Dry Forests

Famous quotes containing the words dry and/or forests:

    ‘Tis not such lines as almost crack the stage
    When Bajazet begins to rage;
    Nor a tall met’phor in the bombast way,
    Nor the dry chips of short-lunged Seneca.
    Nor upon all things to obtrude
    And force some odd similitude.
    What is it then, which like the power divine
    We only can by negatives define?
    Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)

    The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)