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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.) 23 1 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 16 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 10 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature 8 0 Browse Search
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches 4 0 Browse Search
Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the story of his life 4 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oldport days, with ten heliotype illustrations from views taken in Newport, R. I., expressly for this work. 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Irene E. Jerome., In a fair country 2 0 Browse Search
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2 2 0 Browse Search
Henry Morton Stanley, Dorothy Stanley, The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley 2 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Ruskin or search for Ruskin in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A plea for culture. (search)
se who give their lives to the intellectual service of America, but there is no cause for fear. If we can only avoid incorporating superficiality into our institutions, literature will come when all is ready, and when it comes will be of the best. It is not enough to make England or France our standard. There is something in the present atmosphere of England which seems fatal to purely literary genius: its fruits do not mature and mellow, but grow more and more acid until they drop. Give Ruskin space enough, and he grows frantic and beats the air like Carlyle. Thackeray was tinged with the same bitterness, but he was the last Englishman who could be said, in any artistic sense, to have a style; as Heine was the last German. The French seems the only prose literature of the present day in which the element of form has any prominent place; and literature in France is after all but a favored slave. This surely leaves a clear field for America. But it is peculiarly important for
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Literature as an art. (search)
But as French painters and actors now habitually surpass all others even in what are claimed as the English - qualities,simplicity and truth,--so do French prose-writers excel. To be set against the brutality of Carlyle and the shrill screams of Ruskin, there is to be seen across the Channel the extraordinary fact of an actual organization of good writers, the French Academy, whose influence all nations feel. Under their authority we see introduced into literary work an habitual grace and perft! How great the power of an habitual understatement, on which in due season one strong thought rises, like an ocean-crest, and breaks, and sweeps onward, lavishing itself in splendor! What a glorious gift of heaven would have been the style of Ruskin, for instance, could he but have contained himself, and put forth only half his strength, instead of always planting, in the words of old Fuller, a piece of ordnance to batter down an aspen-leaf ! It would be hardly safe to illustrate what has
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
rature, and ignoring the magnificent mystery of words. Human language may be polite and prosaic in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables. The statue is not more surely included in the block of marble than is all conceivable splendor of utterance in Worcester's Unabridged. And as Ruskin says of painting that it is in the perfection and precision of the instantaneous line that the claim to immortality is made, so it is easy to see that a phrase may outweigh a library. Keats heads the catalogue of things real with sun, moon, and passages of Shakespeare ; and Keats himself has left behind him winged wonders of expression that were not surpassed by Shakespeare, nor by any one else who ever dared touch the English tongue. There may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, The Greek goddesses. (search)
y highest, it cannot be found in the fallen; and if we must lose either from the temple, we can better spare the suppliant than the goddess. And save in depicting this attribute of humility or contrition, modern literature, at least since Petrarch, seems to me singularly wanting in grand pictures of ideal womanhood. Spenser's impersonations, while pure and high, are vague and impalpable. Shakespeare's women seem at best far inferior, in compass and variety, to Shakespeare's men; and if Ruskin glorifies them sublimely on the one side, Thackeray on the other side professes to find in them the justification of his own. Goethe paints carefully a few varieties, avoiding the largest and noblest types. . Where among all these delineations is there a woman who walks the earth like a goddess? Where is the incessu patuit dea or Homer's di=a gunaikw=n? Among recent writers, George Sand alone has dared even to attempt such a thing; she tries it in Consuelo, and before the divinity has got h