St. 2
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)
Source: Ode to Evening (1747) http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/017002.htm, line 9.
“The whole landscape flashes while the hero now wraps about his body the fleece with its starry tufts of hair, now shifts it to his neck, now folds it upon his left arm.”
Micat omnis ager villisque comantem
sidereis totos pellem nunc fundit in artus,
nunc in colla refert, nunc implicat ille sinistrae.
Source: Argonautica, Book VIII, Lines 122–124
Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst (1889); English edition: Birdflight As The Basis of Aviation (1911).
“O’er folded blooms
On swirls of musk,
The beetle booms adown the glooms
And bumps along the dusk.”
The Beetle.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
"Does God Exist?" debate http://hitchensdebates.blogspot.com/2010/11/hitchens-vs-turek-vcu.html vs.
2010s, 2010
Context: I'll grant you that it would possible to track the pregnancy of the woman Mary who's mentioned about three times in the Bible and to show there was no male intervention in her life at all but yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy. I can say— I don't say that's impossible. Parthenogenesis is not completely unthinkable. It does not prove that his paternity is divine and it wouldn't prove that any of his moral teachings were thereby correct. Nor, if I was to see him executed one day and see him walking the streets the next, would that show that his father was God or his mother was a virgin or that his teachings were true, especially given the commonplace nature of resurrection at that time and place. After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it. The was raised, didn't say a thing about what she'd been through. And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves in Jerusalem opened and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet people. So it seems resurrection was something of a banality at the time. Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived. So I'll give you all the miracles and you'll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack.
