Roughness

“ It certainly is a feat, difficult of accomplishment, to stop a man who is rushing towards you with the speed of an express train, and upset him without the slightest injury to yourself, but is this the fairest way of defending your flags? It savors too much of roughness, and can be the cause of a serious accident, because a fall on the ice, at any time is usually painful and dangerous enough, without any additional impetus from without. If it is allowable, it is most unfair to "body" a man into the side of the rink. ”

“ When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length. ”

“ There seemed a tension in the air—as if something was going to snap. Doubtless you have often felt it—a sensation as though pins and needles were pricking you all over. As though you wanted to scream—to cry out—against an uncertain sensation that gripped you. ”

“ Men plough through muck and mire, dragging their feet and legs through water and mud, or sleep in the open, shivering with cold. The fingers are chilled to the bone, all feeling has gone away from the feet; for all one knows, the feet may have gone. No fires are lit, there is no wood, nothing that will burn. ”

“ When I crept over the hill, broken with tears.
⁠When I crouched down on the grass, dumb in despair,
I heard the soft croon of the wind bend to my ears,
⁠I felt the light kiss of the wind touching my hair. ”

“ Through his ruby lips might speak.
And his glossy locks to a fearful length
Have grown in that bed of clay,
In a clustering mesh they have wreathed their strength,
Who will part those curls away? ”

“ A glance back at the Concise group above will show you that with time the comparison which was once the basis and the life of the figurative use of words is dulled, obscured, even lost.
As a further enforcement of this fact, let us analyze the word rough. In its literal application, it may designate any surface that has ridges, projections, or inequalities and is therefore uneven, jagged, rugged, scraggy, or scabrous. Now frequently a man's face or head is rough because unshaved or uncombed; also the fur of an animal is rough. ”

“ These dark channelled rocks, worn, as with eternal tears,—these traces, so evident of ancient and vast desolations,—suggest the idea of boundless power and inexorable will, before whose course the most vehement of human feelings are as the fine spray of the cataract. ”

“ And so, after being carted, and jolted, and unloaded, you will be thrown into a hole, and your body, ice-cold, and as yielding as meat to the touch—oh, that awful icy softness!—your flesh will begin to rot, to be such that not your nearest friend would touch you. ”

“ To the dreadful crash of the two great bodies of wood and iron, which splintering against one another, instantly foundered, one loud cry was added—a cry of agony and death—the cry of a hundred human creatures swallowed up at once by the waves! ”

“ All is there disorder and accident, or seems so; sudden starts of its shattered beds hither and thither; ugly struggles of unexpected strength from under the ground; fallen fragments, toppling one over another into more helpless fall. ”

“ Down you go, and the wretched thing worries you, whilst you bark your fingers and swear horribly, bruising your knees and shins, and cursing the day on which you saw the light of a hard and feelingless world. ”

“ Ever the winds sigh and drop into those sun-swept silences. Ever the gorge lies motionless, unmoved, until I fear. It is a grim thing, unholy, terrible! It is human—some mighty drama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy, and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak, unheard, unechoed, and unknown. ”

“ Tears of perspiration collect in beads at the apertures of the pores; tears glide down the surface, and fall from all the salient points of our frame, from our elbows, from our finger-ends; a sweet languor creeps over us, and we feel as though, like a heathen god of old, we were dissolving into a liquid stream. ”

“ When the great angry waves arise,
In long low lines against the skies,
And, with a sullen motion,
Dash themselves against the rocks,
Raising a cloud of foam, which mocks
Their sullenness—then falling, dies. ”

“ On, on, on—on through the heat and the crowd and the dust—on, or they will be trampled down and lost—on, with throbbing brain and tottering limbs—on, till the heart grows sick, and the eyes grow blurred, and a gurgling groan tells those behind they may close up another space. ”

“ I heard a short, sharp cry behind me, a fall, and turning saw an awful face rushing upon me,—not human, not animal, but hellish, brown, seamed with red branching scars, red drops starting out upon it, and the lidless eyes ablaze. ”

“ If you rinse your greasy mess-kit in a tub of greasier water, you are one of many gathered like thirsty birds about a road-side puddle. If you fill your lungs and the pores of your sweaty skin with dust, fellows in adversity are all about you, looking grimier than you feel ”

“ Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naivete, Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations, They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers, They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes. ”

“ Halting, we threw small stones at them, after the fashion of inquiring humanity, which caused them to rear angrily upright on their hinder parts, snarl with wide-open mouths at us, then, curving their backs in high disdain, they moved off towards the water, their heads over their sleek shoulders, grunting—always grunting. ”

“ The tediousness and pain of these hours upon the rock grew only the greater as the day went on; the rock getting still the hotter and the sun fiercer. There were giddiness, and sickness, and sharp pangs like rheumatism, to be supported. ”

“ It needs but a moment for the conversation to become general,—about roots under the shoulder, stubs in the back, a ridge on which it is impossible for the sleeper to balance, the non-elasticity of boughs, the hardness of the ground, the heat, the smoke, the chilly air. ”

“ How your black and white would burn! On this rock, high and lifted up, come and sit. You are panting from the long pull and the steep pull up the gorge; but you forget it all in the landscape, near and remote, that lies under your eye. ”

“ As of old, gigantic, silent, or, clamorously, in the loosening rains and heat, casting down your stones—you will lift up your black defiance in the clear mountain nights, your grandeur to the sun by day. ”

“ All its forms are marked with violent angles, as if the whole muscular energy—so to speak—of the cloud, were writhing in every fold, and their fantastic and fiery volumes have a peculiar horror—an awful life—shadowed out in their strange, swift, fearful outlines, [Page 261] which oppress the mind more than even the threatening of their gigantic gloom. ”

“ The unhappy men crawled on with trembling limbs and chattering teeth till the snow, collecting round their feet in hard lumps, like stones, some scattered fragment, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their companions, made them stagger and fall. ”

“ Sometimes, however, the tears which the earth thus sheds, this crystal thread, scorned by the unobserving passer-by, is arrested in its timid course by some trifling obstacle—a rising path, a fallen branch or tree. ”

“ You find a quiet little hill of clay, with nothing stirring round about; you smash into it with your boot-heel or a bit of wattle, and instantly the earth is covered in every direction with a scrambling, scurrying—doubtless, if one could hear them, a screaming—crowd, all bent on knowing what has caused the disturbance. ”

“ I put on some clothes and went down the road; all the dull or startling noises in that din of burning growing louder and louder as I walked. The heaviest sound was that of an incessant cracking and crunching, as if some giant with teeth of stone was breaking up the bones of the world. ”

“ And fouling of the limbs with gore, was there,
O long before the gleaming spears ere flew;
And nature prompted man to shun a wound,
Before the left arm by the aid of art
Opposed the shielding targe. And, verily,
Yielding the weary body to repose,
Far ancienter than cushions of soft beds,
And quenching thirst is earlier than cups. ”

“ The deformed, the crippled and the half-witted abound. Rogues and rascals, brutes in human form, and human forms that are harking back to the brute abound also. With some we may sound the lowest depths, with others we may ascend to glorious heights. ”

“ Above all these questions which we have just skimmed, there rises another, of a graver and more mysterious kind, one which occurs at the end of all studies that treat of sensation, and with regard to which some reflections will not be out of place here. To what, outside of us, do those sensations which we experience within us correspond? ”

“ Men and women and young children, gaunt with hunger and begrimed with dirt, some with faces that were hard and stony, some with faces that were weak and simple, some with eyes that were red as blood, all weary with waiting and wasted with long pain, ran hither and thither in the gloom of the foul place where they were immured together. ”

“ To their windows, as scattering the mud you race.
Wingless sparrows and, like them, brown,
Bullied, then bullying—when ye are grown,
What is the outcome? Make it known.
Brothers, gather these waifs of the street,
Wash off their mudstains, make them meet,
With strengthened minds, our minds to greet. ”

“ Always when I flounder into the midst of bushes, which cross and intertwine themselves about my legs, and brush my face, and seize hold of my clothes, with their multitudinous grip,—always, in such a difficulty, I feel as if it were almost as well to lie down and die in rage and despair as to go one step farther. ”

“ Rude and rough power lies in its sound. The monosyllabic verbs which it commences show well what its original effect was felt to be. Race, rage, rack, rail, rain, rake, ramp, range, rant, rate, rave, rash, raze—all these words have an affinity of meaning, derived from the ra, though modified by the endings. ”

“ It always blows tremulously, making the leaves of the trees shudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulness which gives them—and I watch them this moment as I write—an expression of anger as well as of fear and distress. ”

“ But the process, in addition to the burn and sting, the incessant thirst, the dust-laden air, the hot skullbone like an iron lid that must fly off, and the strange, dim, red starlight, the somber red varying shadow, the weird rush and roar and lull—all these created heroic fortitude if a man was to endure. ”

“ And neither bar nor lock Its fiery onslaught can restrain; And arms—invite its shock. It tears in twain like tender grass, The strongest forest-trees; It grinds to dust the hardened brass, Though stout and firm it be. ”

“ Why, the heat of the sun on the rock was so overpowering, that the man was in great agony; his naked feet were so burnt, that he was compelled to keep moving them, by placing one upon the other and changing them every minute. ”

“ The depth of the perforation from which the foaming furious water returns, must be wonderful, to cause such an extreme agitation. It is more a scene of solemnity, surprise, and astonishment, than that of beauty ”

“ What is wanting in the density of the element is more than made up by the force of the contending winds, which rush into the mouth, eyes, and nostrils, as if flying from a water-fiend. The “courage of worse behind” alone persuades the gasping sufferer to take one desperate step more. ”

“ And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man’s body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches. ”

“ Then he said, "Do you know, I think I could endure this painful ride a little better if only I had something to hold myself by? Do you mind if I take a piece of grass and put it in your mouth? I can hold on to that when I shake about and my sore spots will not hurt so much." ”

“ Were you tender-hearted enough to feel compunction in sitting down hard on a six-year-old sore, or if you had an aversion to kicking the suffering brute with both heels and belting his hide with a yard or two of fencing-wire to get him to show signs of animation, you would dismount and walk—perhaps, weep. ”

“ The well-known, how-often fondly-contemplated features tell the whole story in the photograph taken, as you say, a few days before the crisis. Madness is plainly lurking in that lurid eye, stamps indelibly the arch of the nostril and the curve of the lip, and in ambush along the soft curve of the cheek it lies ready to burst forth in consuming fire. ”