Crotchets in the Air; Or An (un)scientific Account of a Balloon-trip: In a Familiar Letter to a Friend

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H. Colburn, 1838 - Balloon ascensions - 98 pages
 

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Page 3 - Why, thy face is valanced since I saw thee last: com'st thou to beard me in Denmark/— What, my young lady and mistress! By'r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven, than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine.
Page 22 - tis, to cast one's eyes so low! The crows and choughs, that wing the midway air, Show scarce so gross as beetles : Half way down Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade! Methinks, he seems no bigger than his head: The fishermen, that walk upon the beach, Appear like mice; and yon...
Page 27 - ODE TO MESSRS. GREEN, HOLLOND, AND MONCK MASON, ON THEIR LATE BALLOON EXPEDITION. " Here we go up, up, up, — and there we go down, down, downy." — OLD BALLAD. O lofty-minded men ! Almost beyond the pitch of my goose pen ! And most inflated words ! Delicate Ariels ! ethereals ! birds Of passage ! fliers ! angels without wings ! Fortunate rivals of Icarian darings...
Page 16 - I cannot have been deceived," says he ; "I speak from the evidence of my senses, founded upon repetition of the fact. Upon each of the three or four experimental trials of the powers of the balloon to enable the people to glide away from us with safety to themselves — down they all went about thirty feet ! — then, up they came again, and so on. There we sat quietly all the while in our wicker buck-basket, utterly unconscious of motion ; till, at length, Mr. Green snapping a little iron, and thus...
Page 16 - Atropos, cutting the connexion between us with a pair of shears — down it went, with every thing on it ; and your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town (your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call it), having been placed on casters for the occasion — I am satisfied of that — was gently rolled away from under us"* Feeling nothing of the ascending motion, the first iinpresssion that takes possession of you in "going up" in a balloon, is the quietude — -the silence, that grows more and...
Page 15 - I do not despise you," says he, " for talking about a balloon going up, for it is an error which you share in common with some millions of our fellow-creatures ; and I, in the days of my ignorance, thought with the rest of you. I know better now. The fact is, we do not go up at all ; but at about five minutes past six, on the evening of Friday, the 14th of September, 1838 — at about that time, Vauxhall Gardens, with all the people in them, went downi
Page 80 - Presently it re-appeared, and there was seen a momentary sheet of flame. There was a dreadful pause. In a few seconds, the poor creature, enveloped and entangled in the netting of her machine, fell with a frightful crash upon the slanting roof of a house in the Rue de Provence (not a hundred yards from where I was standing), and thence into the street,—and Madame Blanchard was taken up a shattered corpse...
Page 77 - It had already been crippled by the expulsion of some quantity of its breath of life, but it was not a creature to surrender its existence at a blow. Its destruction was a work of time, and, as the work proceeded, it heaved and panted and groaned, till, its throes becoming fainter and fainter, it finally gave up the gas and lay stretched on the earth— as flat as a pancake ! And there's a touch of the sublime for you. And, now, that huge, swollen, and swaggering creature, which had lately astonished...
Page 11 - ... of the natives of the earth by so shabby an attempt. And, last of this category, there are no custom-house officers to search your car, and ask, " What have you got in that bottle ?" But, let me tell you, there is one set-off against these comforts : there are no inns in the whole of that country; so that when what we had
Page 5 - ... of a balloon-trip you must expect from me : — nothing about " Here the barometer fell to — ," " Here the thermometer rose to — ," " Here the mercury stood at — ;" no balloon-jargon, but a plain, surface-of-earth description. So, on to your question. " According to your observations, in what manner, and to what extent, are the interests of science likely to be advanced, and the state of society in general, morally and physically considered (dividing your answer to this portion of the question...

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