hide Matching Documents

Your search returned 201 results in 67 document sections:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Literature as an art. (search)
as the English - qualities,simplicity and truth,--so do French prose-writers excel. To be set against the brutality of Carlyle and the shrill screams of Ruskin, there is to be seen across the Channel the extraordinary fact of an actual organizatiole, as to that of Jean Paul. Such an author may therefore be very useful to a student who can withstand him, which poor Carlyle could not. There was a time, it is said, when English and American literature seemed to be expiring of conventionalism. Carlyle was the Jenner who inoculated and saved us all by this virus from Germany, and then died of his own disease. It is an exciting thing to remember the time when all literature was in the inflammatory stage of this superinduced disorder; but does any one now read Carlyle's French Revolution without a sense of pain? Every year now shows that the whole trick of style with which it was written was false from beginning to end. For surely no style can be permanently attractive that is not s
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
then hate our prison forever. How sparkling was Reade's crisp brilliancy in Peg Woffington! --but into what disagreeable affectations it has since degenerated! Carlyle was a boon to the human race, amid the tameness into which English style was declining; but who is not tired of him and his catchwords now? Now the age has outgrtal vigor of the seventeenth, so that Sir Thomas Browne and Andrew Marvell seem quite as near to us as Pope or Addison,a style penetrated with the best spirit of Carlyle, without a trace of Carlylism. Be neither too lax nor too precise in your use of language: the one fault ends in stiffness, the other in slang. Some one told ericanisms, so they be good ones. American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle, Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary instincts to create the new words it needs. To be sure, the inelegancies with which we are ch
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors, Thoreau. (search)
oundless affluence of external nature. The world of art might also have deeply influenced him, had the way been opened for its closer study. Emerson speaks of the raptures of a citizen arrived at his first meadow; but a deep, ascetic soul like Thoreau's could hardly have failed to be touched to a far profounder emotion by the first sight of a cathedral. The impression that Thoreau was but a minor Emerson will in time pass away, like the early classification of Emerson as a second-hand Carlyle. All three were the children of their time, and had its family likeness; but Thoreau had the lumen siccum, or dry light, beyond either of the others; indeed, beyond all men of his day. His temperament was like his native air in winter,--clear, frosty, inexpressibly pure and bracing. His power of literary appreciation was something marvellous, and his books might well be read for their quotations, like the sermons of Jeremy Taylor. His daring imagination ventured on the delineation of jus
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies, 1837. (search)
ers, of which nobody could ever tell— either then or years afterward—how much was real or how much imaginary. These traits of constitution also made his college life less happy than his childhood; and his distaste to all regular study made him no favorite with the Faculty, though his aims were always high and his morals unstained. He had much facility as a writer and speaker, was a contributor to Harvardiana, and always claimed to have written in that magazine the first American review of Carlyle. His long and rambling autobiography in the Class Book closes with this expression of his purposes at graduation: I shall most probably occupy myself in some literary pursuit in the West for six or seven years to come, and then, unless Heaven shall have given me some other pursuit, I shall return to Cambridge and study for the sacred office. He graduated with his Class in 1837; and a letter which he wrote to the Class Secretary, dated Haverhill, Massachusetts, November 4, 1847, bridges
James Russell Lowell, Among my books, Dante. (search)
ll-directed dawdling of two years, at last ended in his death at Buonconvento (August 24, 1313; Carlyle says wrongly September); poisoned, it was said, in the sacramental bread, by a Dominican friar, bribed thereto by Florence. See Carlyle's Frederic, Vol. I. p. 147. The story is doubtful, the more as Dante nowhere alludes to it, as he certainly would have done had he heard of it. Accordingat was in books, may be justly suspected of not going further, though with Carey to help him. Mr. Carlyle, who has said admirable things of Dante the man, was very imperfectly read in Dante the authorts answer to each other, because pleasure results from their harmony. (Convito, Tr. I. c. 5.) Carlyle says that he knew too, partly, that his work was great, the greatest a man could do. He knew i we pass to another better life after this (Convito, Tr. II. c. 9). It is a fine divination of Carlyle from the Non han speranza di morte that one day it had risen sternly benign in the scathed hear
James Russell Lowell, Among my books, Wordsworth. (search)
in 1797. A very improbable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia Literania represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion of treasonable dealings with the French enemy by their constant references to a certain Spy Nosey. The story at least seems to show how they pronounced the name, which was exactly in accordance with the usage of the last generation in New England. When Emerson visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of Wilhelm Meister, a part of which he had read in Carlyle's translation apparently. There was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of Germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of Goethe. His poem of the Thorn, though vastly more imaginative, may have been suggested by Burger's Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain. The
James Russell Lowell, Among my books, Milton. (search)
great masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his art when he tells us how, in that wonderful scene of the death of Monseigneur, he saw du premier coup d'oeil vivement porte, tout ce qui leur échappoit et tout ce qui les accableroit. It is the gift of producing this reality that almost makes us blush, as if we had been caught peeping through a keyhole, and had surprised secrets to which we had no right,— it is this only that can justify the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle has this power of contemporizing himself with bygone times, he cheats us to Play with our fancies and believe we see; but we find the tableaux vivants of the apprentices who deal in his command without his power, and who compel us to work very hard indeed with our fancies, rather wearisome. The effort of weaker arms to shoot with his mighty bow has filled the air of recent literature with more than enough fruitless twanging. Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes intolerabl
Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 14. (ed. Reverend J. William Jones), Address before the Virginia division of Army of Northern Virginia, at their reunion on the evening of October 21, 1886. (search)
detached volunteer militia companies, the Army of Northern Virginia grew in the course of a year, as it has been said, into the greatest body of infantry the world has ever seen. To revive and catch again to-night if we can, somewhat of the fire and enthusiasm of that time which carried us so hurriedly into its ranks, and somewhat of the devoted patriotism which kept us there so patiently amidst all the sufferings and privations of those four long eventful years. In his essay on Burns, Carlyle thus speaks of the love for his mother-land—Scotland. He says: We hope there is a patriotism founded on something better than prejudice; that our country may be dear to us without injury to our philosophy—that in loving and justly prizing all other lands we may prize justly and yet love before all others our own stern mother-land, and the venerable structure of social and moral life which mind has through all ages been building up for us there. Surely there is nourishment for the bett
Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 17. (ed. Reverend J. William Jones), Life, services and character of Jefferson Davis. (search)
of the Lost Confederacy. Clear and strong in intellect; proud, high-minded, sensitive: self-willed, but not self-centred; self-assertive for his cause, but never for his own advancement; aggressive and imperious, as are nearly all men fit for leadership; with the sturdy virtues that command respect, but without the small diplomacies that conciliate hostility, he was one of those characters that naturally make warm friends and bitter enemies; a veritable man, terribly in earnest, such as Carlyle loved to count among the heroes. Neither selfish, Cold, nor cruel. Such a man can never be understood while strife lasts; and little did they understand him who thought him selfish, cold, or cruel. When he came to Richmond as your President, your generous people gave him a home, and he declined it. After the war, when dependent on his labor for the bread of his family, kind friends tendered him a purse—gracefully refusing, Send it, he said, to the poor and suffering soldiers and thei
Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 18. (ed. Reverend J. William Jones), chapter 3 (search)
ed upon by Major Stringfellow to respond to the toast: In memory of General Lee—great as a man, great as a soldier, and greater still as an exemplar of Christian life. The Doctor said he would reply by telling what his friend, Major (now Dr.) Smith, was too modest to relate. That was that after General Jackson was wounded that Major Smith shifted his own body so as to put it between the wounded General and the men who were firing on him. As to the toast, he could say, in the words of Carlyle, who was not a parson, that a man's religion is his chief part and turns all the rest. The Doctor said that in point of service he was the oldest man in the regiment, and that counting by seniority he was entitled to ride five yards in front of Colonel Jones. Referring to the governor's fifty-year prophecy, he said that at the end of that time Norfolk would be a Liverpool, Lynchburg an Edinboroa, Richmond a Paris, and Farmville a London. The Doctor concluded by comparing Lee's memo
1 2 3 4 5 6 7