Estray Quotes

One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies - coal, iron, steam - a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements - agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow - not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs - but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he - American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. (Henry Adams)