Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of ExileThis is Melville's Classic tale of a man that was exiled for fifty years. |
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Common terms and phrases
adventurer ain't American boat boots breeches Brentford brigantine British Bunker Hill Captain Paul Carrickfergus clothes coat Count D'Estaing crew cried cutter deck Doctor Franklin door England English ere long escape Ethan Allen exile farmer fire garden gentleman grim rocks guns hand heard heart honest friend Horne Tooke hurried Israel Potter John Paul Jones king lady land Latin Quarter London look master-at-arms miles Millet morning mountains Nantucket ship never nigh night officer once Paris passed Paul Jones Pont Neuf poor Israel Poor Richard port present prisoner prisoner of war Ranger replied Israel retreat round sage sail sailor seemed Serapis ship side sight Sir John soldiers sort soul Squire Woodcock stood strange stranger suddenly thought tion turned vessels walk wall wanderer White Waltham Whitehaven Yankee
Popular passages
Page 189 - So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous : verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.
Page 85 - Industry need not wish, as Poor Richard says, and he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains without pains; then help, hands, for I have no lands; or if I have, they are smartly taxed.
Page 192 - Sharing the same blood with England, and yet her proved foe in two wars — not wholly inclined at bottom to forget an old grudge — intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations.
Page 99 - So at midnight, the heart of the metropolis of modern civilization was secretly trod by this jaunty barbarian in broad-cloth; a sort of prophetical ghost, glimmering in anticipation upon the advent of those tragic scenes of the French Revolution which levelled the exquisite refinement of Paris with the blood-thirsty ferocity of Borneo; showing that broaches and fingerrings, not less than nose-rings and tattooing, are tokens of the primeval savageness which ever slumbers in human kind, civilised or...
Page 256 - Similar funereal festoons spanned it to the west, while eastward, towards the sea, tiers and tiers of jetty colliers lay moored, side by side, fleets of black swans. The Thames, which far away, among the green fields of Berks, ran clear as a brook, here, polluted by continual vicinity to man, curdled on between...
Page 85 - So what signifies wishing and hoping for better times? We may make these, times better if we bestir ourselves. ' Industry need not wish, and he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains without pains; then help hands, for I have no lands,' or if I have they are smartly taxed.
Page xi - BIOGRAPHY, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue — one given and received in entire disinterestedness — since neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, nor the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.
Page 183 - The career of this stubborn adventurer signally illustrates the idea, that since all human affairs are subject to organic disorder; since they are created in, and sustained by, a sort of half-disciplined chaos; hence, he who in great things seeks success, must never wait for smooth water; which never was, and never will be; but with what straggling method he can, dash with all his derangements at his object, leaving the rest to Fortune.
Page 252 - Unless, indeed, according to the phrase, each man was a "brick," which, in sober scripture, was the case; brick is no bad name for any son of Adam ; Eden was but a brickyard ; what is a mortal but a few luckless shovelfuls of clay, moulded in a mould, laid out on a sheet to dry, and ere long quickened into his queer caprices by the sun ? Are not men built into communities just like bricks into a wall ] Consider the great wall of China : ponder the great populace of Pekin.
Page 153 - Let him alone,' was the wise man's answer to some statesman who sought to hamper Paul with a letter of instructions. Much subtile casuistry has been expended upon the point, whether Paul Jones was a knave or a hero, or a union of both. But war and warriors, like politics and politicians, like religion and religionists, admit of no metaphysics.