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Knight's Mechanical Encyclopedia (ed. Knight) 32 0 Browse Search
Margaret Fuller, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (ed. W. H. Channing) 24 0 Browse Search
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2 24 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 22 0 Browse Search
James Russell Lowell, Among my books 20 0 Browse Search
Laura E. Richards, Maud Howe, Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, in two volumes, with portraits and other illustrations: volume 1 14 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 12 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 12 0 Browse Search
Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 2 10 0 Browse Search
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 10 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Plato or search for Plato in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A plea for culture. (search)
will go still further, and with especial reference to that which there is most disposition to banish from use, the Greek. It certainly is not a hasty or boyish judgment on my part, nor yet one in which pedantry or servility can have much to do, when I deliberately avow the belief that the Greek literature is still so entirely unequalled among the accumulated memorials of the world, that it seems to differ from all others in kind rather than in degree. In writing this, I am thinking less of Plato than of Homer, and not more of Homer than of the dramatic and lyric poets. So far from the knowledge of other literatures tending to depreciate the Greek, it seems to me that no one can adequately value this who has not come back to it after long study of the others. Ampere, that master of French prose, has hardly overstated the truth when he says that the man best versed in all other books must say, after all, in returning to a volume of Homer or Sophocles,--Here is beauty, true and sove
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
ies eternal. Yesterday I turned from treatises on gunnery and fortification to open Milton's Latin Poems, which I had never read, and there, in the Sylvarum Liber, I came upon a passage as grand as anything in Paradise lost, --his description of Plato's archetypal man, the vast ideal of the human race, eternal, incorrupt, coeval with the stars, dwelling either in the sidereal spaces, or among the Lethean mansions of souls unborn, or pacing the unexplored confines of the habitable globe. Thereet's own sylvan groves had been suddenly cut down, and opened a view of Olympus. Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and diplomacy ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there seemed nothing real in the universe but Plato's archetypal man. Indeed, it is the same with all contemporary notorieties. In all free governments, especially, it is the habit to overrate the dramatisatis personae of the hour. How empty to us are now the names of the great American polit
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, The Greek goddesses. (search)
, but degrades her into a French lorette, and fills storybooks with her levities. How unlike this are the conceptions of Plato, whose philosophy has been called a mediation of love. Love, according to him, first taught the arts to mankind,--arts ouch in the more serious Greek literature which may be quoted to sustain this assertion. There is a remarkable passage of Plato, in which he says that children may find comedy more agreeable, but educated women ai(/ te pepaideume/nai tw=n gunaikw=n,--rendered by Ficinus mulieres eruditae. Plato, de Leg., Book II. p. 791, ed. 1602. Compare Book VII. p. 898, same edition. and youths and the majority of mankind prefer tragedy. This distinctly recognizes intellectual culture as an element in out. And if, following Ben Jonson, we wish to know what man can say in a little, we must seek it in such poems as this by Plato, preserved in the Anthology:-- My star, upon the stars thou gazest. Would that I were heaven, that on thee I might lo
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Sappho. (search)
arly lose much from history by ignoring all the execution done by small brunettes. The Greek Anthology describes her as the pride of the lovely-haired Lesbianis ; Plato calls her the beautiful Sappho or the fair Sappho, *sapfou=s th=s kalh=s. Phaedr. 24. Homer celebrates the beauty of the Lesbian women in his day. Iliad, 9.129,on that the recitation of one of her poems so affected the great lawgiver Solon, that he expressed the wish that he might not die till he had learned it by heart. Plato called her the tenth Muse. Others described her as uniting in herself the qualities of Muse and Aphrodite; and others again as the joint foster-child of Aphrodite pointed the way to the solution,--to create a civilization where the highest culture shall be extended to woman also. It is not enough that we should dream, with Plato, of a republic where man is free and woman but a serf. The aspirations of modern life culminate, like the greatest of modern poems, in the elevation of womanhood.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, On an old Latin text-book. (search)
y, and demand only that, like the barbaric hatchet, it shall bring down its man? In America, this tendency is only dawning; while Emerson lives, it will be still believed that literature means form as well as matter. But no one can talk with the pupils of our new technological schools, without seeing that, in surrendering books like my old Latin text-book, it is in fact literature that they renounce. They speak as impatiently of the hours wasted on Paradise Lost as if they were given to Plato. Even at our oldest University, the department of Rhetoric and oratory came so near to extinction that it only got a reprieve on the very scaffold, at the intercession of some of the older graduates. To pursue literature per se has become almost a badge of reproach in quarters where what is sometimes called the new education prevails. Now there is no danger, in these exciting Darwinian days, that any one will disregard the study of natural science; but when one sees how desperately it som