: | Jewett, Sarah Orne | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The White Rose Road | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Being a New Englander, it is natural that I should first speak
about the weather. Only the middle of June, the green fields, and
blue sky, and bright sun, with a touch of northern mountain wind
blowing straight toward the sea, could make such a day, and that is
all one can say about it. We were driving seaward through a part
of the country which has been least changed in the last thirty
years,—among farms which have been won from swampy lowland, and
rocky, stump-buttressed hillsides; where the forests wall in the
fields, and send their outposts year by year farther into the
pastures. There is a year or two in the history of these pastures
before they have arrived at the dignity of being called woodland,
and yet are too much shaded and overgrown by young trees to give
proper pasturage, when they make delightful harbors for the small
wild creatures which yet remain, and for wild flowers and berries.
Here you send an astonished rabbit scurrying to his burrow, and
there you startle yourself with a partridge, who seems to get the
best of the encounter. Sometimes you see a hen partridge and her
brood of chickens crossing your path with an air of comfortable
door-yard security. As you drive along the narrow, grassy road,
you see many charming sights and delightful nooks on either hand,
where the young trees spring out of a close-cropped turf that
carpets the ground like velvet. Toward the east and the quaint
fishing village of Ogunquit I find the most delightful woodland
roads. There is little left of the large timber which once filled
the region, but much young growth, and there are hundreds of acres
of cleared land and pasture ground where the forests are springing
fast and covering the country once more, as if they had no idea of
losing in their war with civilization and the intruding white
settler. The pine woods and the Indians seem to be next of kin,
and the former owners of this corner of New England are the only
proper figures to paint into such landscapes. The twilight under
tall pines seems to be untenanted and to lack something, at first
sight, as if one opened the door of an empty house. A farmer
passing through with his axe is but an intruder, and children
straying home from school give one a feeling of solicitude at their
unprotectedness. The pines are the red man's house, and it may be
hazardous even yet for the gray farmhouses to stand so near the
eaves of the forest. I have noticed a distrust of the deep woods,
among elderly people, which was something more than a fear of
losing their way. It was a feeling of defenselessness against some
unrecognized but malicious influence. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 233 | Author: | Jewett, Sarah Orne | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | William's Wedding | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE hurry of life in a large town, the constant putting aside
of preference to yield a most unsatisfactory activity, began to vex
me, and one day I took the train, and only left it for the
eastward-bound boat. Carlyle says somewhere that the only
happiness a man ought to ask for is happiness enough to get his
work done; and against this the complexity and futile ingenuity of
social life seems a conspiracy. But the first salt wind from the
east, the first sight of a lighthouse set boldly on its outer rock,
the flash of a gull, the waiting procession of seaward-bound firs
on an island, made me feel solid and definite again, instead of a
poor, incoherent being. Life was resumed, and anxious living blew
away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or
long enough. It was a return to happiness. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 234 | Author: | Kellogg, John Harvey, 1852-1943. | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Plain facts for old and young : embracing the natural history and hygiene of organic life. | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | LIFE, in its great diversity of forms, has ever been
a subject of the deepest interest to rational beings.
Poets have sung of its joys and sorrows, its brilliant
phantasies and harsh realities. Philosophers
have spent their lives in vain attempts to solve its
mysteries; and some have believed that life was nothing
more than a stupendous farce, a delusion of the senses.
Moralists have sought to impress men with the truth
that "life is real," and teeming with grave responsibilities.
Physiologists have busied themselves in observing
the phenomena of life, and learning therefrom its
laws. The subject is certainly an interesting one, and
none could be more worthy of the most careful attention. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 236 | Author: | Le Bon, Gustave | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Psychology of Revolution | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE present age is not merely an epoch of discovery; it is
also a period of revision of the various elements of knowledge.
Having recognised that there are no phenomena of which the first
cause is still accessible, science has resumed the examination of
her ancient certitudes, and has proved their fragility. To-day
she sees her ancient principles vanishing one by one. Mechanics
is losing its axioms, and matter, formerly the eternal substratum
of the worlds, becomes a simple aggregate of ephemeral forces in
transitory condensation. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 239 | Author: | Maus, Marion P. | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The New Indian Messiah | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | FOR many years we have regarded the Indian's belief in a
Supreme Being as very vague and undefined. He has, however,
appeared to recognize a "Great Spirit" and a "happy hunting-ground," the home of the departed braves — a country where beautiful
prairies and forests are abounding in game, watered by cool
streams, forming an ideal Indian heaven. This belief seems a part
of his nature, just as his love for his free and savage life, which
the advance of civilization is forcing him to renounce. The
buffalo is a thing of the past, and even the elk, the antelope, and
the deer have nearly disappeared, and he finds he must live on the
bounty of the white man or starve. For years he has been confined
to military reservations, and has chafed under the restraint thus
put upon him. Little wonder he looks for a change, and longs for
his once free life, and gladly grasps the new belief in the red
Saviour, which is rapidly spreading to every Western tribe, and
which the great chief Red Cloud "says will spread over all the
earth." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 240 | Author: | McGlasson, Eva Wilder | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | A Child of the Covenant | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | HE was a Georgian, the landlady said. Indeed, he said so himself,
volubly enough, when there was any one to listen. The difficulty
seemed to be that there was seldom any one to listen at such times
as found the Georgian ready for conversation. The other boarders
were, for the most part, young men who went to work in the morning
just as he was getting well to sleep, and who came back at the hour
when the Georgian, clean-shaved and cheerful, was going out for the
night. He was well-favored and young, with an air of good-fellowship in his yellow mustaches, and with a gay, reckless gleam
under the wide rim of his soft hat. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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