Green Man

“ Moral: Infamy is harder to bear than adverse fortune.'
'The Green Man.—A green man, wandering through the Highlands of Scotland, discovered, in a sequestered valley, a still, with which certain unprincipled individuals were engaged in the illicit manufacture of aqua-vitæ. Being, as we have stated, a green man, he was easily persuaded by those unprincipled individuals to expend a considerable sum in the purchase of the intoxicating produce of their still, and to drink so much of it that he speedily became insensible. ”

“ Green, in his History of the English People, "was the one theme of troubadour and trouveur; but it was a love of refinement, of romantic follies, of scholastic discussions, of sensuous enjoyment—a plaything rather than a passion. Nature had to reflect the pleasant indolence of man; the song of the minstrel moved through a perpetual May-time; the grass was ever green; the music of the lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket. There was a gay avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man's life. ”

“ To the economist, again, the green plain is a sort of burial-place of hidden treasure, where all the forethought and industry of man are set at naught by the caprice of the power which hid the treasure. ”

“ He was impressed with the patience and helplessness of vegetable life, seeing an aged and enormous tree strangled where it grew by the writhing coils of some green parasite. And yet it seemed to him that life must be far easier for a tree than for a man. A light breeze, herald of the evening, threw the plumes of the forest edge into tossing confusion. The ways of the wood were full of gentle sound. ”

“ Green, he said, was the primal colour of vegetable existence—the first raiment in which Nature leaped 59into existence; the colour on which the eye loved to repose; and, in the primeval state, the first quality that attracted man to man, and bound him up in the circles of those tender charities and affinities which kept the early societies of the race together. ”

“ Green there was too, of course—the vivid, clattering green of majestic cocoanut palms, the virescent flare of beech-grass, the crisp fan of scrub palmetto, and always the great, glossy mangrove trees rearing like giant laurel bushes in the dark, dustless splendor. But green in the Gulf, somehow, always seems like man's idea, or woman's—a sheer after-thought, as it were, of shade or trimmings. All the blue gulf wants is glare—and the eternal chance to grind pale rain bow-tinted shells into white sand! ”

“ Green fancy is a strange hidden house on the American border of Canada. In and around it royal personages, third-rate actors, a New York man of the world, a beautiful woman, an Irishman of fortune, an international crook, all play their parts in an exciting drama of European intrigue.
“The narrative gallops along at a rapid rate, with plenty of dramatic incidents and exciting situations, while the author garnishes characters, incidents, and narratives with touches of humor.”
“It is a light romance, but the element of mystery is well sustained after the manner of such writers.” ”

“ In The Well at the World’s End green trees and enchanted waters are shown to us, as they were understood by old writers, who thought that the generation of all things was through water; for when the water that gives a long and fortunate life and that can be found by none but such a one as all women love is found at last, the Dry Tree, the image of the ruined land, becomes green. To him indeed as to older writers Well and Tree are all but images of the one thing, of an ‘energy’ that is not the less ‘eternal delight’ because it is half of the body. ”

“ Green was thus driven, not theoretically, but as a practical necessity, to raise again the whole question of man in relation to nature. When (he held) we have discovered what man in himself is, and what his relation to his environment, we shall then know his function—what he is fitted to do. In the light of this knowledge we shall be able to formulate the moral code, which, in turn, will serve as a criterion of actual civic and social institutions. ”

“ Break the ice, whatever attitude her natural pride dictates, offer your services.
"I'm on the Daily Intelligencer," I said. "I'm the man who first walked on top of the grass."
Ten miles later I inquired, "Wouldnt you be more comfortable with that heavy fur coat off? I can put it in the back with your luggage and it won't be crushed."
She shook her head more impatiently.
Suddenly I remembered the car radio installed a few days before. A little cheerful music calms the soul. I turned it on and got a band playing a brandnew hit, "Green as Grass." ”

“ But with the green grass and soft moss for a carpet, umbrageous trees for a shade, the murmuring stream for the ear, together with the sound of the breeze amongst the leaves to woo reflection, the syrens of vicious pleasure may be avoided, and the disquietudes of life be forgotten. Like a true citizen of the world, I had become enamoured with liberty, and with the instinct of a denizen of the forest, I shrank from the presence of man. ”

“ Of what is the colour of green that the earth’s best page is made of it? Of what is the colour of young green that it brings, unbidden, tender thoughts? It is more than the gold of Corn, and the brown of ploughed earth, and the glory of flowers. By it comes peace to the eyes, and through the eyes to the heart of man, so that men say of youth and the times of youth that they are salad days; and of old age, if so be it is a fine old age, that it is green. It is the colour of the body as blue is the colour of the soul. ”

“ Would you moralise on the lawn’s green expanse with the great modern interpreter of nature?—learn, then, the secret of humility from the grass before you. Its very end is to be trodden under foot, and yet it rises stronger after it. Mow or roll it as much as you will, and it only sends up thicker shoots. Even in winter it is always green, always cheerful; type of perpetual youth and perpetual freshness, its very uniformity like a reflection of the unclouded sky above. Truly they were wise men, those old monks, who loved so much a spacious courtyard of grass! ”

“ So when the green-goods men, of whom the genial Mr. Alf Wolfe was the chief, asked Snipes to act as “trailer” for them at a quarter of a dollar for every victim he shadowed, he jumped at the offer and was proud of the position.
If you should happen to keep a grocery store in the country, or to run the village post-office, it is not unlikely that you know what a green-goods man is ”

“ Men and women—that is to say, such of them as have characteristics pronounced enough to make them classifiable—may be divided into those whose primary interests are in nature and what relates to nature, and those whose primary interests are in and for man. Green was the most striking type I have known of the latter class, not merely because his human interests were strong, but also because they excluded, to a degree singular in a mind so versatile, interests in purely natural things. ”

“ I can prove that the world has always been growing greener. Only lately men have invented absinthe and the Westminster Gazette. I could prove the world has grown less green. There are no more Robin Hood foresters, and fields are being covered with houses. ”

“ However, despite Smith’s fears, evidence suggests that numbers of Pagan men are turning away from androcentric mythopoetic figures such as the Green Man and the Horned God towards female spiritual archetypes. ”

“ When you say a clump of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. I think everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statement of the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grass looked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; the green blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged but unimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You could not believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of a careless boot, much less the entire arsenal of military and agricultural implements. ”

“ The flame that raged uncontrollably over the forest and plain, man now puts under his kettle to make his tea; the torrent that devastated the valleys, man now dikes and distributes in irrigating ditches, transforming deserts into green fields. The fitful flash of the lightning in the heavens man conducts along a little wire and converts into the steady glow of the incandescent lamp. Nor does man any longer adapt function to environment. ”

“ I thought that the old man had spoken truly when he said that the Golden Age comes again with every dawn. The dew gave the eyes a kind of fitness and worthiness to behold the white fruit blossom and the sudden hills of horse-chestnut green. It washed out London as the old man’s brush had done. See! the world is but a brown and fragrant cloud decorated with dark boles, green foliage, white bloom, and here and there a soul akin to them; it turns the wilful mind into a garden neat and fine, of red and white, with green lawns between, which the bee Fancy sucks at and combines. ”

“ The whole country is green at this moment, more so than at any other period of the year. The earth is completely decked in delicate verdure of varied shades: the fruit-trees have dropped their blossoms, and the orchards and gardens are green; the forest has just put on its fresh foliage, the meadows are yet uncolored by the flowers, and the young grain-fields look grassy still. ”

“ It is not a right which it rests with a man to retain or give up at his pleasure. It is not the less a wrong that a man should be a slave because he has sold himself into slavery. The individual's right to live is but the other side of the right which society has in his living. The individual can no more voluntarily rid himself of it than he can of the social capacity, the human nature, on which it is founded. Thus, however ready men may be for high wages to work in a dangerous pit, a wrong is held to be done if they are killed in it. ”

“ It was a sad sight to see neat rectangular patterns of roads and highways, cultivated fields and orangegroves, checkered towns and sprawling suburbs come to an abrupt stop where they were blotted out by the regimented uniformity of the onrushing grass. For miles we flew above its dazzling green until our eyes ached from the sameness and our minds were dulled from the lack of variety below. ”

“ To our right was the stagnant river, dammed up behind the blockading arm of grass. Leftward, downtown, the thumb of the cityhall pointed rudely upward and far beyond was the listless Pacific. Ahead, the gridiron of streets was shockingly interrupted and severed by the great green mass plumped in its center.
It grew to enormous bigness and everything else disappeared; we were over and looked down upon it, a pasture hummock magnified beyond belief; retaining its essential identity, but made ominous by its unappropriate situation and size. ”

“ Never before had I so deeply felt the desolation of the northland. In a wilderness there is nothing forbidding to me; its huge earth-bedded, living pillars supporting the enormous canopy of green, its vastness, its mystery, its calm silence, may awe yet nothing sadden. But a vague foreboding enters when man enters. Where his corn grows amid the cinders of primeval things, his wanton gashes on tree and land, his beastly pollution of the wild, crystal waters, all the restlessness, and barrenness, and filth, and sordid deformity he calls his home—these sadden me unutterably. ”

“ It is instructive to study the history of the moral progress of individuals or communities; to mark the gradual development of truth; to watch the slow germination of its seed sown in simple obedience to the command of the Great Husbandman, while yet its green promise, as well as its golden fruition, was hidden from the eyes of the sower; to go back to the well-springs and fountain-heads, tracing the small streamlet from its hidden source, and noting the tributaries which swell its waters, as it moves onward, until it becomes a broad river, fertilizing and gladdening our present humanity. ”

“ Green on the hillside! green in the meadows and pastures! green everywhere—all around is changeless and everlasting green! as if hillside and valley, forest and field, had but a single dress for morning, noon, and night, and that only and always green! True, there is the music of the birds, joyous notes and variant, happy and hilarious, in the spring-time, but there is no cricket under the flat stone in the pasture, his song is not heard in the stone wall, or in the corner of the fences ”

“ The young and tender greens, freshened up by last night’s rain, were at their very best and most beautiful stage, there were flowers everywhere, and the ground was carpeted in places with a mosaic of colour.
“Why do people live in cities when the country is so beautiful?” demanded Pam in a tone of positive awe, as her gaze roamed over the open spaces and the vistas of green which stretched away on either side.
“People love their own species better than Nature,” answered Don, with the rare wisdom which sometimes characterizes quiet folk. ”

“ The earth is black; and in the early spring the trunks and branches of the trees look black too, and moist; but no sooner are these dark surfaces warmed by the rays of the sun than they send forth green grass and leaves. Vegetation requires light and warmth; but the amount must not be excessive. The reason why all that is green is so grateful to the eye, is that it seems like the union of warmth and cool moisture; it arouses sensations of calm contentment and health, but not those of passion, or what the world calls happiness. ”