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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 36 0 Browse Search
Knight's Mechanical Encyclopedia (ed. Knight) 36 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life 26 0 Browse Search
Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Documents and Narratives, Volume 10. (ed. Frank Moore) 19 1 Browse Search
James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen 17 3 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors 17 1 Browse Search
Historic leaves, volume 5, April, 1906 - January, 1907 14 0 Browse Search
John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana 13 5 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Irene E. Jerome., In a fair country 12 0 Browse Search
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2 10 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life. You can also browse the collection for Emerson or search for Emerson in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 1: discontinuance of the guide-board (search)
eneral tendency of modern literature to do without external aids to make its meaning clear. There is undoubtedly a tendency to rely more and more upon what has been well called the presumption of brains in the reader. Note, for instance, the steady disappearance of the italic letter from the printed page. Once used as freely as in an epistle from one of Thackeray's fine ladies, it is now employed by careful writers almost wholly to indicate foreign words or book titles; a change in which Emerson and Hawthorne were conspicuous leaders. There is a feeling that only a very crude literary art will now depend on typography for shades of meaning which should be rendered by the very structure of the sentence. The same fate of banishment is overtaking the exclamation-point, so long used by poets-conspicuously by Whittier — as a note of admiration also. Here, too, as in the other case, the emphasis is now left to render itself; and even the last verse of the poem, which often — to cite W
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 4: a world outside of science (search)
ength he revolutionized the world of science. By his weakness he gave evidence that there is a world outside of science. We cannot, on the one side, deny that Darwin represented the highest type of scientific mind. Nor can we, on the other, deny the value and validity of what he ignored. Of the studies that became extinguished in him, we can say, as Tacitus said when the images of Brutus and Cassius 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 t
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 5: a bit of war photography (search)
er 5: a bit of war photography After the applause won by Mr. Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, a little reaction is not strange; and this has already taken, in some quarters, a form quite unjust and unfair. Certainly any one who spent so much as a week or two in camp, thirty years ago, must be struck with the extraordinary freshness and vigor of the book. No one except Tolstoi, within my knowledge, has brought out the daily life of war so well; it may be said of these sentences, in Emerson's phrase, Cut these and they bleed. The breathlessness, the hurry, the confusion, the seeming aimlessness, as of a whole family of disturbed ants, running to and fro, yet somehow accomplishing something at last; all these aspects, which might seem the most elementary and the easiest to depict, are yet those surest to be omitted, not merely by the novelists, but by the regimental histories themselves. I know that when I first read Tolstoi's War and Peace, The Cossacks and Sevastopol, it
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 12: the next step in journalism (search)
ot only erroneous as to details, but are made out of the whole cloth. On inquiry he finds it to be just the same with all his neighbors. The same witness already quoted receives frequently a cutting from different newspapers recently published, describing him as taking a daily spin on a tricycle to certain designated towns, with his little daughter behind him, the fact being that neither of them has mounted a tricycle for years, nor did they ever visit in that way the towns specified. Emerson somewhere describes a very shy man to whom it was always a pain that he must at any given moment be somewhere, but who was comforted by the thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not. The present habit of the newspapers deprives us of all that innocent pleasure, since they may at any moment assign to us all these innumerable places at the same time. Cicero, who rejoiced that he was at a certain time so unimportant that he could mount his horse and ride a few miles out o
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 14: a disturbed christmas (search)
fying only the lower side of our nature. Yet all that he said was but little more than was said during our civil war by Emerson, the calmest and least combative of philosophers. He, too, saw the curious fact that while war is in itself barbarous, as do often the wife and mother; but none of these on a scale so conspicuous and irresistible as in the conflict of war. Emerson's conclusion is, Certain it is that never before since I read newspapers has the morale played so large a part in them aa year; invents means; systematizes everything. We began the war in vast confusion; when we end it all will be system. Emerson in Concord, by his son, p. 89. There is nothing in Judge Holmes's oration which goes quite so far as this. Yet this is seem what Horace Bushnell called it, the devil's play, but for these loftier aspects. We must never quite lose sight of Emerson's fine lines: Though love repine and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply- 'Tis man's perdition to be safe Whe
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 15: the cant of cosmopolitanism (search)
s been prevented from being a little wicked only by the lingering of a very few scruples and the presence of but a very few dollars. After his return to his family his cosmopolitanism is appalling. Perhaps there is a maiden who might compare with him, the damsel who has been taken abroad with the expectation of becoming the proud bride of a ducal coronet, and has come home with only a complete wardrobe and an exceedingly incomplete French accent. The more experienced often go abroad, as Emerson said-and Motley and Lowell illustrated-to be Americanized. That is, they learn that the nation of which they are a portion has its own career to work out; that nothing that can be learned or won in Europe is too good for us, but that you can no more transplant the social atmosphere of Europe than you can change the climate or the sky. They learn also the folly of supposing that cosmopolitanism means good manners, or has, indeed, very much to do with them. Perhaps, if we hear a man ment
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 22: more mingled races (search)
ut with some that has been plundered from other people. Moreover, those who are appalled by the aspect of the latest arrivals are apt to forget the looks of some that preceded them. Those early squalid crowds have simply vanished in their descendants. Who that sees the vast and well-dressed congregations that come and go to our Roman Catholic churches can recall the advance-guard of the Irish immigration as it came among us sixty years ago-poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow, as Emerson says, whose first act on arrival was to dig himself an earthen shanty, and live in it? Who that sees the equally prosperous French Canadian congregations pouring out of the great Roman Catholic churches of Fall River, Massachusetts, or Woonsocket, Rhode Island, can recall the Canadian families that used to cross the frontier forty or fifty years ago — a man, a woman, twelve children, and a large bundle? Each of those early migrations was a step in progress; as De Tocqueville pointed out
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 29: acts of homage (search)
nder such circumstances as to form but a trivial part of their career. Who can doubt that, fifty years hence, the disproportion will be far greater than now? After all is said and done, the circle of American writers who established our nation's literature, half a century ago, were great because they were first and chiefly American; and of the Americans who have permanently transplanted themselves for literary purposes it is pretty certain that James and Bret Harte would have developed more lasting power had they remained at home. Transplanting helps tulips, but it is a doubtful aid to human intellects. Why is it not as great a thing to be fellow-countrymen of Emerson and Hawthorne as of Tennyson and Browning? Even of these last names, it is to be remembered that Tennyson lived the life of a recluse, and Browning lived so much out of England that the fact was urged strongly by a brother author, James Payn, as a source of objection to his being buried in Westminster Abbey. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 31: the prejudice in favor of retiracy (search)
lly thinks it rather a weakness; if they plunge into printer's ink, why not accept the consequences? But surely in the sympathetic breast there is something which pulsates in their defence. The instinct of retiracy is not wholly limited to women. Tennyson, whom Lord Lytton called Miss Alfred, in his day, says frankly of the poet generally, His worst he kept, his best he gave, and pleads earnestly that all of his life except what he puts in print may be recognized as his own. Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, and many others have claimed a similar shelter. Longfellow confessed to a dislike to seeing his name in print. Swift, while seeming defiant of the world, read family prayers in secret in his household-in a crypt, as Thackeray said — that they might not be talked about; not only retiring to the Scriptural closet, but taking his whole family there. Shakespeare, while engaged in the most conspicuous of all professions, yet kept his personality so well concealed that there are tho
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 33: the test of talk (search)
Chapter 33: the test of talk We are all unconsciously testing ourselves, all the time, for the information of those around us, and one of the most familiar tests is that of talk. Emerson says that every man reveals himself at every moment; it is he himself, and nobody else, who assigns his position. Each the herald is who wrote His rank and quartered his own coat. After spending an hour in the dark with a stranger, we can classify him pretty surely as to education, antecedents, and the like, unless he has had the wit to hold his tongue. In that case he is inscrutable. In Coleridge's well-known anecdote the stranger at the dinner-table would forever have remained a dignified and commanding figure, had not the excellence of the apple-dumplings called him for a moment forth from his shell to utter the fatal words, Them's the jockeys for me. After that the case was hopeless; he had betrayed himself in five words. Of course the speaker might still have been a saint or a he