To A. B. “Then, as all my soules bee, Emparadis’d in you, (in whom alone I understand, and grow and see,) The rafters of my body, bone Being still with you, the Muscle, Sinew, and Veine, Which tile th...

This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is...

“At one time the earth was probably a white-hot sphere like the sun.” Tarr and McMurry...

… a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison ...

… a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison ...

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, ...

Oliver married Eliza in May. After their wedding trip to Philadelphia, they returned to the house he had built for her on Woodson Street. With his great hands he had laid the foundations, burrowed out...

In the great processional of the years through which the history of the Gants was evolving, few years had borne a heavier weight of pain, terror, and wretchedness, and none was destined to bring with ...

The baby was, to reverse an epigram, an unconscionable time in getting born; but when Gant finally awoke just after ten o’clock next morning, whimpering from tangled nerves, and the quivering shame of...

Luke got well after cursing doctor, nurse, and family for several weeks: it was stubborn typhoid. Gant was now head of a numerous family, which rose ladderwise from infancy to the adolescent Steve⁠—wh...

The death of Grover gave Eliza the most terrible wound of her life: her courage was snapped, her slow but powerful adventure toward freedom was abruptly stopped. Her flesh seemed to turn rotten when s...

This journey to California was Gant’s last great voyage. He made it two years after Eliza’s return from St. Louis, when he was fifty-six years old. In the great frame was already stirring the chemistr...

Eugene was loose now in the limitless meadows of sensation: his sensory equipment was so complete that at the moment of perception of a single thing, the whole background of color, warmth, odor, sound...

Yes, and in that month when Prosperpine comes back, and Ceres’ dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees,...

But this freedom, this isolation in print, this dreaming and unlimited time of fantasy, was not to last unbroken. Both Gant and Eliza were fluent apologists for economic independence: all the boys had...

Eliza saw Altamont not as so many hills, buildings, people: she saw it in the pattern of a gigantic blueprint. She knew the history of every piece of valuable property⁠—who bought it, who sold it, who...

It was the winter, and the sullen dying autumn that he hated most at Dixieland⁠—the dim fly-specked lights, the wretched progress about the house in search of warmth, Eliza untidily wrapped in an old ...

In the years that followed, up to his eleventh or twelfth year when he could no longer travel on half fares, Eugene voyaged year by year into the rich mysterious South. Eliza, who, during her first wi...

The plum tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. But in the Spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit an...

The plum tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. But in the Spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit an...

The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. Old haunt-eyed...

The Spring grew ripe. There was at midday a soft drowsiness in the sun. Warm sporting gusts of wind howled faintly at the eaves; the young grass bent; the daisies twinkled. He pressed his high knees u...

Eugene spent the next four years of his life in Leonard’s school. Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the dark road of pain and death down which the great limbs of Gant had already begun to...

In the years that had followed Eliza’s removal to Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away...

One afternoon in the young summer, Gant leaned upon the rail, talking to Jannadeau. He was getting on to sixty-five, his erect body had settled, he stooped a little. He spoke of old age often, and he ...

Gant, during these years in which Helen and Luke, the two for whom he felt the deepest affection, were absent a large part of the time, lived a splintered existence at home and at Eliza’s. He feared a...

During the first years of this illness Gant showed a diminished, but not a seriously impaired, energy. At first he had, under the doctor’s treatment, periods of tranquillity when he almost believed hi...

Toward the beginning of Eugene’s fourteenth year, when he had been a student at Leonard’s for two years, Ben got work for him as a paper carrier. Eliza grumbled at the boy’s laziness. She complained t...

He did not tell the Leonards that he was working in the early morning. He knew they would oppose his employment, and that their opposition would manifest itself in the triumphant argument of lowered g...

With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his torso from loin to chin. “Now, let me see,” he whined with studious deliberation, “what he gives on this.” He fumbled for the notes. To...

Yes. The enormous crime had been committed. And, for almost a year, Eugene had been maintaining a desperate neutrality. His heart, however, was not neutral. The fate of civilization, it appeared, hung...

In the autumn, at the beginning of his fifteenth year⁠—his last year at Leonard’s⁠—Eugene went to Charleston on a short excursion. He found a substitute for his paper route. “Come on!” said Max Isaacs...

My Shakespeare, rise! He rose. The bard rose throughout the length and breadth of his brave new world. He was not for an age, but for all time. Then, too, his tercentenary happened only once⁠—at the e...

Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds. He had been sick very little i...

Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds. He had been sick very little i...

Before his first year was ended, the boy had changed his lodging four or five times. He finished the year living alone in a big bare carpetless room⁠—an existence rare at Pulpit Hill, where the studen...

There was at Dixieland a girl named Laura James. She was twenty-one years old. She looked younger. She was there when he came back. Laura was a slender girl, of medium height, but looking taller than ...

One day, when June was coming to its end, Laura James said to him: “I shall have to go home next week.” Then, seeing his stricken face, she added, “but only for a few days⁠—not more than a week.” “But...

When he returned to the university for his second year, he found the place adjusted soberly to war. It seemed quieter, sadder⁠—the number of students was smaller and they were younger. The older ones ...

During the few remaining days of his holiday, he stayed almost entirely away from the house, coming for a brief and mumbled meal, and late at night, for bed. He waited for departure as a prisoner for ...

Eugene returned to Altamont two weeks before the term began at Pulpit Hill. The town and the nation seethed in the yeasty ferment of war. The country was turning into one huge camp. The colleges and u...

There was no train until the next day. Heston quieted him during the evening with a stiff drink of gin manufactured from alcohol taken from the medical laboratory. Eugene was silent and babbled incohe...

In that enormous silence, where pain and darkness met, some birds were waking. It was October. It was almost four o’clock in the morning. Eliza straightened out Ben’s limbs, and folded his hands acros...

So, to Ben dead was given more care, more time, more money than had ever been given to Ben living. His burial was a final gesture of irony and futility: an effort to compensate carrion death for the u...

Three weeks after Eugene’s return to the university the war ended. The students cursed and took off their uniforms. But they rang the great bronze bell, and built a bonfire on the campus, leaping arou...

Gant and Eliza came to his graduation. He found them lodgings in the town: it was early June⁠—hot, green, fiercely and voluptuously Southern. The campus was a green oven; the old grads went about in g...

The Square lay under blazing moonlight. The fountain pulsed with a steady breezeless jet: the water fell upon the pool with a punctual slap. No one came into the Square. The chimes of the bank’s clock...