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George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 5, 13th edition. 32 0 Browse Search
James Russell Lowell, Among my books 20 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays 20 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.) 18 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
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 16 0 Browse Search
George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition. 14 0 Browse Search
George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 6, 10th edition. 12 0 Browse Search
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2 10 0 Browse Search
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 8 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Voltaire or search for Voltaire in all documents.

Your search returned 8 results in 5 document sections:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A plea for culture. (search)
en are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges. The thought of a century seems to posterity to have been intrusted to very few minds, but those minds have always been fed by a myriad minds unseen. Why ask whether there was one Homer or a hundred? The hundred contributed their lives, their hopes, their passions, their despairs, to enrich the one. Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it. How sad seems the intellectual isolation of Voltaire with his Le peuple n'est rien. To have loved America is a liberal education. Let the student think with reverence of the value of this great race to him, and of his possible worth to it, though his very name be forgotten. Every act of his may be a solid contribution towards a nation's training. But as the value of a nation to the human race does not depend upon its wealth or numbers, so it does not depend even upon the distribution of elementary knowledge, but upon the high-water mark
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Ought women to learn the alphabet? (search)
arious maxims and bon-mots of eminent men, in respect to women. Niebuhr thought he should not have educated a girl well,--he should have made her know too much. Lessing said, The woman who thinks is like the man who puts on rouge, ridiculous. Voltaire said, Ideas are like beards: women and young men have none. And witty Dr. Maginn carries to its extreme the atrocity: We like to hear a few words of sense from a woman, as we do from a parrot, because they are so unexpected. Yet how can we wonay-headed, how nobly do these sit upon a woman's brow! Each year adds to the storied renown of Elizabeth of England, greatest sovereign of the greatest of historic nations. Christina of Sweden, alone among the crowned heads of Europe (so says Voltaire), sustained the dignity of the throne against Richelieu and Mazarin. And these queens most assuredly did not sacrifice their womanhood in the process; for her Britannic Majesty's wardrobe included four thousand gowns; and Mlle. de Montpensier
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Mademoiselle's campaigns. (search)
ion at last. Civil war is impending. Conde, at twenty-one the greatest general in Europe, after changing sides a hundred times in a week, is fixed at last. Turenne is arrayed against him. The young, the brave, the beautiful cluster around them. The performers are drawn up in line,--the curtain rises,--the play is The wars of the Fronde, --and into that brilliant arena, like some fair circus equestrian, gay, spangled, and daring, rider Mademoiselle. Almost all French historians, from Voltaire to Cousin (St. Aulaire being the chief exception), speak lightly of the Wars of the Fronde. La Fronde n'est pas serieuse. Of course it was not. Had it been wholly serious, it would not have been wholly French. Of course French insurrections, like French despotisms, have always been tempered by epigrams; of course the people went out to the — conflicts in ribbons and feathers; of course over every battle there pelted down a shower of satire, like the rain at the Eglinton tournament. More
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, The Greek goddesses. (search)
if each had married into a Roman family. It is only since the publication of Thirlwall's Greece, in 1835, that they have generally appeared in English books under their own proper titles. With the Latin names came a host of later traditions, mostly foreign to the Greek mind, generally tending toward the trivial and the prosaic. Shakespeare in French does not more instantly cease to be Shakespeare, than the great ideals vacate their shrines when Latinized. Jeanne d'arc, in the hands of Voltaire, suffers hardly more defamation of character than the Greek goddesses under the treatment of Lempriere. Now that this defilement is being cleared away, we begin to see how much of the stateliness of polytheism lay in its ideal women. Monotheism is inevitable; there never was a polytheism in the world, but so soon as it produced a thinker it became a monotheism after all. Then it instantly became necessary to say He or She in speaking of the Highest; and the immediate result was a mascul
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Sappho. (search)
ls in history. Worse, for instance, than the malice of the Greek comedians or of Ovid — since they possibly believed their own stories — was the attempt made by Voltaire to pollute, through twenty-one books of an epic poem, the stainless fame of his own virgin country-woman, Joan of Arc. In that work he revels in a series of imput the art of printing had remained undiscovered, that all contemporary memorials of this maiden had vanished, and posterity had possessed no record of her except Voltaire's Pucelle. In place of that heroic image there would have remained to us only a monster of profligacy, unless some possible Welcker had appeared, long centuries seeks to show this indirectly, through a minute criticism of her writings. Into this he carries, I regret to say, an essential coarseness of mind, like that of Voltaire, which delights to torture the most innocent phrases till they yield a double meaning. He reads these graceful fragments as the sailors in some forecastle might