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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, Short studies of American authors. You can also browse the collection for Emerson or search for Emerson in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors, Hawthorne. (search)
dency is just now to the opposite fault,--to a distrust of all nice attention to form in writing, as being necessarily a weakness. Hawthorne happily escaped both these dangerous alternatives; and, indeed, it is hard to see that his genius was much affected by his surroundings, after all. He had, to be sure, the conscientious fidelity of Puritanism in his veins, a thing equally important for literature and for life: without it he might have lavished and wasted himself like Poe. He had what Emerson once described as the still living merit of the oldest New-England families; The Dial, III.101. he had moreover the unexhausted wealth of the Puritan traditions,--a wealth to which only he and Whittier have as yet done any justice. The value of the material to be found in contemporary American life he never fully recognized; but he was the first person to see that we really have, for romantic purposes, a past; two hundred years being really quite enough to constitute antiquity. This w
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors, Poe. (search)
mal tragedy, for which genius only makes the footlights burn with more lustre. There is a passage in Keats's letters, written from the haunts of Burns, in which he expresses himself as filled with pity for the poet's life: he drank with blackguards, he was miserable; we can see horribly clear in the works of such a man his life, as if we were God's spies. Yet Burns's sins and miseries left his heart unspoiled, and this cannot be said of Poe. After all, the austere virtues — the virtues of Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier — are the best soil for genius. I like best to think of Poe as associated with his betrothed, Sarah Helen Whitman, whom I saw sometimes in her later years. That gifted woman had outlived her early friends and loves and hopes, and perhaps her literary fame, such as it was: she had certainly outlived her recognized ties with Poe, and all but his memory. There she dwelt in her little suite of rooms, bearing youth still in her heart and in her voice, and on her hair al
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors, Thoreau. (search)
ly made by Thoreau himself. While tinged here and there, like most New England thinkers of his time, with the manner of Emerson, he was yet, as a companion, essentially original, wholesome, and enjoyable. Though more or less of a humorist, nursingexternal 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 habe 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 childrenEmerson 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 br
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors, Howells. (search)
man, but he had thoughts and purposes, something to protest against, and something to say. He is often classed with Mr. James as representing the international school of novelists, yet in reality they belong to widely different subdivisions. After all, Mr. James has permanently set up his easel in Europe, Mr. Howells in America; and the latter has been, from the beginning, far less anxious to compare Americans with Europeans than with one another. He is international only if we adopt Mr. Emerson's saying, that Europe stretches to the Alleghanies. As a native of Ohio, transplanted to Massachusetts, he never can forego the interest implied in this double point of view. The Europeanized American, and, if we may so say, the Americanized American, are the typical figures that re-appear in his books. Even in The lady of the Aroostook, although the voyagers reach the other side at last, the real contrast is found on board ship; and, although his heroine was reared in a New-England vi
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors, Helen Jackson. ( H. H. ) (search)
w critics who know even the name of the woman who has come nearest in our day and tongue to the genius of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and who has made Christina Rossetti and Jean Ingelow appear but second-rate celebrities. When some one asked Emerson a few years since whether he did not think H. H. the best woman-poet on this continent, he answered in his meditative ay, Perhaps we might as well omit the woman, thus placing her, at least in that moment's impulse, at the head of all. He used O Love, poor Love, why didst thou burn thy ships? Verses, p. 71. H. H. writes another class of poems, that, with a grace and wealth like Andrew Marvell's, carry us into the very life of external nature, or link it with the heart of man. Emerson's Humblebee is not a creation more fresh and wholesome than is My strawberry. O marvel, fruit of fruits, I pause To reckon thee. I ask what cause Set free so much of red from heats At core of earth, and mixed such sweets With sour and spice