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قراءة كتاب Impressions of America
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
rules them with charming nonchalance.
The men are entirely given to business; they have, as they say, their brains in front of their heads. They are also exceedingly acceptive of new ideas. Their education is practical. We base the education of children entirely on books, but we must give a child a mind before we can instruct the mind. Children have a natural antipathy to books—handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.
In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilisation. There at any rate is a country that has no trappings, no pageants and no gorgeous ceremonies. I saw only two processions—one was the Fire Brigade preceded
by the Police, the other was the Police preceded by the Fire Brigade.
Every man when he gets to the age of twenty-one is allowed a vote, and thereby immediately acquires his political education. The Americans are the best politically educated people in the world. It is well worth one’s while to go to a country which can teach us the beauty of the word FREEDOM and the value of the thing LIBERTY.
3. In a poem published in an American magazine on February 15th, 1882, Wilde wrote
4. Poems by Oscar Wilde. Also his Lecture on the English Renaissance. The Seaside Library, Vol. lviii. No. 1183, January 19th, 1882. 4to. Pp. 32. New York: George Munro, Publisher.
A copy of this edition was sold by auction in New York last year for eight dollars.
5. See An Essay concerning Human Understanding, IV. xii. 10.
A still more striking instance of the use of this expression is to be found in the same writer’s Thoughts concerning Education, s. 28, where he says:—“Once in four and twenty hours, I think, is enough; and nobody, I guess, will think it too much.”
OSCAR WILDE IN AMERICA.
An interesting account of Oscar Wilde, at the time of his American tour, was given in the Lady’s Pictorial a few weeks after his arrival in New York, the city which he described as “one huge Whiteley’s shop.”
He was interviewed in a room which was intensely warm and the sofa on which the poet reclined was drawn up to the fire. An immense wolf rug, bordered with scarlet, was thrown over it and half-encircled his graceful form in its warm embrace. Wilde was wearied. In a languid, half enervated
manner he gently sipped hot chocolate from a cup by his side. Occasionally he inhaled a long, deep whiff from a smouldering cigarette held lightly in his white and shapely hand.
He was attired in a smoking suit of dark brown velvet faced with lapels of red quilted silk. The ends of a long dark necktie floated over the facing like sea-weed on foam tinged by the dying sun. Dark