Alice Morse Earle
Alice Morse Earle
Alice Morse Earlewas an American historian and author from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was christened Mary Alice by her parents Edwin Morse and Abby Mason Clary. On 15 April 1874, she married Henry Earle of New York, changing her name from Mary Alice Morse to Alice Morse Earle. Her writings, beginning in 1890, focussed on small sociological details rather than grand details, and thus are invaluable for modern social historians. She wrote a number of books on colonial Americasuch as Curious...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth27 April 1851
CountryUnited States of America
It is heartrending to read the entries in many an old family Bible - the records of suffering, distress, and blasted hopes.
The landlord of colonial days may not have been the greatest man in town, but he was certainly the best-known, often the most popular, and ever the most picturesque and cheerful figure.
When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.
The grape Hyacinth is the favorite spring flower of my garden - but no! I though a minute ago the Scilla was! and what place has the Violet? the Flower de Luce? I cannot decide, but this I know - it is some blue flower.
Every sea-captain who sailed to the West Indies was expected to bring home a turtle on the return voyage for a feast to his expectant friends.
Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.
Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal.
The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days as a tavern.
Every day may not be good... but there's something good in every day
The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present.
Sunken gardens should be laid out under the supervision of an intelligent landscape architect; and even then should have a reason for being sunken other than a whim or increase in costliness.
In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow, uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks placed on legs like milking-stools.
We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness.
We have very pretty Dutch gardens, so called, in America, but their chief claim to being Dutch is that they are set with bulbs, and have Delft or other earthen pots or boxes for formal plants or shrubs.