hide Sorting

You can sort these results in two ways:

By entity
Chronological order for dates, alphabetical order for places and people.
By position (current method)
As the entities appear in the document.

You are currently sorting in ascending order. Sort in descending order.

hide Most Frequent Entities

The entities that appear most frequently in this document are shown below.

Entity Max. Freq Min. Freq
George Bancroft 97 1 Browse Search
Ralph Waldo Emerson 96 0 Browse Search
Amos Bronson Alcott 76 0 Browse Search
Newport (Rhode Island, United States) 59 3 Browse Search
James Fenimore Cooper 54 0 Browse Search
Charles Norton 54 0 Browse Search
Henry David Thoreau 52 0 Browse Search
Julia Ward Howe 51 3 Browse Search
Elliot Cabot 50 0 Browse Search
Gottingen (Lower Saxony, Germany) 48 0 Browse Search
View all entities in this document...

Browsing named entities in a specific section of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises. Search the whole document.

Found 155 total hits in 115 results.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
Matthew Arnold (search for this): chapter 25
nd make the American. With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was born. This remark, which appeared first in the Atlantic Monthly, called down the wrath of Matthew Arnold, who missed the point entirely in calling it tall talk or a species of brag, overlooking the fact that it was written as a physiological caution addressed to this nervous race against overworking its children in school. In reality, it was a rely duplicate Englishmen, Nature might have said, the experiment is not so very interesting, but if they are to represent a new human type, the sooner we know it, the better. No one finally did more toward recognizing this new type than did Matthew Arnold himself, when he afterwards wrote, in 1887, Our countrymen [namely, the English], with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility ; and again in the same essay, The whole American nation ma
Campbell (search for this): chapter 25
ture was not inclined to show itself with much promptness, during and after long years of conflict, first with the Indians, then with the mother country. There were individual instances of good writing: Judge Sewall's private diaries, sometimes simple and noble, sometimes unconsciously eloquent, often infinitely amusing; William Byrd's and Sarah Knight's piquant glimpses of early Virginia travel; Cotton Mather's quaint and sometimes eloquent passages; Freneau's poetry, from which Scott and Campbell borrowed phrases. Behind all, there was the stately figure of Jonathan Edwards standing gravely in the background, like a monk at the cloister door, with his treatise on the Freedom of the will. Thus much for the scanty literary product; but when we turn to look for a new-born statesmanship in a nation equally new-born, the fact suddenly strikes us that the intellectual strength of the colonists lay there. The same discovery astonished England through the pamphlet works of Jay, Lee, a
Hamlin Garland (search for this): chapter 25
, like the flash of a revolving light; you must make the most of it while you have it. The highways of literature are spread over, said Holmes, with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done with. In America, as in England, the leading literary groups are just now to be found less among the poets than among the writers of prose fiction. Of these younger authors, we have in America such men as Winston Churchill, Robert Grant, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Arthur S. Pier, and George Wasson; any one of whom may at any moment surprise us by doing something better than the best he has before achieved. The same promise of a high standard is visible in women, among whom may be named not merely those of maturer standing, as Harriet Prescott Spofford, who is the leader, but her younger sisters, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and Josephine Preston Peabody. The drama also is advancing with rapid steps, and is likely to be stil
Owen Wister (search for this): chapter 25
h of a revolving light; you must make the most of it while you have it. The highways of literature are spread over, said Holmes, with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done with. In America, as in England, the leading literary groups are just now to be found less among the poets than among the writers of prose fiction. Of these younger authors, we have in America such men as Winston Churchill, Robert Grant, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Arthur S. Pier, and George Wasson; any one of whom may at any moment surprise us by doing something better than the best he has before achieved. The same promise of a high standard is visible in women, among whom may be named not merely those of maturer standing, as Harriet Prescott Spofford, who is the leader, but her younger sisters, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and Josephine Preston Peabody. The drama also is advancing with rapid steps, and is likely to be still more success
Crevecoeur (search for this): chapter 25
an assured him that they were guessed regularly every month in twenty thousand families or more, the publisher still shook his head. As to the element of humor itself, it used to be the claim of a brilliant New York talker that he had dined through three English counties on the strength of the jokes which he had found in the corners of an old American Farmer's Almanac which he had happened to put into his trunk when packing for his European trip. From Brissot and Volney, Chastellux and Crevecoeur, down to Ampere and De Tocqueville, there was a French appreciation, denied to the English, of this lighter quality; and this certainly seems to indicate that the change in the Anglo-American temperament had already begun to show itself. Ampere especially notices what he calls une veine europeenne among the educated classes. Many years after, when Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble, writing in reference to the dramatic stage, pointed out that the theatrical instinct of Americans created in them a
Addison (search for this): chapter 25
mental eye; but will not twenty million copies of him do, for the present? The Englishman's strong point is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation. Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly on his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The American's disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall. Washington Irving, who seemed at first to so acute a French observer as Chasles a mere reproduction of Pope and Addison, wrote to John Lothrop Motley two years before his own death, You are properly sensible of the high calling of the American press,--that rising tribunal before which the whole world is to be summoned, its history to be revised and rewritten, and the judgment of past ages to be canceled or confirmed. For one who can look back sixty years to a time when the best literary periodical in America was called The Albion, it is difficult to realize how the intellectual relations of the two nations
Gough (search for this): chapter 25
ic Monthly, to which almost every one of them contributed, and of which they made up the substantial opening strength. With these there was, undoubtedly, a secondary force developed at that period in a remarkable lecture system, which spread itself rapidly over the country, and in which most of the above authors took some part and several took leading parts, these lectures having much formative power over the intellect of the nation. Conspicuous among the lecturers also were such men as Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Whipple, Holland, Curtis, and lesser men who are now collectively beginning to fade into oblivion. With these may be added the kindred force of Abolitionists, headed by Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, whose remarkable powers drew to their audiences many who did not agree with them. Women like Lucretia Mott, Anna Dickinson, and Lucy Stone joined the force. These lectures were inseparably linked with literature as a kindred source of popular education; they were s
Mason (search for this): chapter 25
rld — for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in preference to the general Congress of Philadelphia. Yet it is to be noticed further that here, as in other instances, the literary foresight in British criticism had already gone in advance of even the statesman's judgment, for Horace Walpole, the most brilliant of the literary men of his time, had predicted to his friend Mason, two years before the Declaration of Independence, that there would one day be a Thucydides in Boston and a Xenophon in New York. It is interesting to know that such predictions were by degrees shadowed forth even among children in America, as they certainly were among those of us who, living in Cambridge as boys, were permitted the privilege of looking over whole boxes of Washington's yet unprinted letters in the hands of our kind neighbor, Jared Sparks (1834-37); manuscripts whose curv
Freneau (search for this): chapter 25
ors first, and its poets later. Literature was not inclined to show itself with much promptness, during and after long years of conflict, first with the Indians, then with the mother country. There were individual instances of good writing: Judge Sewall's private diaries, sometimes simple and noble, sometimes unconsciously eloquent, often infinitely amusing; William Byrd's and Sarah Knight's piquant glimpses of early Virginia travel; Cotton Mather's quaint and sometimes eloquent passages; Freneau's poetry, from which Scott and Campbell borrowed phrases. Behind all, there was the stately figure of Jonathan Edwards standing gravely in the background, like a monk at the cloister door, with his treatise on the Freedom of the will. Thus much for the scanty literary product; but when we turn to look for a new-born statesmanship in a nation equally new-born, the fact suddenly strikes us that the intellectual strength of the colonists lay there. The same discovery astonished England th
Curtis (search for this): chapter 25
hem contributed, and of which they made up the substantial opening strength. With these there was, undoubtedly, a secondary force developed at that period in a remarkable lecture system, which spread itself rapidly over the country, and in which most of the above authors took some part and several took leading parts, these lectures having much formative power over the intellect of the nation. Conspicuous among the lecturers also were such men as Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Whipple, Holland, Curtis, and lesser men who are now collectively beginning to fade into oblivion. With these may be added the kindred force of Abolitionists, headed by Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, whose remarkable powers drew to their audiences many who did not agree with them. Women like Lucretia Mott, Anna Dickinson, and Lucy Stone joined the force. These lectures were inseparably linked with literature as a kindred source of popular education; they were subject, however, to the limitation of being
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...