For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread. Rebecca Harding Davis More Quotes by Rebecca Harding Davis More Quotes From Rebecca Harding Davis The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. Rebecca Harding Davis army war ideas We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart. Rebecca Harding Davis eye struggle heart But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls. Rebecca Harding Davis politician soul remember Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror. Rebecca Harding Davis crime aliens men Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil. Rebecca Harding Davis agents devil children TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance. Rebecca Harding Davis credit things-in-life two You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it. Rebecca Harding Davis patriotic grandfather glad Men and women thought and did noble and mean things that would have been impossible to them before or after. A man cannot drink old Bourbon long and remain in his normal condition. We did not drink Bourbon, but blood. Rebecca Harding Davis men mean blood it is a mistake to talk of the twilight of age, or the blurred sight of old people. The long day grows clearer at its close, and the petty fogs of prejudice which rose between us and our fellows in youth melt away as the sun goes down. At last we see God's creatures as they are. Rebecca Harding Davis twilight sight mistake the New Englander landed on a stony, barren tract, and a large share of his strength during two centuries has gone to force a living out of it. Hence he has come to regard economy - a necessary unpleasant quality at best - as the chief of virtues. He has cultivated habits which verge on closeness in dealing with food, and with the expression of feeling, and even - his enemies think - with feeling itself. Rebecca Harding Davis expression two thinking Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of thehighest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then. Rebecca Harding Davis money teacher country One sees that dead, vacant look steal over the rarest, finest of women's faces . . . in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces . . . Rebecca Harding Davis solitude summer lying Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people. Rebecca Harding Davis uplifting war people ... I suppose that the party or sect which is to do any work in the world must breathe its own peculiar atmosphere, speak its own little patois, and see but one side of the question on which it fights. Rebecca Harding Davis atmosphere party fighting I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us. Rebecca Harding Davis woman living god men Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North. Rebecca Harding Davis river road great village But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth. Rebecca Harding Davis fault nation youth young
