hide Sorting

You can sort these results in two ways:

By entity
Chronological order for dates, alphabetical order for places and people.
By position (current method)
As the entities appear in the document.

You are currently sorting in ascending order. Sort in descending order.

hide Most Frequent Entities

The entities that appear most frequently in this document are shown below.

Entity Max. Freq Min. Freq
Europe 76 0 Browse Search
Americans 44 0 Browse Search
Lowell 41 5 Browse Search
United States (United States) 36 0 Browse Search
1896 AD 32 32 Browse Search
Walter Scott 32 2 Browse Search
Emerson 26 0 Browse Search
America (Netherlands) 26 0 Browse Search
Matthew Arnold 22 0 Browse Search
Shelley 21 1 Browse Search
View all entities in this document...

Browsing named entities in a specific section of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life. Search the whole document.

Found 47 total hits in 31 results.

1 2 3 4
Forum (Arkansas, United States) (search for this): chapter 4
were not carried in the procession: Eo magis praefulgebant quia non visebantur; or, as Emerson yet more tersely translates it, They glared through their absences. It would be easy to multiply testimonies from high scientific authority to this limitation and narrowing of the purely scientific mind. One such recent testimony may be found in an important report of the head of the chemical department of Harvard University, Prof. Josiah P. Cooke; and another in that very remarkable paper in the Forum entitled The education of the future, by a man who singularly combines within himself the scientific and literary gifts-Clarence King, formerly Director of the United States Geological Survey. After weighing more skilfully than I have ever seen it done elsewhere the strength and weakness of the literary or classical training of the past, he thus deals with the other side: With all its novel powers and practical sense, I am obliged to admit that the purely scientific brain is miserably mech
United States (United States) (search for this): chapter 4
d be easy to multiply testimonies from high scientific authority to this limitation and narrowing of the purely scientific mind. One such recent testimony may be found in an important report of the head of the chemical department of Harvard University, Prof. Josiah P. Cooke; and another in that very remarkable paper in the Forum entitled The education of the future, by a man who singularly combines within himself the scientific and literary gifts-Clarence King, formerly Director of the United States Geological Survey. After weighing more skilfully than I have ever seen it done elsewhere the strength and weakness of the literary or classical training of the past, he thus deals with the other side: With all its novel powers and practical sense, I am obliged to admit that the purely scientific brain is miserably mechanical; it seems to have become a splendid sort of self-directed machine, an incredible automaton, grinding on with its analyses or constructions. But for pure sentiment,
Aeschylus (search for this): chapter 4
not until the people got ready to ride that steeds swifter than the wind and stronger than the storm were harnessed in, and glittering bands of steel were spread in twin extension across the continent, that the carriages which bore the people might not swerve from their triumphant way. Two hundred years ago, if a king wished to convey to a distance the news of war or peace, or of the birth of an heir, he could do it best by lighting vast bonfires on successive hills, as in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus (toioi/de lampadhfo/rwn no/moi), until the tale was told. It was not until the people became as important as princes that all these lavish and clumsy fires were condensed into one little electric spark; and wires covered the land in a network of tracery, or sank below the ocean, that the humblest of the nation could telegraph to other lands and climes the news of war and peace in his household, or the birth of an heir to his modest throne. Nay, even while we dwell on these achieved wond
Mozart (search for this): chapter 4
of what he proposed writing. These observations, he says, arise from an Ode to Light with which I am now busy. I have as yet no idea what the poem will be, but a presentiment; and yet I can promise beforehand that it will be successful. Corresp. of Schiller and Korner, II. 173. So similar are the laws of all production in the imaginative arts that we need only to turn to a great musician's description of the birth of music to find something almost precisely parallel. In a letter from Mozart, lately condensed by Professor Royce The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 456. : he writes: My ideas come as they will, I don't know how, in a stream.... If I can hold on to them, they begin to join on to one another, as if they were bits that a pastry cook should join on in his pantry. And now my soul gets heated, and if nothing disturbs me the piece grows larger and brighter, until, however long it is, it is all finished at once, so that I can see it at a glance. In both arts, therefore
Lewis G. Janes (search for this): chapter 4
those of a layman only. There is unquestionably much in common between the poetic impulse, the impulse of religious emotion, and the ethical or moral instinct, if instinct it be. So plain is this, that the mere attempt to recognize in either of these anything outside of science is met at the outset with suspicion by those who have risked their all on the faith that science includes all. This was strikingly seen, for instance, in the Brooklyn Ethical Association, the other day, when Dr. Lewis G. Janes, in a valuable address on Life as a fine art, had allowed himself to say that the art-impulse, spontaneous, vital, creative, breaks through the bonds of constraining legalism and restores the soul to freedom. He was at once taken to task by his stricter associates, and was assured that this was by no means psychological science or evolution, but that he had given poetry and rhetoric in the place of cold facts and scientific deductions. Brooklyn Ethical Association, Essays on Evolu
Bentham (search for this): chapter 4
ts place there also. At present, as we know, the followers of Herbert Spencer claim to have utterly captured, measured, and solved it from the point of view of science; and they dismiss the whole conception of Intuitive Morals as completely as Bentham thought he had annihilated the word ought, when he said frankly fifty years ago that it was meaningless, and should be expunged from the English language, or at least from the vocabulary of morals. The talisman of arrogance, indolence, and ignoought not, as circumstances may be. In deciding You ought to do this, You ought not to do it, is not every question of knowledge set at rest? If the use of the word be admissible at all, it ought to be banished from the vocabulary of morals. Bentham's Deontology, i. 31, 32. It is claimed by Mr. Spencer's ablest American advocate that the moral sense is not ultimate, but derivative, and that it has been built up out of slowly organized experiences of pleasure or pain. Mr. John Fiske, in E
Shakespeare (search for this): chapter 4
at its highest point. Up to the age of thirty, Darwin tells us, he took intense delight in poetry --Milton, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Shelley-while he read Shakespeare with supreme enjoyment. Pictures and music also gave him much pleasure. But at sixty-seven he writes that for many years he cannot endure to read a line of poetry ; that he has lately tried Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated him; and that he has almost lost all taste for pictures and music. This he records, not with satisfaction, but with great regret ; I. e, by his son, Am. ed. pp. 30, 81. he would gladly have it otherwise, but cannot. It is simply ty the mere force of patient will. Keats, in one of his fine letters, classifies the universe, and begins boldly with things real, as sun, moon, and passages of Shakespeare. Sun and moon lie within the domain of science; and at this moment the astronomers are following out that extraordinary discovery which has revealed in the bri
Herbert Spencer (search for this): chapter 4
arnest? If the devout impulse thus takes its place with the poetic, in a world outside of science, the question must inevitably follow, whether the ethical emotion is to take its place there also. At present, as we know, the followers of Herbert Spencer claim to have utterly captured, measured, and solved it from the point of view of science; and they dismiss the whole conception of Intuitive Morals as completely as Bentham thought he had annihilated the word ought, when he said frankly fi ought to do this, You ought not to do it, is not every question of knowledge set at rest? If the use of the word be admissible at all, it ought to be banished from the vocabulary of morals. Bentham's Deontology, i. 31, 32. It is claimed by Mr. Spencer's ablest American advocate that the moral sense is not ultimate, but derivative, and that it has been built up out of slowly organized experiences of pleasure or pain. Mr. John Fiske, in Essays of Brooklyn Ethical Society, p. 94. But if no
Korner (search for this): chapter 4
or of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Defense of poetry, Essays and Letters, Am. ed. i. 56. In the same way Schiller wrote to Korner that what impressed him when he sat down to write was usually some single impulse or harmonious tone, and not any clear notion of what he proposed writing. These observations, he says, arise from an Ode to Light with which I am now busy. I have as yet no idea what the poem will be, but a presentiment; and yet I can promise beforehand that it will be successful. Corresp. of Schiller and Korner, II. 173. So similar are the laws of all production in the imaginative arts that we need only to turn to a great musician's description of the birth of music to find something almost precisely parallel. In a letter from Mozart, lately condensed by Professor Royce The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 456. : he writes: My ideas come as they
Thoreau (search for this): chapter 4
ing round each other and influencing each other's motions, and this at a distance so great that the rays of light which reveal them left their home nearly fifty years ago. The imagination is paralyzed before a step so vast; yet it all lies within the domain of science, while science can tell us no more how Macbeth or Hamlet came into existence than if the new astronomy had never been born. It is as true of the poem as of the poet--Nascitur non fit. We cannot even define what poetry is; and Thoreau says that there never yet was a definition of it so good but the poet would proceed to disregard it by setting aside all its requisitions. Shelley says that a man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The greatest poet even cannot say it, for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the consci
1 2 3 4