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
Charles Sumner 350 0 Browse Search
Ralph Waldo Emerson 210 0 Browse Search
Samuel Longfellow 187 13 Browse Search
John A. Andrew 166 0 Browse Search
Elizur Wright 139 1 Browse Search
Julian Hawthorne 98 0 Browse Search
George L. Stearns 96 0 Browse Search
Abraham Lincoln 94 0 Browse Search
James Russell Lowell 83 1 Browse Search
W. T. G. Morton 74 0 Browse Search
View all entities in this document...

Browsing named entities in a specific section of Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches. Search the whole document.

Found 434 total hits in 126 results.

... 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
1882 AD (search for this): chapter 6
t the Coleridge celebration, in which he levelled an attack on the English canonization of what they call common sense, but which is really a new name for dogmatism. Lowell, if not a transcendentalist, was always an idealist, and he knew that ideality was as necessary to Cromwell and Canning as it was to Shakespeare and Scott. He was certainly more popular in England than he had ever been in America, and he openly admitted that he disliked to resign his position. Professor Child said, in 1882: Lowell's conversation is witty, with a basis of literary cramming; and that seems to be what the English like. He went to twenty-nine dinner parties in the month of June, and made a speech at each one of them. In the last years of his life he was greatly infested with imitators who, as he said of Emerson in the Fable for critics, stole his fruit and then brought it back to him on their own dishes. Some of them were too influential to be easily disposed of, and others did not know when
1843 AD (search for this): chapter 6
y enough. Publishers had not then discovered that what the general public desires is not literature, but information on current topics, and this is the last thing which the true man of letters is able to provide. A magazine article, or a campaign biography of General Grant, could be written in a few weeks, but a solid historical biography of him, with a critical examination of his campaigns, has not yet been written, and perhaps never will be. A literary venture of Lowell and his friends in 1843, to found a first-rate literary magazine, proved a failure; and it is to be feared that he lost money by it. See Scudder's Life of Lowell, III.109. However the world might use him he was sure of comfort and happiness at his own fireside, where he read Shelley, and Keats, and Lessing, while Mrs. Lowell studied upon her German translations. The sympathy of a truehearted woman is always valuable, even when she does not quite understand the grievance in question, but the sympathy that Ma
1847 AD (search for this): chapter 6
a poet. His Emilia Galotti still holds a high position on the German stage and has fine poetic qualities, but it is written in prose. His Nathan the wise was written in verse, but did not prove a success as a drama. In one he attacked the tyranny of the German petty princes, and in the other the intolerance of the Established Church. We may assume that is the reason why Lowell admired them; but Lowell was also too critical and polemic to be wholly a poet,--except on certain occasions. In 1847 he published the Fable for critics, the keenest piece of poetical satire since Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, --keen and even saucy, but perfectly good-humored. About the same time he commenced his Biglow Papers, which did not wholly cease until 1866, and were the most incisive and aggressive anti-slavery literature of that period. Soon afterwards he wrote The vision of Sir Launfal, which has become the most widely known of all his poems, and which contains passages of the pur
1876 AD (search for this): chapter 6
Scudder's biography, II., 186. This was a pretty broad hint, but E. L. Godkin was not the man to pay much attention to the advice of Lowell or anybody. In fact, he seems to have won Lowell over after this to his own way of thinking. Lowell certainly became more conservative with age. He did not support the movement for negro citizenship, and had separated himself in a manner from the other New England poets. After 1872 Longfellow saw little of him, except on state occasions. In 1876 he made a political address that showed that if he had not already gone over to the Democratic party he was very close upon the line. Charles Francis Adams had already gone over to Tilden, and had carried the North American Review with him. It would not do to lose Lowell also, so the Republican leaders hit upon the shrewd device of nominating him as a presidential elector, an honor which he could not very well decline. When the disputed election of Hayes and Tilden came, Godkin proposed tha
1873 AD (search for this): chapter 6
ould be confirmed on account of his transcendental tendencies, and his connection with the Anti-slavery Standard; but Longfellow threw the whole weight of his influence in Lowell's favor, and this would seem to have decided it. From this time till 1873 Lowell was more of a prose-writer than a poet, and his essays on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other English poets are the best of their kind, --not brilliant, but appreciative, penetrating, and well-considered. Wasson said of him that no othat such a critical juncture-when all patriots should have been united-and it offended a good many Republicans without conciliating the opposition. Lowell's successor in this editorial chair was an old Webster Whig who had become a Democrat. In 1873 he resigned his professorship and went to Italy for a holiday. He said to some friends whom he met in Florence: I am tired of being called Professor Lowell, and I want to be plain Mr. Lowell again. Eliot wanted to keep my name on the catalogue f
1838 AD (search for this): chapter 6
, when men who claim To place a Reverend before their name Ascend the Lord's own holy place to preach In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach; And which, if measured by Judge Thatcher's scale, Had doomed their author to the county jail! Alas that Christian ministers should dare To preach the views of Gibbon and Voltaire! To confound the strong spiritual assertion of Emerson with the purely negative attitude of the French satirist was a common mistake in those days, and the Lowell of 1838 needs small excuse for it. He must have been in a biting humor at this time, for there is a cut all round in his class poem, although it is the most vigorous and highly-finished production of his academic years. After college came the law, in which he succeeded as well as youthful attorneys commonly do; and at the age of twenty-five he entered into the holy bonds of matrimony. The union of James Russell Lowell to Maria White, of Watertown, was the most poetic marriage of the nineteenth
1872 AD (search for this): chapter 6
heft. . . . Get one, and the Nation will no longer offend anybody. Scudder's biography, II., 186. This was a pretty broad hint, but E. L. Godkin was not the man to pay much attention to the advice of Lowell or anybody. In fact, he seems to have won Lowell over after this to his own way of thinking. Lowell certainly became more conservative with age. He did not support the movement for negro citizenship, and had separated himself in a manner from the other New England poets. After 1872 Longfellow saw little of him, except on state occasions. In 1876 he made a political address that showed that if he had not already gone over to the Democratic party he was very close upon the line. Charles Francis Adams had already gone over to Tilden, and had carried the North American Review with him. It would not do to lose Lowell also, so the Republican leaders hit upon the shrewd device of nominating him as a presidential elector, an honor which he could not very well decline. When t
1867 AD (search for this): chapter 6
ighteenth century; and in more recent times two members of the family have held the position of judge in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. They are a family of refined intellectual tastes, as well as of good business and professional ability, but of a retiring disposition and not often conspicuous in public life,a family of general good qualities, nicely balanced between liberal and conservative, and with a poetic vein running through it for the past hundred years or more. In the Class of 1867 there was an Edward J. Lowell who was chosen class odist, and who wrote poetry nearly, if not quite, as good as that of his distinguished relative at the same period of life. James Russell Lowell was born at Elmwood, as it is now called, on Washington's birthday in 1819,--as if to make a good staunch patriot of him; and, what is even more exceptional in American life, he lived and died in the same house in which he was born. It was not such a house as the Craigie mansion, but still spacio
June (search for this): chapter 6
ife Lowell thought more of these ten years with Maria White than of the six years when he was Ambassador to England,with twenty-nine dinner-parties in the month of June. What would poets do without war The Trojan war, or some similar conflict, served as the ground-work of Homer's mighty epic; Virgil followed in similar lines; h a large division of Freshmen or Sophomores. Neither did he take much personal interest in his classes. He always invited them to an entertainment at Elmwood in June, but two or three years later he could not remember their faces unless they remained in or about Cambridge. In regard to his efficiency as an instructor and lectuell's conversation is witty, with a basis of literary cramming; and that seems to be what the English like. He went to twenty-nine dinner parties in the month of June, and made a speech at each one of them. In the last years of his life he was greatly infested with imitators who, as he said of Emerson in the Fable for critics
1861 AD (search for this): chapter 6
le profit from the sale of his books during the preceding year was less than a hundred dollars, and he thought there ought to be a law for the protection of authors. The real trouble was hard times. He did not like Madrid, and at the end of a year wrote that it seemed impossible for him to endure the life there any longer. Evarts gave him a vacation, and at the end of the second year Hayes promoted him to the Court of St. James. Such an appointment would have been dangerous enough in 1861, but at the time it was made the relations between the United States and Great Britain were sufficiently peaceable to warrant it. Lowell represented his country in a highly creditable manner. The only difficulty he experienced was with the Fenian agitation, and he managed that with such diplomatic tact that no one has yet been able to discover whether he was in favor of home rule for Ireland or not. He made a number of excellent addresses in England, besides a multitude of after-dinner sp
... 7 8 9 10 11 12 13