Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life. You can also browse the collection for America (Illinois, United States) or search for America (Illinois, United States) in all documents.

Your search returned 5 results in 3 document sections:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 6: Lowell's closing years in Cambridge (search)
to sheer quantity, of course London was overpowering; it was like going from a small preparatory school to Oxford; but, after all, a man usually finds, in looking back, that his own schoolmates afforded him a microcosm of the world. Lowell, fortunately, lived to refute very promptly the ignorant pity bestowed upon him in advance by Matthew Arnold, for returning home, after the intoxication of his life in England, to live in Elmwood. Mr. Arnold never in his life had one glimpse of what America is to an American; and those who best knew Lowell had no such fear as this. The first pang over, created by the return to his changed home, and he slipped into his old associations as easily as into a familiar garment. Never was he more delightful than in those later fireside years, even when the fireside had come to be a part of a sick-room. Indeed, he was more agreeable than ever before; his habit of mind was more genial; he was less imperious, more moderate in his judgments — in short
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 22: more mingled races (search)
arrival was to dig himself an earthen shanty, and live in it? Who that sees the equally prosperous French Canadian congregations pouring out of the great Roman Catholic churches of Fall River, Massachusetts, or Woonsocket, Rhode Island, can recall the Canadian families that used to cross the frontier forty or fifty years ago — a man, a woman, twelve children, and a large bundle? Each of those early migrations was a step in progress; as De Tocqueville pointed out in his day, a log hut in America was not a home, but a halting-place on the way to something better. Each type of new arrivals brought qualities of its own; the French Canadian was less energetic than the Irish, but less turbulent; the Irish more original and aggressive, but less temperate. All our Civil War scarcely brought to light such a phenomenon as an Irish coward; but when it came to the statistics of the guard-house the report was less favorable. We err in assuming that any one race monopolizes all the virtues
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 30: our criticism of foreign visitors (search)
rm that older and newer communities come to be more on an equality. We go to England to hear Shakespeare's lark sing at heaven's gate; and Thomas Hughes came to America to hear Lowell's bobolink. These ties again are formed very slowly, and the colonial spirit still lingers so much among us that a very little English reputation anc, whose book on The Condition of Women in the United States justly criticises American women as knowing little of the history of any country except England and America, has been herself reproved for the amount and variety of knowledge which she has crowded into these brief essays. We have probably never had such good criticismshe does not applaud the architecture and decoration of the Woman's Building at Chicago, and fearlessly points out that manner is far less important than matter in America, even in the eyes of those who call themselves artists. Yet she is spoken of by some leading journals as if she were a mere commonplace gossip, without earnestne