Harry Perry Robinson

“ And at night sometimes, when the wolves howl and the deer whistle, or the whine of a puma reaches my ears—all caged, I suppose—the longing for the old life becomes almost intolerable. I yearn for the long mountain-slopes, with the cool night-wind blowing; and the stately rows of trees, black-stemmed and silver-topped in the moonlight; and the noise of the tumbling streams in one’s ears, when all the world was mine to wander in—mine and Wooffa’s. ”

“ But beyond all this—apart from, and vastly greater than, the considerations of the interest or the security of either Great Britain or the United States—is the claim of humanity. The two peoples have it in their hands to give to the whole world no less a gift than that of Universal and Perpetual Peace. It involves no self-sacrifice, the giving of this wonderful boon, for the two peoples themselves would share in the benefit no less than other peoples, and they would be the richer by the giving. It involves hardly any effort, for they have but to hold out their hands together and give. ”

“ But a spring comes when they issue from their winter lairs and new sounds are borne to them on the keen, resin-scented mountain air. The hills ring to the chopping of axes; and the voices of men—a new and terrible sound—reach their ears. The earth, soft with the melting snows, shows unaccustomed prints of heavy heels. The coyote and the deer and all the forest folk have gone; the beaver-dams are broken, and the builders vanished. ”

“ It matters not that the world has not appealed to them. The fact remains that they can do this thing and they alone; and it is for them to ask their own consciences whether any considerations of pride, any prejudice, any absorption in their own affairs—any consideration actual or conceivable—can justify them in holding back. Still more does it rest with the American people—usually so quick to respond to high ideals—to ask its conscience whether any consideration, actual or conceivable, can justify it in refusal when Great Britain is willing—anxious—to do her share. ”

“ Ever so cautiously you move your paw gently half way up towards his head, and then, when your claws are almost touching him, you strike—strike, once and hard, with a hooking blow that sends him whirling like a bar of silver far out on the bank behind you. And trout is good—the plump, dark, pink-banded trout of the mountain streams. But you must not strike one fraction of a second too soon, for if your paw has more than an inch to travel before the claws touch him he is gone, and all you feel is the flip of a tail upon the inner side of the paw, and all your time is wasted. ”

“ The glory of England lies in the fact that she "takes on" the best of all the nations of the world at their own games. It is not the United States only, but all her Colonies and every country of Europe that turn to Great Britain as to their best antagonist in whatever sport they find themselves proficient. Just now England's brow is somewhat bare of laurels, but year in and year out Britain will continue to win the majority of contests in her meetings with all the world; and if she lose at times, is it not better to have rivals good enough to make her extend herself? ”

“ Had I not again and again, when in the town, dodged round the corner of a building, and waited while he passed a few yards away, or stood immovable in the dark shadow of a building, and looked straight at him while he went by utterly unconscious that I was near? Nothing could live in the forest for a week with no more eyesight, scent, or hearing than a man possesses, and without his thunder-stick he would be as helpless as a lame deer. ”

“ As we came near we knew that the fight could not be altogether over, for there was still a sound of snarling and the angry stamping of a stag, and the sight that at last met our eyes was one that it did us good to see.
There was a wide circular open space, in which every living thing had been trampled down, and the ground was all scored and furrowed with the mark of hoof and antler; and in the middle stood the stag, erect and defiant. Before him on the ground lay the body of the he-wolf, covered with blood and stamped almost beyond recognition. ”

“ The fabric of society is of too new a weaving, he knows too well the trick of it, for it to be wonderful in his eyes.
Lack of reverence is only a symptom of the American's strength—not admirable in itself, yet, as the index to something admirable, not, perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful. The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman. ”

“ So you turn to the bank at your side and begin to grub; and as you grub you wander on, eating the roots that you scratch up and the young shoots of plants that are appearing here and there. And all the time the day is growing, and the sensation is coming back to your limbs, and your hunger is getting satisfied, and you are wider and wider awake. And, thoroughly interested in what you are about, before you are aware of it, you are fairly started on another year of life.
That is how a bear begins each spring. ”

“ Again, the American will say that the United States needs no allies. She can hold her own; let Great Britain do the same. And again I say that it is no question now of whether either Power can hold its own against the world or not. Great Britain, Americans should understand, has no more fear for herself than has the United States. England "does not seek alliances: she grants them." There is not only no single European Power, but there is no probable combination of European Powers, which England does not in her heart serenely believe herself quite competent to deal with. ”

“ At last a day comes when you wake into something more like complete consciousness than you have known since you shut yourself up. There is a new feeling in the air; a sense of moisture and fresh smells are mingling with the warm dry scent of your den. And you are aware that you have not changed your position for more than a quarter of a year, but have been squatting on your heels, with your back against the wall and your nose folded into your paws across your breast; and you want to stretch your hind-legs dreadfully. ”

“ The Englishman—who, when at home, has himself lived, not entirely secluded, but in a measure shut off from contact with other peoples—by continual going abroad and never-ceasing friction with his neighbours, by perpetual disheartenment with the perplexities of his colonial empire, has become less of a critic than a grumbler; and to do him justice he is, in speech, infinitely more contemptuous of his own government than he is of the American or any other. The American on the contrary remains cheerfully, light-heartedly, garrulously critical. ”

“ It is merely pathetic to find such a paper as the London Academy at this late day summing up the American æsthetic impulse as follows: "Their culture is now a borrowed thing animated by no life of its own. Their art is become a reflection of French art, their literature a reflection of English literature, their learning a reflection of German learning. A velleity of taste in their women of the richer class seems to be all that maintains in their country the semblance of a high, serious, and disinterested passion for the things of the mind." ”

“ There have of course always been circles—as, notoriously, in and around Boston, and, less notoriously but no less truly, in Philadelphia and New York—wherein the speech, whether written or spoken, has been as scrupulous in form and grammar as in the most scholarly circles in Great Britain. These circles corresponded to what we have called the public-school and university class of England, and, no more than it, did they speak the common speech of their country. Only now is the people as a whole consciously striving after an uplifting of such common speech. ”

“ Nothing strikes an Englishman more, after he comes to know the people, than this eclectic habit, paradoxically combined as it is with an intense—an over-noisy—patriotism. "The best," the American is fond of saying, "is good enough for me"; and it never occurs to him that he has not entire right to the best wherever he may find it. In England it is only a small part of the population which considers itself entitled to the best of anything. The rest of the people may covet, but the best belongs to "their betters." The American knows no "betters." ”

“ War on the scale of the Civil War ploughs deep. It may be impossible for a nation to make itself cultivated—to grow century-old shrubberies and five-century-old turf—in ten years or forty; and when the Americans in their ravening famine reach out to grasp at once all that is good and beautiful in the world, it may be that at first they cannot assimilate all that they draw to them—they can grasp, but not absorb. To that extent there may be much that is superficial in American culture. ”

“ If it does refuse and wars continue—if, within the coming decade, war should break out, whether actually involving the United States itself or not, more bloody and destructive than any that the world has seen—and if then the facts should be presented to posterity for judgment,—will the American people be held guiltless? It is improbable that the case ever could be so presented, for there is none to put the United States on trial, none to draw an indictment, none to prosecute. The world has not turned to the United States to ask that it be saved ”

“ It is, perhaps, largely as a reaction against the Jacksonian theory of universal competence that the avowed ideal of American education to-day is to cultivate the student's power of concentration—to give him a survey, elementary but sound, of as wide a field as possible, but above all to teach him so to use his mind that to whatever corner of that field he may turn for his walk in life, he will be able to focus all his intellect upon it—to concentrate and bring to bear all his energies on whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his fortune. ”

“ I had already lived in the United States for some three months, half of which time had been spent in New York hotels and boarding houses and half in Northern New York and rural New England, where, staying at farms or at the houses of families in the smaller towns to which I bore letters of introduction, I flattered myself that I had probed deep—Oh, ever so deep!—below the surface and had come to understand the people as they lived in their own homes. And my ripened judgment was that the bulk of the well-to-do people of the country supported life chiefly by consumption of parsnips. ”

“ The history of the United States as an independent nation goes back no more than one hundred and thirty years, a space to be spanned by two human lives; so that events of even her very earliest years are still recent history and the sentiments evoked by those events have not yet had time to die. In the days of the childhood of fathers of men still living (the thing is possible, so recent is it) the nation was born out of the throes of a desperate struggle with Great Britain—a struggle which left the name "British" a word of loathing and contempt to American ears. ”