Word: racking
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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...commune with their shape-teeming grates, and draw deep thoughts from their beer-mugs. The poets of this school are carefully excluded - in their wild moods - from the papers of the Eastern colleges; but in the free and unbounded West they flourish like so many green bay-trees, and rack their brains for metaphors which would set Pope's teeth on edge could he hear them; but they have at least the poetic spirit, and are apt to make fewer metrical mistakes than their more sensible and prosaic compeers. From their number, too, it is not unlikely that those very...
...blindness to our own interests, and is enough to make a tenderhearted man repent and invest. The utter absurdity of the articles offered for sale makes no difference; for the man who tries to make you, who always wear laced shoes, believe that the Combined Bootjack and Towel-rack is an indispensable article, lingers as long in the room as the man who sells Bibles. Let no one infer that I think that students should not give in charity. Without doubt they might make the best possible use of some of their spare pocket-money by relieving real distress...
...long since classical instruction here rested on a basis entirely different from the present. The works of the grand old thinkers of Greece and Rome were read, not as etymological and grammatical puzzles, but for their beauties of idea and of expression. The student was not asked to rack his brains and search the grammar for the peculiar technical reason for an uncommon use of a subjunctive, or to give a long dissertation on the ground of a Grecian author's choice of the infinitive with av instead of the optative. It was supposed that the average student had sufficient...