American Literature (5)

• The university motto

 Harvard University ──Veritas(拉丁文─真理)   

 National Hsinchu University of Education──

	博雅弘達

 National Taipei University of Education──

 TO LOVE TO ACT (親愛篤行)

•  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow(1807-1882)

1. ''Paul Revere's Ride''
2. ''A Psalm of Life''

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
     And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
     Funeral marches to the grave.

•  Henry David Thoreau ( 1817 – 1862) 

was an American author, poet, philosopher, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

•  Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was a religious and philosophical movement that was developed during the late 1820s and 1830s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society.Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both people and nature.
Transcendentalists believed ：
They had faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. 

•  Walden

1.  I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
2. Thoreau insists on telling us that his Walden project is not a life decision or a commitment to a set of ideals, but an experiment in alternative living that is unambiguously amateurish. It is more like casual play than like solemn ideology. This informality explains why, when he leaves Walden Pond in 1847, Thoreau does not admit failure; rather, he says simply that he has other lives to live. Having learned the lessons that Walden Pond had to offer him, he turned to other scenes and other occupations, thus proving rather than undercutting his philosophy of life.

     Hamlet:
                    —Frailty, thy name is woman!—
                                                        Hamlet Act 1, scene 2, 142–146

• "O Captain! My Captain!" 

"O Captain! My Captain!" is a poem written by Walt Whitman in 1865. The poem is classified as an elegy because it is a mourning poem that was written in the memory of someone. The poem was written to honor Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. 

• 推薦電影： 2012

• 三大電子書網站： Gutenberg/Barleby.com/University of Virginia Library

• Vocabulary