Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
When, some two years ago a collection of Atlantic essays was offered to the public, it was the editor's idea that this volume should be, to use the current phrase, a kind of permanent exhibit of the character and quality of _The Atlantic_. In these hurrying days, even the seda...
When, some two years ago a collection of Atlantic essays was offered to the public, it was the editor's idea that this volume should be, to use the current phrase, a kind of per...
2. Part 2Whether he had any inkling of what was in store for him, I do not know, but it is highly probable that he had. Dogs and other animals are wonderful mind-readers. I have known th...
3. Part 3Suddenly before us rose the jungle, raw-edged, with border zone of bleached, ashamed trunks and lofty branches white as chalk, of dead and dying trees. For no jungle tree, howev...
4. Part 4Squatting is one of the many things which a white man may learn from watching his _shikarees_ and guides, and which, in the wilderness, he may adopt without losing caste. We are...
5. Part 5The legend exhibited all the persistence of one of those tales which have doubtless been preserved through the centuries because of their taming effects upon recalcitrant husban...
6. Part 6The member of one profession is always flattered by being taken for a skilled practitioner of another. Try it on your minister. Instead of saying, 'That was an excellent sermon...
7. Part 7The meekest of men love to tell how bad they were as boys, hugging their fiction of early depravity with an unregenerate glee. The more innocuous they may be now, the more they...
8. Part 8He avoids idle wanderers. But they do not all do so. I remember to have been wakened one night in a village by the gossip of two old headmen. They had met before my tent; there...
9. Part 9But after all, the plain truth is that adventure consists less in the experiences one actually has than in the indefatigable expectancy with which one awaits them. Indeed, I som...
10. Part 10Another possible measure of the student's interest is found in _Harvard of Today from an Undergraduate Point of View_, published in 1913 by the Harvard Federation of Territorial...
11. Part 11It had been a hot July morning with a sultry land breeze blowing, and as we walked the three miles down the unshaded track, we had weariedly and unavailingly slapped at mosquito...
12. Part 12But she kept the peril close. None of the neighbors, who hailed her on the street or gossiped on the vine-hung porch, ever noticed that often, as she talked, she would clasp her...
13. Part 13In the _Alcestis_ Euripides made one of the best plays in the world, full of true pathos, full of jovial humor, both of which sometimes verge upon the burlesque. The happy endin...
14. Part 14I am indeed no novice to her charms. I have been victim to the enchantments of a long line of old ladies from my earliest years upward. When my frocks were still short and I sti...
15. Part 15We did not adopt Viola; she adopted us. She followed us to the tent where we were spending the summer, and there she stayed with us, to remain on guard when we were away, to wel...
16. Part 16Thy youngest dearest one has perished; thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last. The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew, died in the promise of the fruit, is waste; t...
17. Part 17But be all that as it may, I am yet persuaded that it is by some such means as I have here touched on that all biography of the better sort must in time be written. Turn where w...
18. Part 18A further revelation was that my mother was done with life and with us. She was exquisite in her treatment of us, managing in receiving still to be the giver. One day she said t...
19. Part 19It was bitterly cold, and it rained--oh, how it rained! But we didn't care, we were going to Thorshavn at last, and there was a good sea. The change of wind, the down-pour, had...