As for me," still speaking of scenery, "these mountains
about here, that I see every day, are no more to me, in one sense,
than a man's farm is to him. What mostly interests me now is when I
see some new freak or shape in the face of Nature."
In literature it may be said that Old Phelps prefers the best in the
very limited range that has been open to him. Tennyson is his
favorite among poets an affinity explained by the fact that they are
both lotos-eaters. Speaking of a lecture-room talk of Mr. Beecher's
which he had read, he said, "It filled my cup about as full as I
callerlate to have it: there was a good deal of truth in it, and some
poetry; waal, and a little spice, too. We've got to have the spice,
you know." He admired, for different reasons, a lecture by Greeley
that he once heard, into which so much knowledge of various kinds was
crowded that he said he "made a reg'lar gobble of it." He was not
without discrimination, which he exercised upon the local preaching
when nothing better offered. Of one sermon he said, "The man began
way back at the creation, and just preached right along down; and he
didn't say nothing, after all. It just seemed to me as if he was
tryin' to git up a kind of a fix-up.
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