Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Boston
A Boston man is the east wind made flesh.
Thomas Appleton.
The sea returning day by day
Restores the world-wide mart.
So let each dweller on the Bay
Fold Boston in his heart
Till these echoes be choked with snows
Or over the town blue ocean flows.
Emerson—Boston. St. 20.
One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.
*****
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Sam Walter Foss—The Calf-Path.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead;
They followed still his crooked way
And lost a hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.
Sam Walter Foss—The Calf-Path.
Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.
Holmes—Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. VI.
A solid man of Boston;
A comfortable man with dividends,
And the first salmon and the first green peas.
Longfellow—New England Tragedies. John Endicott. Act IV.
Solid men of Boston, banish long potations!
Solid men of Boston, make no long orations!
Charles Morris—Pitt and Dundas’s Return to London from Wimbledon. American Song. From Lyra Urbanica.
Solid men of Boston, make no long orations;
Solid men of Boston, drink no long potations;
Solid men of Boston, go to bed at sundown;
Never lose your way like the loggerheads of London.
Billy Pitt and the Farmer. Printed in
“Asylum for Fugitive Pieces” (1786), without author’s name.
Massachusetts has been the wheel within New England, and Boston the wheel within Massachusetts. Boston therefore is often called the “hub of the world,” since it has been the source and fountain of the ideas that have reared and made America.
Rev. F. B. Zinckle—Last Winter in the United States. (1868).