Word: blest
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Then and now, romanticism had a special feeling against Original Sin and for Original Innocence, seeing it exemplified in youth. William Wordsworth hailed a child of six: "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" That sentiment was obliquely echoed last summer at the Amherst College commencement; the class valedictorian declared: "Our parents and our teachers believe in adulthood and maturity: our wish is to stay immature as little children." It was meant metaphorically; yet it expressed a profound disillusion with the values of the "older generation"-or perhaps the lack of them. Given little to believe in or rebel against by their liberal...
Isles of the Blest. Tall tales of horse trading, Twain found, were the same the world over. For instance, a visiting American, shopping for a matched pair of horses, was led by a Hawaiian native trader to a little stable, unfortunately locked, as the trader's brother had gone to the country with the key. The purchaser examined one horse critically through a window, went around the stable, and examined the other through a window at the other end. The match was perfect, the deal concluded on the spot, and the salesman went off-leaving his client to discover...
After his four-month exploration, Twain forever yearned to return to Hawaii. In 1881, he wrote to a Hawaiian friend that "if the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of Haleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom...
Less than four years later, Khrushchev's age of abundance seems as remote as mythology's Isles of the Blest. For all his glowing promises to the consumer, living standards in Russia today are little higher than they were in 1958. Though some food prices have increased sharply since 1962, there has been only a token increase in wages. Housing, consumer goods, and several key sectors of heavy industry have fallen far short of even the reduced levels set for them last year...
...knows? This Africa so richly blest With golden lands and fronded palms in air, The envy of great nations far and near, May yet the world lead back to peace and rest, Goodwill to all. Who knows? Who knows...