Thunder Quotes - page 7
Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa - rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!
Charles Darwin
And o'er them lowers destruction, high in air,
Upon those jutting crags, whose rugged sides,
Riven in fragments, and like ruins pil'd,
Seem as that giants of those ancient days
When earthborn creatures braved th' Olympic Gods,
Those of whom fable tells, had torn away
Rocks from their solid base, and with strong arm,
Parted the mountains: there the avalanche hangs,
Mighty, but tremulous; just a light breath
Will loosen it from off its airy throne;
Then down it hurls in wrath, like to the sound
Of thunder amid storms, or as the voice
Of rushing waters-death in its career.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon