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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.), Index (search)
, 317 Tarkington, Booth, 91, 288, 420 Tasso, 450 Tatler, the, 110 Taussig, F. W., 442 Taxation in American States and cities, 442 Taylor, Bayard 31, 36, 38-43, 44, 45, 48, 113, 128, 155, 163, 164, 314. 586 Taylor, Bert Leston, 21 Taylor, John, 432 S. H., 480 Taylor, Tom, 270, 275 Taylor, Zachary, 375 Tell it all, 143 Temperance town, a, 279 Temple, Mary, 101 Tenement House, a, 606 Ten great Religions, 211 Ten months a captive among Filipinos, 166 Tennyson, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 46, 54, 77, 487 Tenth annual report (Mann H.), 410 Ten times one is ten, 120 Tenting on the Plains, 160 Tent life in Siberia, 165 Ten years a cowboy, 161 Terhune, A. P., 165 Ternaux-Compans, 456 Tertiary history of the Grand Canyon, 159 Tess of the D'urbervilles, 288 Testut, Charles, 592, 593, 594, 597 Texan emigrant, the, 131 Texas Review, The, 540 n. Texas steer, a, 279 Text of Shakespeare, the, 486 Thackeray, 69, 77, 99, 114
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Americanism in literature. (search)
result in a new form of national genius. But we must guard against both croakers and boasters; and above all, we must look beyond our little Boston or New York or Chicago or San Francisco, and be willing citizens of the great Republic. The highest aim of most of our literary journals has thus far been to appear English, except where some diverging experimentalist has said, Let us be German, or Let us be French. This was inevitable; as inevitable as a boy's first imitations of Byron or Tennyson. But it necessarily implied that our literature must, during this epoch, be second-rate. We need to become national, not by any conscious effort, such as implies attitudinizing and constraint, but by simply accepting our own life. It is not desirable to go out of one's way to be original, but it is to be hoped that it may lie in one's way. Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes. If you want to astonish the whole world, said Rahel, tell the simple truth. It is easier to excuse a tho
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
d sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives us an affluence of synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can show. While you utterly shun slang, whether native or foreign born,--at present, by the way, our popular writers use far less slang than the English,--yet do not shrink from Americanisms, 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 go
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises, chapter 4 (search)
The same lucky spell is attributed to a piece of the bride's garter, in Normandy, or to pins filched from her dress, in Sussex. For those more cultivated, the charm of this transmitted personality is best embodied in autographs, and the more unstudied and unpremeditated the better. In the case of a poet, nothing can be compared with the interest inspired by the first draft of a poem, with its successive amendments — the path by which his thought attained its final and perfect utterance. Tennyson, for instance, was said to be very indignant with those who bore away from his study certain rough drafts of poems, justly holding that the world had no right to any but the completed form. Yet this is what, as students of poetry, we all instinctively wish to do. Rightly or wrongly, we long to trace the successive steps. To some extent, the same opportunity is given in successive editions of the printed work; but here the study is not so much of changes in the poet's own mind as of those
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises, VII: Henry David Thoreau (search)
se the mass of any literature. What is nature, he elsewhere says, unless there is a human life passing within it? Many joys and many sorrows are the lights and shadows in which she shines most beautiful. This is the real and human Thoreau, who often whimsically veiled himself, but was plainly enough seen by any careful observer. That he was abrupt and repressive to bores and pedants, that he grudged his time to them and frequently withdrew himself, was as true of him as of Wordsworth or Tennyson. If they were allowed their privacy, though in the heart of England, an American who never left his own broad continent might at least be allowed his privilege of stepping out of doors. The Concord school-children never quarreled with this habit, for he took them out of doors with him and taught them where the best whortleberries grew. His scholarship, like his observation of nature, was secondary to his function as poet and writer. Into both he carried the element of whim; but his ve
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises, IX: George Bancroft (search)
ed dignity of the scholar who has also been, in his day, a man of affairs, and who is yet too energetic to repose upon his laurels or waste much time upon merely enjoying the meed of fame he has won. In both his winter and summer abodes he had something of the flattering position of First Citizen; he was free of all sets, an honored member of all circles. His manners were often mentioned as courtly, but they never quite rose to the level of either of the two classes of manner described by Tennyson:-- Kind nature is the best, those manners next That fit us like a nature second-hand; Which are indeed the manners of the great. Neither of these descriptions exactly fitted Mr. Bancroft; his manners were really of the composite sort, and curiously suggestive of the different phases of his life. They were like that wonderful Japanese lacquer-work, made up of twenty or thirty different coats or films, usually laid on by several different workmen. There was at the foundation the some
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises, chapter 22 (search)
f Venice with such success that by 1883 he had completed an edition of all the plays in forty volumes. It has long been accepted as a standard critical authority, being quoted as such by leading English and German editors. He was lately engaged in a thorough revision of this edition, doing this task after he had reached the age of seventy-five. He has also edited Scott's complete poems, as well as (separately) The Lady of the Lake and The lay of the last Minstrel ; an Edition de luxe of Tennyson's works in twelve volumes, and another, the Cambridge Edition, in one volume. He has edited volumes of selections from Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Browning, with Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. He is also the author of Shakespeare the boy, with sketches of youthful life of that period; The Satchel guide to Europe, published anonymously for twenty-eight years; and a book on the Elementary study of English. With his son, John C. Rolfe, Ph. D., Professor of Latin i
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors, Poe. (search)
and rather patronized Hawthorne, but found him only peculiar and not original; Works, ed. 1853, III., 202. saying of him, He has not half the material for the exclusiveness of literature that he has for its universality, whatever that may mean; and finally he tried to make it appear that Hawthorne had borrowed from himself. He returned again and again to the attack on Longfellow as a wilful plagiarist, denouncing the trivial resemblance between his Midnight Mass for the Dying year and Tennyson's Death of the Old year, as belonging to the most barbarous class of literary piracy. Works, ed. 1853, III., 325. To make this attack was, as he boasted, to throttle the guilty; Works, ed. 1853, III., 300. and while dealing thus ferociously with Longfellow, thus condescendingly with Hawthorne, he was claiming a foremost rank among American authors for obscurities now forgotten, such as Mrs. Amelia B. Welby and Estelle Anne Lewis. No one ever did more than Poe to lower the tone of li
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oldport days, with ten heliotype illustrations from views taken in Newport, R. I., expressly for this work., Oldport in winter. (search)
ld any imagination have transferred him thither. Through him the correspondence of other days came softened of all immediate solicitude. Ere it reached you, friends had died or recovered, debtors had repented, creditors grown kind, or your children had paid your debts. Perils had passed, hopes were chastened, and the most eager expectant took calmly the missive from that tranquillizing hand. Meeting his friends and clients with a step so slow that it did not even stop rapidly, he, like Tennyson's Mariana, slowly From his bosom drew Old letters. But a summons came at last, not to be postponed even by him. One day he delivered his mail as usual, with no undue precipitation; on the next, the blameless soul was himself taken and forwarded on some celestial route. Irreparable would have seemed his loss, did there not still linger among us certain types of human antiquity that might seem to disprove the fabled youth of America. One veteran I daily meet, of uncertain age, perhaps
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oldport days, with ten heliotype illustrations from views taken in Newport, R. I., expressly for this work., Footpaths. (search)
upon it by those who dwell beside it or pass over it; indeed, roads become picturesque only when they are called lanes and make believe that they are but paths. The very irregularity of a footpath makes half its charm. So much of loitering and indolence and impulse have gone to its formation, that all which is stiff and military has been left out. I observed that the very dikes of the Southern rice plantations did not succeed in being rectilinear, though the general effect was that of Tennyson's flowery squares. Even the country road, which is but an enlarged footpath, is never quite straight, as Thoreau long since observed, noting it with his surveyor's eye. I read in his unpublished diary: The law that plants the rushes in waving lines along the edge of a pond, and that curves the pond shore itself, incessantly beats against the straight fences and highways of men, and makes them conform to the line of beauty at last. It is this unintentional adaptation that makes a footpath
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