牢门
新殖民地的创建者，无论当初他们可能怎样计划着人类理想的美德和幸福的生活，可是从最初的实际需要出发，他们总是坚定不移地把一部分处女地划作墓地，而将另一部分留作监狱的地基。事实就是这样：在这个城镇建立约十五年或二十年后，这座木建监狱已烙上了风雨毁坏和经岁月磨损的其他印记，使它的外观显得更加阴暗，看起来令人沮丧和讨厌。那栋大木门粗糙铁器上的锈垢比这新世界上任何别的东西都显得古老陈旧。像一切事情起因于原罪一样，它似乎从未有过青年时代。在这座难看的建筑物前面，在它与，街心车辙之间有一片野草疯长的绿地。这片绿地同这块土地上的有些东西明显地友好融合，互相辉映；因为在这块土地上很早就产生了文明社会的黑色之花——监狱。而在入口门道的一边，生长着一排野玫瑰，几乎一直延伸到门槛边上。在六月的阳光下，争妍斗艳，目炫心招，撩人遐想，仿佛它们的迷人芳香和纤巧柔媚就是奉献给锒铛入狱的罪犯和跨出牢门、走向刑场的死囚，以表示大自然从内心深处对他们的怜悯和仁慈。
由于某种奇妙的机缘，这排野玫瑰饱受历史风雨而能保持活力；是否仅仅是因为原先遮蔽它的巨大松树和橡树早已倒下，使它能从古老严峻的荒野中幸存下来7我们不敢妄下结论。
既然发现就在我们即将叙述的故事的忧郁入口处，我们忍不住摘下它的一朵鲜花献给各位读者。
我们希望：它能象征我们人生艰难旅程中所能发现的甜蜜的道德之花；或者也指望由它来缓解和安慰：在读完这个讲述人性脆弱和悲哀的故事的不幸结局后的伤心。
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia virtue
andhappiness they might originally project, have invariably recognizedit among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of thevirgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of aprison. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after thesettlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked withweather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yetdarker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust onthe heavy metal parts of its oaken door looked more antique thananything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this uglybuilding, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grassplot, much overgrown with weeds, which evidently found something friendly in the soil that had so early borne the blackflower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the doorway, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with flowers, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, a, token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
This rose bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wild, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally grown over it we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, whichis now about to issue from that gloomy entrance, we could hardlydo otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to thereader.
It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet
moralblossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve thedarkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
展开
英语界名人、名家论阅读。
光学几句干巴巴的英文不行，……不要总是把阅读的目的放在提高英文上，阅读首先是吸收知识，吸收知识的过程中自然而然就吸收了语言。
——许国璋
用英文思维是许多英语学习者都希望达到的一种境界，因为这是用英语流畅地表达思想的基础。对于一个生活在非英语环境中的中国学生来说，要做到部分或全部用英文来思考确有很大难度，但也不是可望而不可及。从自己学习英语的经历中，我体会到坚持大量阅读是实现这一目标最有效的途径之一。
——何其莘（北京外国语大学副