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Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 15 1 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 5 1 Browse Search
Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the story of his life 4 0 Browse Search
Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing) 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge 2 2 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Edward Channing or search for Edward Channing in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Americanism in literature. (search)
ruth. It is easier to excuse a thousand defects in the literary man who proceeds on this faith, than to forgive the one great defect of imitation in the purist who seeks only to be English. As Wasson has said, The Englishman is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present? We must pardon something to the spirit of liberty. We must run some risks, as all immature creatures do, in the effort to use our own limbs. Professor Edward Channing used to say that it was a bad sign for a college boy to write too well; there should be exuberances and inequalities. A nation which has but just begun to create a literature must sow some wild oats. The most tiresome vaingloriousness may be more hopeful than hypercriticism and spleen. The follies of the absurdest spread-eagle orator may be far more promising, because they smack more of the soil, than the neat Londonism of the city editor who dissects him. It is but a few yea
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
ceive why there should be so much fuss about it. The piece, you think, is incorrect; why, take it; I m all submission; what you d have it, make it. But to discharge that friendly office no universal genius is salaried; and for intellect in the rough there is no market. Rules for style, as for manners, must be chiefly negative: a positively good style indicates certain natural powers in the individual, but a merely unexceptionable style is only a matter of culture and good models. Dr. Channing established in New England a standard of style which really attained almost the perfection of the pure and the colorless, and the disciplinary value of such a literary influence, in a raw and crude nation, has been very great; but the defect of this standard is that it ends in utterly renouncing all the great traditions of literature, and ignoring the magnificent mystery of words. Human language may be polite and prosaic in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the high tho
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Ought women to learn the alphabet? (search)
s is like the man who puts on rouge, ridiculous. Voltaire said, Ideas are like beards: women and young men have none. And witty Dr. Maginn carries to its extreme the atrocity: We like to hear a few words of sense from a woman, as we do from a parrot, because they are so unexpected. Yet how can we wonder at these opinions, when the saints have been severer than the sages?--since the pious Fenelon taught that true virgin delicacy was almost as incompatible with learning as with vice; and Dr. Channing complained, in his Essay on exclusion and Denunciation, of women forgetting the tenderness of their sex, and arguing on theology. Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but it obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it assumes. If contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates it. Systematically discourage any individual, or class, from birth to death, and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their degradation, i