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Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 2 22 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 16 0 Browse Search
James Russell Lowell, Among my books 14 0 Browse Search
Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 1 14 0 Browse Search
Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 3. 10 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 6 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 6 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier 6 0 Browse Search
Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing) 6 0 Browse Search
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1 4 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Southey or search for Southey in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Literature as an art. (search)
up hot, or else not at all. But it is evident that mere simplicity of style is not enough, for there is a manner of writing which does not satisfy us, though it may be simple and also carefully done. Such, for instance, is the prose style of Southey, which was apparently the model for all American writing in its day. We see the result in the early volumes of the North American Review, whose traditions of rather tame correctness were what enabled us to live through the Carlyle epoch with safeeable Roman Catholic writer, Digby, is a striking recent example. There is no satisfaction in being told, as Charles Lamb told Godwin, that you have read more books that are not worth reading than any other man ; nor in being described, as was Southey by Shelley, as a talking album, filled with long extracts from forgotten books on unimportant subjects. One must not have more knowledge than one can keep in subjection; but every literary man needs to accumulate a whole tool-chest in his memor
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
ms, 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 chiefly reproached are not distinctively American: Burke uses pretty considerable ; Miss Burney says, I trembled a few ; the English Bible says reckon, Locke has guess, and Southey realize, in the exact sense in which one sometimes hears them used colloquially 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 acquiring. To the previous traditions and associations of the English tongue we add resourc