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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors 48 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.) 20 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Irene E. Jerome., In a fair country 16 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 14 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life 12 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oldport days, with ten heliotype illustrations from views taken in Newport, R. I., expressly for this work. 10 0 Browse Search
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches 10 0 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 4 0 Browse Search
The Daily Dispatch: November 28, 1861., [Electronic resource] 2 0 Browse Search
Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 18. 2 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 Thoreau or search for Thoreau in all documents.

Your search returned 6 results in 6 document sections:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 4: a world outside of science (search)
ing round each other and influencing each other's motions, and this at a distance so great that the rays of light which reveal them left their home nearly fifty years ago. The imagination is paralyzed before a step so vast; yet it all lies within the domain of science, while science can tell us no more how Macbeth or Hamlet came into existence than if the new astronomy had never been born. It is as true of the poem as of the poet--Nascitur non fit. We cannot even define what poetry is; and Thoreau says that there never yet was a definition of it so good but the poet would proceed to disregard it by setting aside all its requisitions. Shelley says that a man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The greatest poet even cannot say it, for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the consci
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 7: a very moral and nice book (search)
Chapter 7: a very moral and nice book It was once the good-fortune of the present writer to read, in the Island of Fayal, a letter just written by a young lady of Portuguese-English birth who had been reading the New Testament for the first time. It was worth while to see such a letter, for many persons must have felt, first or last, with Thoreau, that it would be a delightful thing for any one to encounter those wonderful narratives as a fresh discovery, in maturer years, apart from all the too familiar associations of Sunday-school and sermon. Such was, at any rate, this young lady's experience, and her statement of the result was at least a little astonishing. She wrote, in her half-foreign English, to an American friend in these words: Did you ever happen to read a book called the New Testament? If not, I advise you to do so. I have just been reading it one of these days, and I find it a very moral and nice book. It is not given to a veteran author like Mr. Andrew L
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 10: Favorites of a day (search)
akespeare's amounted to this, that Addison wrote An Account of the Greatest English Poets in which his name does not appear; and that, of the people one meets in the streets of any city, the majority will not even have heard of him. How many thousand never heard the name Of Sidney or of Spenser, and their books; And yet brave fellows, and presume of fame, And think to bear down all the world with looks. Happy is that author, if such there be, who, although his renown be as small as that of Thoreau in his lifetime, does not greatly concern himself about it, being so occupied with some great thought or hope for man that his own renown is a matter of slight importance. It is for this that Whittier always expressed thanks to the antislavery agitation, because it kept him free from the narrowness of a merely literary ambition. The only absolutely impregnable attitude is in that fine invocation of the radical Proudhon, prefixed to his first work: Thou God who hast placed in my hear
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 15: the cant of cosmopolitanism (search)
In the same way, those who are always urging the need of cosmopolitanism in our literature are usually youths and maidens just from college, whose vast knowledge of the great world is yet to come. It is not necessary to deny the advantage that proceeds, on the whole, from those changes which make travel easier and cause the world to seem smaller. But it is well to remember how much may be done by staying at home. Hawthorne's fame still rests on his Scarlet Letter. Mr. Henry James derides Thoreau as not merely provincial, but parochial; yet that parochial life has found already three biographers in England, which is possibly two more than the lifelong transplantation of Mr. James may win for him. On the other hand, what place in the world is less truly cosmopolitan than Paris, where no native feels called upon to learn a modern language or visit a foreign country, but each Frenchman remains at home for other people to visit him and learn the language he speaks? Paul Bourget, it is
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 23: the alphabet as a barrier (search)
rough that of the Irish and French-Canadian immigrants who preceded them, how short-lived an argument is that based upon their living too economically and so underselling their predecessors. Does any one now complain that Irish families stint themselves in food and clothing, or that Irish cooks and chambermaids do not ask and obtain as high wages as anybody else? No race ever yet submitted to privation merely for the love of it. No path proves so easy as that in the direction of profusion; even the Indian wishes to live as more luxurious hunters live, and Thoreau found in the Maine woods that his aboriginal guide was the only one of the party who remembered to bring a x63 rubber coat. More important is the question, finally, whether it is not true that, as even the Buddhists say, all men are brethren ; and whether we have a right to do what we so long condemned the Chinese and Japanese for doing-namely, to build a wall round our borders and exclude all the rest of mankind. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 29: acts of homage (search)
this country, and come back thinking, like Sim Tappertit and his fellow-revellers, that there's nothing like life. They yearn to be cosmopolitan, whereas what they need is to be true men and women first, and let cosmopolitanism take care of itself. The most cosmopolitan American writers of the last generation were undoubtedly Willis and Bayard Taylor; but what has become of their literary fame? On the other hand, the American names one sees oftenest mentioned in European books-Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Whitman — are those of authors who never visited Europe, or under 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