William A Massey Quotes

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, Of painting speech, and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taught How to embody, and to colour thought?

In fact, is the idea of a serious comparison of American musicals and opera really so outrageous?

Most moving of all was Raymond Massey’s voice, the voice that portrayed Lincoln in Bob Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, reading Stephen Vincent Benét’s Prayer for United Nations,2 which the President himself had once recited on Flag Day: “God of the Free, we pledge our lives and hearts today to the cause of all free mankind…. Grant us brotherhood in hope and union, not only for the space of this bitter war, but for the days to come which shall and must unite all the children of earth.

America that has at its center the poisonous idea of race. This story runs from Thomas Jefferson's obscene remark that the Orangutan prefers "black women over those of his own species," to W. E. B. Du Bois's experience a century

Why New England? Perry Miller once wrote that Virginia, no less than Massachusetts, found its "energizing propulsion" in religion. Miller insisted that Virginia's idea of itself as a trading colony "was conceived in the bed of religion," and that its publicly announced motives of evangelizing Indians and stopping the imperial designs of French and Spanish papists were more than disguises draped over the tobacco trade.

brought the idea that overwhelmed the native cultures they encountered here) are known to us by a name given to them by their enemies. Derided as "precisians" or "precisionists," they were regarded by many of their fellow Englishmen as fanatics who insisted that the Anglican Church had been corrupted with garish ceremonies and needed to return to precise conformity with the pure forms of worship established by Christ's apostles sixteen hundred years before they were born. Among the names by which these people were mocked, the one that stuck was "Puritans."3 As

What, for example, is one to make of Walt Whitman's comment that during the Civil War "the People, of their own choice, [were] fighting, dying for their own idea"? How could Whitman know this-and what, exactly, does it mean for a people to possess, or be possessed by, an idea? Who, indeed, were the people? And how do we place Whitman's remark in relation to the high rates of desertion in that war, or to the brutal draft riots that swept through New York City at its height, when white mobs pulled black men out of their homes for lynching, then dragged their bodies through the streets by the genitals? Was this really a war of, by, and for the people? Or was it a war between industrialists and slaveowners in which people were fodder?

Ever since, there has been a good deal of speculation about why they went. Tocqueville thought "it was a purely intellectual craving that called them from the comforts of their former homes." But according to a less generous observer who lived in their own time, the real reason they left was their misanthropy: "A Puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart." By the beginning of our own century, this view had become the prevailing one. According to D. H. Lawrence, they came "to get away"; and to his own rhetorical question "away from what?"-Lawrence replied, "in the long run, away from themselves." In an especially cruel assessment, William Carlos Williams called them "hard and little" people, as if they were

transcends our own tiny allotment of days and hours if we are to keep at bay the "dim, back-of-the-mind suspicion that one may be adrift in an absurd world."' The name for that suspicion-for the absence or diminution of hope-is melancholy. Melancholy is the dark twin of hope. Ever since it acquired a name from the Greek words for black bile, melanos chole, it has been thought to exert a particularly strong hold on certain people, and, as the great anatomist of melancholy Robert Burton put it, to afflict certain "kingdoms, provinces, and Politickal Bodies [that] are subject in like manner to this disease.