Sarah Orne Jewett (1849 – 1909)
American author and poet whose works were primarily set in her native New England.
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We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water's edge.
"Step in some afternoon," he said, as affectionately as if I were a fellow-shipmaster wrecked on the lee shore of age like himself.
When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.
"Dear robin," said this sad young flower,
"Perhaps you'd not mind trying
To find a nice white frill for me,
Some day when you are flying?"
Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.
The warm sun kissed the earth
To consecrate thy birth,
And from his close embrace
Thy radiant face
Sprang into sight,
A blossoming delight.
'Tain't worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes.
It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.
A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return.
So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
Your patience may have long to wait,
Whether in little things or great,
But all good luck, you soon will learn,
Must come to those who nobly earn.
Who hunts the hay-field over
Will find the four-leaved clover.
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.
Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.
The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.
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