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Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the story of his life 1 1 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature 1 1 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier 1 1 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1 1 Browse Search
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Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the story of his life, XV: journeys (search)
sy to conjure up the little sweet singer. A few days later in the midst of the wonder and thrill of London, he exclaimed:— I feel as if I had just been born . . . . I do not see how there can be a place in the world more delightful than London for one who loves both study and society . . . . I am having the most amazing time, perfectly overwhelmed with invitations and kindnesses. After the above I will add that I breakfast with Froude Monday. At the Athenaeum Club he found Aubrey de Vere, my first author. He came gliding downstairs to me a tall, refined, ascetic-looking man . . . and seemed and talked like a simple, sweet recluse. It may here be added that Colonel Higginson spent his first hours in London by gratifying his curiosity to see certain regions he had long known by reputation, and which were usually considered unsafe for visitors. When he walked through the Seven Dials and St. Giles—then called the Den of Thieves—he was unmolested and perhaps a shade disapp<
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature, Chapter 6: the Cambridge group (search)
taining such wellknown poems as the Hymn to the night, the Beleaguered City, and The Skeleton in armor, gave him immediate popularity as a poet. It was in later work, however, especially in Hiawatha, Evangeline, and The Courtship of iles Standish, that he best fufilled his dream of giving poetic form to material belonging peculiarly to America. But in criticising Longfellow's earlier poetry, we must not lose sight of that fine remark of Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet, who said to Aubrey de Vere, However inferior the bulk of a young man's poetry may be to that of the poet when mature, it generally possesses some passages with a special freshness of their own and an inexplicable charm to be found in them alone. A common ground for criticism on Longfellow's poetry lay in the simplicity which made it then, and has made it ever since, so near to the popular heart. It is possible that this simplicity was the precise contribution needed in that early and formative period of America
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Chapter 2: school days and early ventures (search)
ians, who are terrified by rumbling noises that proceed from a carbonate concealed in the rocks; this suggesting the Great Carbuncle of Hawthorne. All these themes, it will be noticed, are American and local, and hence desirable as selections; but the talent of the author was not precociously mature, like that of Hawthorne, nor did he continue in the same direction. Yet so far as the selection of the themes went, his work was a contribution to the rising school of native literature. Aubrey de Vere once wrote to Tennyson that Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet, had said to him that However inferior the bulk of a young man's poetry may be to that of the poet when mature, it generally possesses some passages with a special freshness of their own, and an inexplicable charm to be found in them alone. It is just this quality which seems wanting in the earliest poems of Whittier. As we may observe in his youthful action a certain element of ordinary self-seeking and merely personal a
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 12: voices of the night (search)
and Poe wrote to Longfellow, May 3, 1841, I cannot refrain from availing myself of this, the only opportunity I may ever have, to assure the author of the Hymn to the night, of the Beleaguered City, and of the Skeleton in Armor of the fervent admiration with which his genius has inspired me. In most of the criticisms of Longfellow's earlier poetry, including in this grouping even the Psalm of Life, we lose sight of that fine remark of Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet, who said to Aubrey de Vere, However inferior the bulk of a young man's poetry may be to that of the poet when mature, it generally possesses some passages with a special freshness of their own and an inexplicable charm to be found in them alone. Professor Wendell's criticisms on Longfellow, in many respects admirable, do not seem to me quite to recognize this truth, nor yet the companion fact that while Poe took captive the cultivated but morbid taste of the French public, it was Longfellow who called forth more