hide Matching Documents

The documents where this entity occurs most often are shown below. Click on a document to open it.

Document Max. Freq Min. Freq
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life 4 0 Browse Search
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 2 0 Browse Search
View all matching documents...

Your search returned 6 results in 3 document sections:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 10: Favorites of a day (search)
while the Englishman is glad of the money, but cares little for the criticism, since he rarely sees it. What is hard for authors, foreign or native, to understand is that fame is apt to be most transitory where it is readiest, and that they should make hay while the sun shines. A year ago the bookseller's monthly returns, as seen in The Bookman and elsewhere, gave the leadership in the sales of every American city to English or Scotch books; now one sees the recent American tales by Hopkinson Smith or Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, for example, leading in every town. There is no deep national principle involved-only a casual change, like that which takes athletic prizes for a few years from one college and gives them to another. Novels and even whole schools of fiction emerge and disappear like the flash or darkening of a revolving light in a light-house; you must use the glimpse while you have it. The highways of literature are spread over, says Holmes, with the shells of
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 32: the disappearance of ennui (search)
not ennui, but nervous prostration. It may be no better; it may even be worse; but it is a different thing. When we think to escape Puritanism into the realms of fashion it is no better. Our civilization is not yet thoroughly adjusted for idle people; the wheels are not oiled; domestic service alone is a perpetual conflict. It is only in Europe that one has leisure for ennui. The situation which made until recently the staple of English novels was that which Mrs. Walford's story of Mr. Smith represents-that of a comfortably provided family, where half a dozen maidens toil not, neither do they spin, but simply sit all day looking out of the window, watching for some rich stranger to come and marry them. This dreary condition finds as yet no counterpart in America. The great success of Little Women in England was largely due, no doubt, to the novelty of the situation there rendered — the family of maidens, all poor, all busy, all happy, and all content to wait to be wooed and
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 10: a New nation (search)
omance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating Old Creole days, was recognized, not as something merely provincial in its significance, but as contributing to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life. Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in verse and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern negro, a type hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers. Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and the honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today. Miss Murfree ( C. E. Craddock ) charmed city-dwellers and country-folk alike by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted lovingly the hemp-