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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 2: a Keats manuscript (search)
Chapter 2: a Keats manuscript Touch it, said Leigh Hunt when he showed Bayard Taylor a lock of brown silky hair, and you will have touched Milton's self. The magic of the lock of hair is akin to that recognized by nomadic and untamed races in anything that has been worn close to the person of a great or fortunate being. Mr. Leland, much reverenced by the gypsies, whose language he speaks and whose lore he knows better than they know it, had a knife about his person which was supposed by them to secure the granting of any request if held in the hand. When he gave it away, it was like the transfer of fairy power to the happy recipient. The same lucky spell is attributed to a piece from the bride's garter, in Normandy, or to pins filched from her dress, in Sussex. For those more cultivated, the charm of this transmitted personality is best embodied in autographs, and the more unstudied and unpremeditated the better. In the case of a poet, nothing can be compared with the inte
Charles E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her letters and journals by her son Charles Edward Stowe, Chapter 8: first trip to Europe, 1853. (search)
d would help me till I got through, and still I am pressed beyond measure and above strength. This horror, this nightmare abomination! can it be in my country! It lies like lead on my heart, it shadows my life with sorrow; the more so that I feel, as for my own brothers, for the South, and am pained by every horror I am obliged to write, as one who is forced by some awful oath to disclose in court some family disgrace. Many times I have thought that I must die, and yet I pray God that I may live to see something done. I shall in all probability be in London in May: shall I see you? It seems to me so odd and dream-like that so many persons desire to see me, and now I cannot help thinking that they will think, when they do, that God hath chosen the weak things of this world. If I live till spring I shall hope to see Shakespeare's grave, and Milton's mulberry-tree, and the good land of my fathers,--old, old England! May that day come! Yours affectionately, H. B. Stowe.
Charles E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her letters and journals by her son Charles Edward Stowe, Chapter 13: old scenes revisited, 1856. (search)
lava came over and fell at our feet, and a gentleman lighted his cigar at it. All around where we stood the smoke was issuing from every chance rent and fissure of the rock, and the Neapolitans who crowded round us were every moment soliciting us to let them cook us an egg in one of these rifts, and, overcome by persuasion, I did so, and found it very nicely boiled, or rather steamed, though the shell tasted of Glauber's salt and sulphur. The whole place recalled to my mind so vividly Milton's description of the infernal regions, that I could not but believe that he had drawn the imagery from this source. Milton, as we all know, was some time in Italy, and, although I do not recollect any account of his visiting Vesuvius, I cannot think how he should have shaped his language so coincidently to the phenomena if he had not. On the way down the mountain our ladies astonished the natives by making an express stipulation that our donkeys were not to be beaten,--why, they could n
Charles E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her letters and journals by her son Charles Edward Stowe, Index. (search)
married life and housekeeping, 89; on birth of her son, 101; describing first railroad ride, 106; on her children, 119; her letter to Mrs. Foote, grandmother of H. B. S., 38; letters to H. B. S. from, 161, 268. Mayflower, the, 103, 158; revised and republished, 251; date of, 490. Melancholy, 118, 341; a characteristic of Prof. Stowe in childhood, 436. Men of Our Times, date of, 410. Middlemarch, H. B. S. wishes to read, 468; character of Casaubon in, 471. Milman, Dean, 234. Milton's hell, 303. Minister's Wooing, the, soul struggles of Mrs. Marvyn, foundation of incident, 25; idea of God in, 29; impulse for writing, 52; appears in Atlantic monthly, 326; Lowell, J. R. on, 327, 330, 333; Whittier on, 327; completed, 332; Ruskin on, 336; undertone of pathos, 339; visits England in relation to, 343; date of, 490; reveals warm heart of man beneath the Puritan in Whittier's poem, 502. Missouri Compromise, 142, 257; repealed, 379. Mohl, Madame, and her salon, 2
C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874., Section tenth: downfall of the Rebellion. (search)
strengthened by its shadow, so all defeats in a good cause are but resting-places on the road to victory at last. He spoke of the patchwork Empire of Germany, of Bismarck, and Della Marmora—of truth, stranger than fiction, viz., of the Italian statesman's assertion of Bismarck's offer to cede France a portion of German territory —of the impolicy of the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine—of the differences with the Catholic Church, the imprisonment of her prelates—and then, taking a volume of Milton, he read, in deep, rich tones of tender melody, his famous sonnet upon the persecution of the Waldenses during Cromwell's protectorate. In closing, he added: Thus history revenges herself. About this time his evening mail was brought; whenever he came to one interesting note or letter he would look it over and then hand it to me to read. * * * The next letter was from Philadelphia, an anonymous attack of the bitterest description, impugning his motives concerning his speech on the Inter
C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874., Xxiv. (search)
strengthened by its shadow, so all defeats in a good cause are but resting-places on the road to victory at last. He spoke of the patchwork Empire of Germany, of Bismarck, and Della Marmora—of truth, stranger than fiction, viz., of the Italian statesman's assertion of Bismarck's offer to cede France a portion of German territory —of the impolicy of the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine—of the differences with the Catholic Church, the imprisonment of her prelates—and then, taking a volume of Milton, he read, in deep, rich tones of tender melody, his famous sonnet upon the persecution of the Waldenses during Cromwell's protectorate. In closing, he added: Thus history revenges herself. About this time his evening mail was brought; whenever he came to one interesting note or letter he would look it over and then hand it to me to read. * * * The next letter was from Philadelphia, an anonymous attack of the bitterest description, impugning his motives concerning his speech on the Inter
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.), Preface (search)
What was demanded early in the nineteenth century of the adolescent nation was an indigenous independent national literature. The wrong answer to this demand was given by the enthusiastic patriots who, after the Revolution, advocated the abrogation of English in these States and the invention and adoption of a new language; or compiled, to silence their skeptical English cousins, pretentious anthologies of all our village elegists; or offered Dwight's Conquest of Canaan as an equivalent to Milton's Paradise lost, Barlow's Columbiad as an imposing national epic, Lathrop's poem on the sachem of the Narragansett Indians, The speech of Caunonicus, as heralding the dawn of a genuinely native school of poetry. Our pioneer historian Knapp discreetly hesitates to say whether she of the banks of the Connecticut [Mrs. Sigourney], whose strains of poetic thought are as pure and lovely as the adjacent wave touched by the sanctity of a Sabbath's morn, be equal to her tuneful sisters, Hemans and
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.), Chapter 9: the beginnings of verse, 1610-1808 (search)
pieces paraphrases from the Bible, translations from Horace, and half a dozen elegies, including one on Cotton Mather and one on Jane Turell. All these are written in the heroic couplet but in a diction more natural than Pope's. That Adams knew Milton's poems is apparent in his Address to the Supreme being. Indeed these poems, though pervaded by the Puritan spirit, yet reveal a more purely aesthetic purpose and a more careful style than can generally be found before the later years of the cenhes as For ages blest thus Britain rose The terror of encircling foes; Her heroes ruled the bloody plain; Her conq'ring standard aw'd the main, as also for the use of personifications and of the terrible: Around all stained with rebel blood, Like Milton's lazar house it stood, Where grim Despair attended nurse, And Death was gov'rnor of the house. For all its indebtednesses McFingal remains the most entertaining satire in our early literature, and the only surviving poem by any member of the
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.), Chapter 5: Bryant and the minor poets (search)
is tautology to say that a poet treats a sublime idea sublimely — for it is the sublimity in the treatment that makes us realize the sublimity of the idea. We can at most conceive a poet's style as a whole; as, along with his individual world of meditation and vision, another phase of his creative power — as his creation of music. Possibly it is the deepest and most wonderful of the poet's creations, transcending its manifestation in connection with any single poem. Perhaps, for instance, Milton's greatest creative act was not Lycidas, or the Sonnets, or Paradise lost, but that music we call Miltonic. Certainly this is the more true the more organic the style is; and, as said before, Bryant's style was highly organic. An astute and sympathetic mind who might never have seen a verse of Bryant's could deduce that style from what has been said in this chapter — if what has been said has been correctly said. Such a mind would not need to be told that Bryant's diction was severe, si<
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1, chapter 8 (search)
al life under any government, but especially under ours; and we are surprised at it in these men, only because we fondly hoped they would be exceptions to the general rule. It was Chamfort, I think, who first likened a republican senate-house to Milton's Pandemonium;--another proof of the rare insight French writers have shown in criticising republican institutions. The Capitol at Washington always brings to my mind that other Capitol, which in Milton's great epic rose like an exhalation from Milton's great epic rose like an exhalation from the burning marl, -- that towering palace, with starry lamps and blazing cressets hung,--with roof of fretted gold and stately height, its hall like a covered field. You remember, Sir, the host of archangels gathered round it, and how thick the airy crowd Swarmed and were straitened; till, the signal given, Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that pygmean race Beyond the Ind
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