Daily definitions
- Merchant
- n. One engaged in a commercial pursuit. A commercial pursuit is one in which the thing pursued is a dollar.
- Out-of-doors
- n. That part of one’s environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.
- I climbed to the top of a mountain one day To see the sun setting in glory, And I thought, as I looked at his vanishing ray, Of a perfectly splendid story.
- ’Twas about an old man and the ass he bestrode Till the strength of the beast was o’ertested; Then the man would carry him miles on the road Till Neddy was pretty well rested.
- The moon rising solemnly over the crest Of the hills to the east of my station Displayed her broad disk to the darkening west Like a visible new creation.
- And I thought of a joke (and I laughed till I cried) Of an idle young woman who tarried About a church-door for a look at the bride, Although ’twas herself that was married.
- To poets all Nature is pregnant with grand Ideas — with thought and emotion. I pity the dunces who don’t understand The speech of earth, heaven and ocean.
- Stromboli Smith
- Yesterday
- n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age. But yesterday I should have thought me blest To stand high-pinnacled upon the peak Of middle life and look adown the bleak And unfamiliar foreslope to the West, Where solemn shadows all the land invest And stilly voices, half-remembered, speak Unfinished prophecy, and witch-fires freak The haunted twilight of the Dark of Rest. Yea, yesterday my soul was all aflame To stay the shadow on the dial’s face At manhood’s noonmark! Now, in God His name I chide aloud the little interspace Disparting me from Certitude, and fain Would know the dream and vision ne’er again.
- Baruch Arnegriff
- It is said that in his last illness the poet Arnegriff was attended at different times by seven doctors.
- Prejudice
- n. A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
- Ugliness
- n. A gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility.