hide Matching Documents

The documents where this entity occurs most often are shown below. Click on a document to open it.

Document Max. Freq Min. Freq
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
View all matching documents...

Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Emerson or search for Emerson in all documents.

Your search returned 18 results in 7 document sections:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A plea for culture. (search)
to hear described, outside of America; and a few wandering lecturers on geology still haunt the field, their discourses being almost coeval with their specimens. Emerson still makes his stately tour, through wondering Western towns, where an enterprising public spirit sometimes, it is said, plans a dance for the same evening in ths with which their names suggest themselves shows how exceptional they are. They represent no considerable literary class, scarcely even a cultivated class. Till Emerson came, we were essentially provincial in the tone of our thought; provincial in attainments we still are. One rarely sees in America, outside the professions, a mato disregard the more permanent verdict of more fastidious tribunals. The richest thought and the finest literary handling which America has yet produced — as of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau — reached at first but a small audience, and are but very gradually attaining a wider hold. Renan has said that every man's work is super
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Literature as an art. (search)
u; to chase dreams for a lifetime, like Hawthorne; to labor tranquilly and see a nation imbued with one's thoughts, like Emerson,--this it is to pursue literature as an art. There is apparently something in the Anglo-Saxon mind which causes a slieister, and shows itself even in the Elective affinities, which is, so far as I know, his most perfect prose work. In Emerson, again, one observes a similar defect; his unit of structure is the sentence, and the periods seem combined merely by thhought are in proportion to his thoughts, and great ideas strain language more than small ones. We cannot say of either Emerson or Thoreau, for instance, that his style is adequate to his needs, because the needs are immense, and Thoreau, at least,rwise we could not enjoy any foreign literature. A fine phrase in Aeschylus or Dante affects us as if we had read it in Emerson. A structural completeness in a work of art seems the same in the Oedipus Tyrannus as in The scarlet letter. Art has t
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Americanism in literature. (search)
in return. For the result, greater possibilities of culture, balanced by greater extremes of sycophancy and meanness. Emerson says that the Englishman of all men stands most firmly on his feet. But it is not the whole of man's mission to be foungnore the nightingale and skylark, and look for the classic and romantic on our own soil. This change began mainly with Emerson. Some of us can recall the bewilderment with which his verses on the humblebee, for instance, were received, when the y collection of American poetry, for instance, one is struck with the fact that it is not so much faulty as inadequate. Emerson set free the poetic intuition of America, Hawthorne its imagination. Both looked into the realm of passion, Emerson witEmerson with distrust, Hawthorne with eager interest; but neither thrilled with its spell, and the American poet of passion is yet to come. How tame and manageable are wont to be the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions! There is no
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
nception twenty times, if need be, until you find some phrase that with its grandeur shall be lucid also. It is this unwearied literary patience that has enabled Emerson not merely to introduce, but even to popularize, thoughts of such a quality as never reached the popular mind before. And when a writer, thus laborious to do hisially here. Nevertheless, such improprieties are of course to be avoided; but whatever good Americanisms exist, let us hold to them by all means. The diction of Emerson alone is a sufficient proof, by its unequalled range and precision, that no people in the world ever had access to a vocabulary so rich and copious as we are acqupening the other day to recur to a list of Cambridge lyceum-lecturers in my boyish days, I find with dismay that the only name now popularly remembered is that of Emerson: death, oblivion, or a professorship has closed over each of the others, while the whole standard of American literature has been vastly raised meanwhile, and no
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Fayal and the Portuguese. (search)
rong of women in dark-blue hooded cloaks which we all took for priestly vestments, and of beggars in a combination of patches which no sane person could reasonably take for vestments of any sort, until one saw how scrupulously they were washed and how carefully put together. The one overwhelming fact of the first day abroad is the simple sensation that one is abroad: a truth that can never be made anything but commonplace in the telling, or anything but wonderful in the fulfilling. What Emerson says of the landscape is true here: no particular foreign country is so remarkable as the necessity of being remarkable under which every foreign country lies. Horace Walpole found nothing in Europe so astonishing as Calais; and we felt that at every moment the first edge of novelty was being taken off for life, and that, if we were to continue our journey round the world, we never could have that first day's sensations again. Yet because no one can spare time to describe it at the moment
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, The Greek goddesses. (search)
ain,--this, which can never be human nature's daily food,--that we need to turn to art. That child is unhappy whose mother's face, as it bends above him, wears not a living tenderness which Raphael could merely reproduce. But the resources of divine exaltation which form the just heritage of that mother's soul, the child knows not till he sees them embodied in Greek sculpture. Other races have made woman beautiful; it was the peculiar glory of the Greeks that they made her sublime. As Emerson says that this wondrous nation anticipated by their language what the orator would say, so their sculpture anticipated what the priest would dream. Quintilian says of Phidias's lost statue of Athena that its beauty seems to have added reverence even to religion itself, so nigh does the majesty of the work approach to that of the divinity. I speak now of the ideal alone. Undoubtedly in ancient Greece, as in modern America, the actual woman was disfranchised, humiliated, enslaved. But n
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, On an old Latin text-book. (search)
prose writers, which at a later period I almost learned by heart. But however we may define the words classic and romantic, it will be found, I think, however contrary to the impression of many, that the child is naturally a classicist first. Emerson said well, Every healthy boy is a Greek ; while his powers are dawning and he divides his life between games and books, he prefers phrases that, while they touch his imagination, have yet a certain definite quality. A Greek statue, a Latin lineies have passed, the writer must now take the style, which is his weapon, must erase from it all attempt at beauty, and demand only that, like the barbaric hatchet, it shall bring down its man? In America, this tendency is only dawning; while Emerson lives, it will be still believed that literature means form as well as matter. But no one can talk with the pupils of our new technological schools, without seeing that, in surrendering books like my old Latin text-book, it is in fact literatur