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American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson praises the English public for still loving freedom, despite their politicians.
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) saw the English as a people much less biased and belligerent than their political masters. Liberty was safe, Emerson believed, while Englishmen still craved not influence abroad, but independence at home.
William Wirt recalls an overpowering sermon from a blind man in a little wooden chapel.
William Wirt, a rising Virginian lawyer, published The Letters of a British Spy in 1803. He took the character of a British tourist (not a secret agent) in the US, and remarked on the habits of the Americans twenty years after the Revolutionary War. This famous passage brings to startling life a blind Christian minister in a roadside chapel in Orange County, as he preaches the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wondered why New Yorkers elected to Congress the kind of man they would turn out of their own homes.
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was unimpressed with the quality of the Representatives that the people of New York sent to Congress. They were the kind of men most people would banish from their homes, but New Yorkers were quite happy to send them to the House if it meant their Party secured a majority and dipped into the pork barrel.
Ahab, his mind broken by an obsession, at last confronts the enemy he has hunted so long.
Ahab, captain of a whaling ship, has been pursuing a huge albino sperm whale he calls Moby Dick, with an ever more deranged hatred. At last he has come to close quarters: he has boarded a small a boat, harpoon at the ready, and rowed out to face the object of his obsession while sharks circle in a frenzy of anticipation. Suddenly, the whale charges headlong — not at Ahab’s boat, but at the ship.
A young Nathaniel Hawthorne recalls a confidential conversation with a tired old horse.
On June 1st, 1816, Robert Hawthorne presented his nephew Nathaniel, a month shy of his twelfth birthday, with a diary ‘with the advice that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as good words as he can’. It was in this diary that Nathaniel recalled running across an underfed working horse, agonisingly forced to listen as his master ground delicious corn at nearby Dingley mill.
However loud his critics shouted their disapproval, Abraham Lincoln would neither deprive them of free speech nor change his opinions.
In 1864, as the American Civil War progressed, talk in Washington had turned to how rebellious Confederate States ought to be handled should the Union win. President Lincoln’s appeals for reconciliation were brushed aside by supporters of the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, a cock-a-doodle-do of victory designed to give Washington sweeping powers.
Benjamin Franklin recalls the disciplines he put himself through on the way to becoming one of America’s literary giants.
Ben Franklin’s father, to head him off from going to sea, apprenticed him at twelve to his elder brother James, a printer in Boston, Massachusetts. Eager to improve his command of prose writing, Ben entered into an informal writing competition with another boy from his neighbourhood, John Collins, on the subject of women’s education; but this only made him acutely aware of his shortcomings.