My tantalized spirit here
Blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting, its roses —

However, there is a local acquaintance with $3,000,000 who had not an ulcer to his name and therefore was looked down upon by other millionaires. He was very glad to take out a five-year lease on my fugitive ulcer and give it a good home.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all in changed, sometimes rather suddenly.

I live among inconveniences that are no longer discomforts. I know where I stand with god and the world. I am a dull but not unkindly vegetable.

Here, Robert Frost writes editor and poet Nathan Haskell Dole on his (Frost’s) birthday. He reflects on his transition into middle-age and recounts a dream he had about Ellis Island. The Frost family passed through the port in 1915, when … Continued

—Of course; I build now and then my castles in the air.—I plan out my little schemes for the future; and cogitate fancies; and occasionally there float forth like wreaths of smoke, and about as substantial, my day dreams.—But, take it all in all, I have reason to bless the breeze that wafted me to Whitestone.

It’s not the rendering of the oral Arabic texts into written English that makes collaborating with Mrabet difficult, but trying to help him maintain some sort of diplomatic relationship with the outside world, which to him is obviously not a part of total reality.

I wait for you to appear to make time not a long treadmill but a flight, a marvelous parabola, an extension of love.

God sends the rain, according to her, and God willed that she should have rheumatism, and it was God who decided that she should forget her beans and let them burn. I put up a good fight, but still I have an uneasy sense of being under the eye of a capricious Overseer who is likely to play almost any kind of trick on me at any moment.

In Hugh’s picture of the Dufflepuds what I like best (though the D’s themselves are quite good) is the ship, just the right sort of ship, and the shadow of the ship, and the windiness of the sky. I mean, I like a picture of out-of-door things to look as if it was really out of doors—as this does. But you all seem able to do that.