Airborne support
This touching account in Thoreau's journal has a swallow, injured by a shot from a gun, being given airborne support...
Intimate and familiar
A striking idea, that in being true, a book will feel intimate and familiar to all men. 'True' surely means...
Feeding & reading: nuts vs apples
Thoreau's observation on the pitfalls of eating nuts. However, the upside, as far as I gather, is that nuts are...
The moon shone upon the water below
I liked this expansive moon-scape and the detail of Wordworth keeping his curtains open to see it.
'The...
Power implied
Something whistlingly clean about this; good writing hitting its target with speed and precision, and a latent force behind every...
Schoolboy sketches
Maurice Cramer was a Geneva schoolboy who joined his classmates in August 1870 for a school trip to discover Champéry. ...
Five for the price of one
Thoreau packs in a rich deck of similes and metaphors in this short description of the shrub oak. For the...
Lost in Russia
The American writer John Steinbeck and the photographer Robert Capa spent months preparing for their trip to the Soviet Union...
The fungus and the toadstool
Thoreau has a habit of bringing interesting things home from his walks the better to observe them. Twigs, fungi, animals...
Wrong by a jugful
A charming way to say that someone is seriously wrong - not right by a jugful. I will try to...
Of tea and stars
A charming juxtaposition of homeliness and magnificence - people drinking tea but noticing a sky sprinkled with stars.
Clapping linen
This seems to mean something like smoothing out and folding linen, though it would baffle people now.
'Mary...
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