Alice Morse Earle: Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing...

The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present.

Alice Morse Earle

time running inspirational

Every day may not be good... but there's something good in every day

Alice Morse Earle

good-morning positive inspirational

The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days as a tavern.

Alice Morse Earle

light home beautiful

Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal.

Alice Morse Earle

time memories believe

Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.

Alice Morse Earle

garden imagination exercise

The grape Hyacinth is the favorite spring flower of my garden - but no! I though a minute ago the Scilla was! and what place has the Violet? the Flower de Luce? I cannot decide, but this I know - it is some blue flower.

Alice Morse Earle

garden flower spring

The landlord of colonial days may not have been the greatest man in town, but he was certainly the best-known, often the most popular, and ever the most picturesque and cheerful figure.

Alice Morse Earle

cheerful may men

It is heartrending to read the entries in many an old family Bible - the records of suffering, distress, and blasted hopes.

Alice Morse Earle

family-bible records suffering

Every sea-captain who sailed to the West Indies was expected to bring home a turtle on the return voyage for a feast to his expectant friends.

Alice Morse Earle

west-indies turtles home

When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.

Alice Morse Earle

shelter unbearable firsts

The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe exit of the latter.

Alice Morse Earle

women rose men children

Sunken gardens should be laid out under the supervision of an intelligent landscape architect; and even then should have a reason for being sunken other than a whim or increase in costliness.

Alice Morse Earle

being landscape intelligent reason

By the year 1670, wooden chimneys and log houses of the Plymouth and Bay colonies were replaced by more sightly houses of two stories, which were frequently built with the second story jutting out a foot or two over the first, and sometimes with the attic story still further extending over the second story.

Alice Morse Earle

more story year sometimes

The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile of the meeting-house.

Alice Morse Earle

build new half law

We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness.

Alice Morse Earle

new man style absence

Salem houses present to you a serene and dignified front, gracious yet reserved, not thrusting forward their choicest treasures to the eyes of passing strangers; but behind the walls of the houses, enclosed from public view, lie cherished gardens, full of the beauty of life.

Alice Morse Earle

eyes you beauty life

In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and life.

Alice Morse Earle

medicine health life science

We have very pretty Dutch gardens, so called, in America, but their chief claim to being Dutch is that they are set with bulbs, and have Delft or other earthen pots or boxes for formal plants or shrubs.

Alice Morse Earle

plants pretty being america

There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world.

Alice Morse Earle

sad ocean life children

The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies.

Alice Morse Earle

old nothing baby years

Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the seat in which each person should sit during public worship.