Harper's Magazine, Volume 144

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Harper's Magazine Company, 1922 - American literature

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Page 343 - This was an open-day vision, in which the curtains of heaven were raised and held aside from futurity to allow me to look into the things which were to come. A feeling of heavenly rapture filled my being, so much so that, like the apostle who was caught up into the third heaven, I did not know whether I was in the body or out of it during my vision. I saw things that it would be unlawful for men to utter. While the vision lasted my soul was lighted up as if illuminated with the candle of God. When...
Page 740 - Anyone who doubts the truth of what I have to say may go and look at them. I was not alone in the nomadic life that I led. There were hundreds of us drifting about in this fashion from one melancholy habitation to another. We lived as a rule two or three in a house, sometimes alone. We dined in the basement. We always had beef, done up in some way after it was dead, and there were always soda biscuits on the table. They used to have a brand of soda biscuits in those days in the Toronto boarding houses...
Page 734 - It has professors who never teach and students who never learn. It has no order, no arrangement, no system. Its curriculum is unintelligible. It has no president. It has no state legislature to tell it how to teach, and yet — it gets there. Whether we like it or not, Oxford gives something to its students, a life and a mode of thought, which in America as yet we can emulate, but not equal.
Page 270 - Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn. your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.
Page 274 - In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable, and did know it.
Page 740 - VIII's kitchen, and sleeping in a tangle of ivy, the student evidently gets something not easily obtained in America. And the more I reflect on the matter the more I am convinced that it is the sleeping in the ivy that does it. How different it is from student life as I remember it! When I was a student at the University of Toronto thirty years ago, I lived — from start to finish — in seventeen different boarding houses. As far as I am aware these houses have not, or not yet, been marked with...
Page 276 - I have no recollection of ever seeing a slave auction in that town; but I am suspicious that that is because the thing was a common and commonplace spectacle, not an uncommon and impressive one. I vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained to one another, once, and lying in a group on the pavement, awaiting shipment to the Southern slave market. Those were the saddest faces I have ever seen. Chained slaves could not have been a common sight, or this picture would not have made so...
Page 712 - One of the oddest sights a green-room can present," he said one day, " is when they are collecting children for a pantomime. For this purpose the prompter calls together all the women in the ballet, and begins giving out their names in order, while they press about him eager for the chance of increasing their poor pay by the extra pittance their children will receive. ' Mrs. Johnson, how many ? '
Page 737 - He has a little place that he calls his "office," with a typewriter machine and a stenographer. Here he sits and dictates letters, beginning after the best business models, "in re yours of the eighth ult, would say, etc., etc.
Page 452 - After having been hard at work from nine or ten in the morning until eleven at night scraping material together, I took the pen and spread this muck out in words and phrases and made it cover as much acreage as I could. It was fearful drudgery, soulless drudgery, and almost destitute of interest It was an awful slavery for a lazy man, and I was born lazy.

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