Este

“ The wide Pacific now stretches beneath us,—away, away, till it touches the Eastern World, covering with its vast sheet of waters nearly one half of the earth's circumference, and separating the Western continent from the Old World by a much wider gulf than on the Atlantic side, as if to represent the greater difference in race and character between its inhabitants and the Asiatic tribes,—and as if, also, to mark the great boundary of the world's territory, and to show that here the circle of the habitable earth is complete. ”

“ Two mighty oceans on the east and west, two mighty continents on the north and south, and embracing, in the singular arrangement of its slopes and levels, all the climates and productions of both and of all, it seems to have been, for ages, we know not how far back, the theatre of all the art, the seat of all the power, the centre of all the refinement and luxury, of the western hemisphere. There are some remarkable works of art, and wonderful traces of ancient civilization in South America, as well as some singular remains of a once numerous and powerful people in the north. ”

“ He had meant never to look upon her face again; he had thought of her as of a creature quite as lost and dead as the Mantuan woman was, in her grave beside the reedy waters. Yet an irresistible longing to snatch her away, to send her out into light, peace, safety, to save her from the touch of the hands that had the fetters of the galleys on them, rose up in him stronger than himself, and made him speak words which he knew were as vain as ever had been the call of Este on his murdered love.
She heard him without any movement, and she answered him without emotion. ”

“ The Terrible and the two other ships plunged into the very heavy sea which the southwester raised, and we made up our minds, from what we saw, that the Great Eastern is the right ship to be in, in a gale of wind. ”

“ One hundred and fifty years after the reign of Honorius, the gravest historian of the times [161] describes the wonders of a remote isle, whose eastern and western parts are divided by an antique wall, the boundary of life and death, or, more properly, of truth and fiction. The east is a fair country, inhabited by a civilized people: the air is healthy, the waters are pure and plentiful, and the earth yields her regular and fruitful increase. In the west, beyond the wall, the air is infectious and mortal ”

“ All of eastern North America, all of South America to the feet of the Andes, all but the highest mountains of Europe, nearly all of Africa, except some of the highlands of the south, all of northern and southwestern Asia, as well as the peninsula of India, all of China and the adjacent lands and islands except the lofty peaks, the whole of Australia, and the archipelagoes of the Pacific, had become parts of the floor of a mighty ocean which rolled unbroken from pole to pole. ”

“ Not only the configuration of the straits and bays, but also the earth’s rotation from west to east, causes the currents here to set towards the west, and wash the western coasts, while they act very little on the eastern. ”

“ For it had not been ascertained whether that extensive region, which is called Terra Firma, separated the Western Ocean [the Atlantic] from the Eastern [the Pacific] ; but it was plain that that continent extended in a southerly direction, and afterwards inclined to the west. ”

“ As the east coast of the United States may be compared, in equal latitudes, with the Siberian and Chinese eastern coasts of Europe, in respect to mean annual temperature, so the western coasts of Europe and America have also very justly been compared together. ”

“ The East is old, pretty fully peopled, and small. The West is new, vast, and thinly peopled. Our rivers can be measured; yours cannot. We are bounded; you are boundless. The West was, therefore, most deeply interested in this system, though certainly not alone interested, even in such works as had a Western locality. To clear her rivers was to open them for the commerce of the whole country; to construct harbors, and clear entrances to existing harbors, whether on the Gulf of Mexico or on the Lakes, was for the advantage of that whole commerce. ”

“ But in the succeeding age they seem to disappear from the eastern continent, though in the western, thanks to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb, and tree-haunting life, they still drag out a precarious existence in many forms from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. ”

“ This method of settlement and this way of life were so striking that in the final decades of the Eighteenth century and the first decades of the Nineteenth century, the men of the migration into the interior of the continent were known as the "Men of the Western Waters." ”

“ Where Pines and Maples grow,
Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow.
Thou art the land, O Canada,
From East to Western sea,
The land of hope for all who toil,
The land of liberty. ”

“ Pop. (1904, estimated) 12,000, chiefly of Indian descent. The city stands on a level open plain, 520 ft. above sea-level, and in the vicinity of large swamps (esteros) bordering the Rio Dulce, from which its name is derived. ”

“ The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab. ”

“ I found it a great relief to be again on the sweet, blue sea, out of sight of land, and free from the tussle and worry and bustle for life which we are daily, hourly even, forced to gaze upon on land. Although the East is, in a very great measure, free from the dreadful crowding for life, still one is bound to see signs of it even among the most indolent of people. ”

“ That wash the lands where laughter, tears, and sighs
Make life,—the lands below the blue of common skies.
But in the west is a mysterious sea,
(What sails have seen it, or what shipmen known?)
With coasts enchanted where the Sirens be,
With islands where a Goddess walks alone,
And in the cedar trees the magic winds make moan.
Eastward the human cares of house and home,
Cities, and ships, and unknown gods, and loves;
Westward, strange maidens fairer than the foam,
And lawless lives of men, and haunted groves,
Wherein a god may dwell, and where the Dryad roves. ”

“ The West has taken strength, thought, training, selected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the East,—as if out of a new Orient; while the East has itself been kept fresh, vital, alert, originative by the West, her blood quickened all the while, her youth through every age renewed. Who can say in a word, in a sentence, in a volume, what destinies have been variously wrought, with what new examples of growth and energy, while, upon this unexampled scale, community has passed beyond community across the vast reaches of this great continent! ”

“ Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the two shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth. ”

“ What shall my west hurt me? As west and east
In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.
Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem. ”

“ Owing to ever increasing facilities of travel, the East is, in a sense, drawn nearer to the West, or, rather the West to the East, but nothing strikes the traveller so much as the apparently vast gulf dividing the dark-skinned races from the white—a gulf deeper and wider than the oceans. ”

“ How are you to have so big a purpose on so small a part of the hemisphere? As it has grown old, unquestionably, the East has grown sectional. There is no suggestion of the prairie in its city streets, or of the embrowned ranchman and farmer in its well-dressed men. Its ports teem with shipping from Europe and the Indies. Its newspapers run upon the themes of an Old World. It hears of the great plains of the continent as of foreign parts, which it may never think to see except246 from a car window. Its life is self-centred and selfish. ”

“ The Occidental have a milky Cast, and want the polished Gloss of the Oriental. They are very plentiful in many Parts of America; as also in France, Italy, and Scotland; and we meet with them every Day in our Oysters and Muscles here, but seldom of any great Beauty. ”

“ Calculations and conjectures—what may the East do without the South, and what may the South do without the East?—sneers, menaces, reproaches, and recriminations—all tend to the same fatal end. What can the East do without the South? What can the South do without the East? They may do much; they may exhibit to the curiosity of political anatomists, and the pity and wonder of the world, the disjecta membra—the sundered, bleeding limbs of a once gigantic body instinct with life, and strength, and vigor. ”

“ If life in the Northern States is a grand epic, a poem full of great teaching, then is that of the Southern States a romance of infinitely-picturesque beauty—yes, even though slavery and sandy deserts exist there. ”

“ Issuing thence to the west and south, as a youth leaves the shelter of his parental house, this spirit found the way to the Indies, discovered the coasts of a new continent, and traversed at last the immensity of the great Pacific, rich in groups of islands remote and mysterious like the constellations of the sky. ”

“ At dawn of day we again discovered land from west-south-west to west-north-west, and another island north-north-west, the latter a high round lump of but little extent: the southern land that we had passed in the night was still in sight. Being very wet and cold I served a spoonful of rum and a morsel of bread for breakfast. ”

“ With a few exceptions we are all West-countrymen, undoubted "dumplings" and "duff-eaters"—at least, so say our East-country friends, though experience has taught me, and probably many of my readers too, that at demolishing a plum pudding the east is not a whit behind the west ”

“ Do not think it strange if I call the country where spices grow West, since they are generally known to be produced in the East, because those who shall sail westward will always find those places in the [82] west, and they who travel by land eastward, will always find those places in the east. The straight lines which are drawn lengthwise on the chart show the distance from west to east, and those which cross the former show the distance from north to south. ”

“ In a general point of view, the surface of the earth may properly be considered as one vast ocean, in which are placed a great number of islands, whose sizes are various. Two of these islands are called CONTINENTS;—because it has hitherto been impossible to sail round them, owing to the frozen state of the waters of the Arctic seas. That which has been for the longer space of time inhabited by civilized nations, is called the eastern, or old continent, and contains Asia, Europe, and Africa. ”

“ From our coast the mind’s eye takes its gaze and sees on the other shores of that great ocean the teeming millions of the Orient, with its institutions running their roots into the most venerable antiquity, its own inherited philosophy and standards of life, its own peculiar races and colors. ”

“ To have an island of one’s own, in the beautiful South Seas, to live remote from strain and worry, and out of the clash and roar of twentieth-century civilization—to pass one’s days in a land of perpetual summer ”

“ To the south, in one unbroken line, lie several thousand miles of coast indented with rich markets of Spanish America—to the west, Asiatic Russia and China are close at hand—between the south and west are New Holland and Polynesia; and within good marketable distance are all the groups and clusters of islands that stud the ocean, from Cape Horn to the Cape of Good Hope, from Asia to America. ”

“ The excessive cold, the many islands and vast floats of ice, all tend to prove that there must be land to the south; and for my persuasion that this southern land must lie, or extend, farthest to the north opposite to the southern Atlantic and Indian oceans, I have already assigned some reasons; to which I may add the greater degree of cold experienced by us in these seas, than in the southern Pacific ocean under the same parallels of latitude. ”

“ With the people of the south, by whom the opposite part of the earth is possessed, you have no intercourse; and by how small a tract do you communicate with the countries of the north? The territory which you inhabit is no more than a scanty island, inclosed by a small body of water, to which you give the name of the great sea and the Atlantick ocean. ”

“ The EAST, in a like intercourse with the west, already finds, and in the progressive improvement of interior communications, by land and water, will more and more find a valuable vent for the commodities which it brings from abroad, or manufactures at home. ”

“ Then what shall we say of the wide West—until recently an unknown region—with its variety of natural wonders, its wild mountains, appalling peaks and lonely valleys, industries, mines of wealth, gorges, streams, plains! It is grand, notwithstanding its development is yet in its infancy. Its possibilities for future greatness are inconceivable even to the hardy pioneer. ”

“ As if nature aimed to provide for two distinct communities, a precipitous mountain spur, which sprawls several hundred miles north and south, ribs the territory almost mathematically in the centre, and tumbles onward, broken and disjointed, to the shores of the Caribbean Sea. ”