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
New England (United States) 160 0 Browse Search
Ralph Waldo Emerson 138 0 Browse Search
Edgar Allan Poe 114 0 Browse Search
Nathaniel Hawthorne 100 0 Browse Search
Walt Whitman 88 0 Browse Search
John Greenleaf Whittier 86 0 Browse Search
Abraham Lincoln 84 0 Browse Search
Benjamin Franklin 66 0 Browse Search
James Russell Lowell 60 0 Browse Search
Washington Irving 56 0 Browse Search
View all entities in this document...

Browsing named entities in a specific section of Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters. Search the whole document.

Found 505 total hits in 180 results.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ...
Elmwood, Ill. (Illinois, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
hable treasures of the English language. In descriptive pieces like Keramos and The Hanging of the Crane, in such personal and occasional verses as The Herons of Elmwood, the Fiftieth birthday of Agassiz, and the noble Morituri Salutamus written for his classmates in 1875, he exhibits his tenderness of affection and all the ripene of his career are easy to trace and must be set down here with brevity. A minister's son, and descended from a very old and distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in Cambridge in 1819. After a somewhat turbulent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 1838, the year of Emerson's Divinity School address. He studied law, t in our diplomatic service, London. He performed his duties with extraordinary skill and success until 1885, when he was relieved. His last years were spent in Elmwood, the Cambridge house where he was born, and he was still writing, in almost as rich a vein as ever, when the end came in 1891. Here was certainly a full and va
Springfield (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
orld. Two of the most popular of all his early pieces, The Psalm of life and Excelsior, have paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the ethical mood of an earnest moment in our national life. We have passed beyond them. And many readers may have outgrown their youthful pleasure in Maidenhood, the rainy day, the bridge, the day is done, verses whose simplicity lent themselves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as The Belfry of Bruges, Seaweed, the fire of Driftwood, the Arsenal at Springfield, My lost youth, The children's hour, and many another lyric, lose nothing with the lapse of time. There is fortunately infinite room for personal preference in this whole matter of poetry, but the confession of a lack of regard for Longfellow's verse must often be recognized as a confession of a lessening love for what is simple, graceful, and refined. The current of contemporary American taste, especially among consciously clever, half-trained persons, seems to be running against Long
Massachusetts (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
judgments. Whittier represents a stock different from that of the Longfellows, but equally American, equally thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was born in 1807, at East Haverhill, had been built by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount Vernon in Virginia and the Craigion: lyrics in praise of fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, campaign songs, hymns, satires against the clergy and the capitalists, superb sectional poems like Massachusetts to Virginia, and, more nobly still, poems embodying what Wordsworth called the sensation and image of country and the human. race. Whittier had now found h, and a diffusion of intellectual tastes throughout the community. It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor, Bancroft and Prescott, Motley and Parkman, were Massachusetts men. Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure. He was a furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national history. Born in 1789
Concord, N. H. (New Hampshire, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
Chapter 7: romance, poetry, and history Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that great generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other men — romancers, poets, essayists, historians — who shared in the intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely artists in prose and verse than they were seekers after the unattainable. Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm with some of the most extreme types of transcendental extravagance. The movement interested him artistically and he utilized it in his romances, but personally he maintained an attitude of cool detachment from it. Longfellow was too much of an artist to lose his head over philosophical abstractions; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct for the concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor. Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable
Pontiac (Illinois, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American forest: for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night. To understand the history of the American forest young Parkman devoted his college vacations to long trips in the wilderness, and in 1846, two years after graduation, he made the epoch-making journey described in his first book, The Oregon Trail. The Conspiracy of Pontiac, a highly-colored narrative in two volumes appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical writing. Then came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years Parkman fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He had had to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the brain, aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by illconsidered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion. His disease took many formsins
Europe (search for this): chapter 7
Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander to be understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds. Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His artisticknor's successor at Harvard, ultimately surrendering the chair to Lowell. He early published two prose volumes, Hyperion and Outre-mer, Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then came, after ten years of teaching and the death of his young wife, the sudden impulse to write poetry, and he produced, softly excited, I know nots of foreign lore and fancy. For though Whittier never went abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave him leisure for varied reading, and he followed contemporary European politics with the closest interest. He emerged more and more from the atmosphere of faction and section, and, though he retained to the last his Quaker creed, h
North America (search for this): chapter 7
lf an hour. Then, after a sufficient interval, it may be repeated, often three or four times in the course of the day. By this means nearly the whole of the volume now offered has been composed. There is no more piteous or inspiring story of a fight against odds in the history of literature. For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a dozen of them-The pioneers of France, The Jesuit in North America, La Salle, The Old Regime, Frontenac, Montcalm and Wolfe, A half-century of conflict-the boy's dream realized, the man's long warfare accomplished. The history of the forest, as Parkman saw it, was a pageant with the dark wilderness for a background, and, for the actors, taciturn savages, black-robed Jesuits, intrepid explorers, soldiers of France-all struggling for a vast prize, all changing, passing, with a pomp and color unknown to wearied Europe. It was a superb theme, better after
Wayside Inn (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
f miles Standish, he selected his themes from our own history. The building of the ship, written with full faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national anthem. It is a wonderful gift, said Lincoln, as he listened to it, his eyes filled with tears, to be able to stir men like that. The Skeleton in Armor, a ballad of the French Fleet, Paul Revere's Ride, the Wreck of the Hesperus, are ballads that stir men still. For all of his skill in story-telling in verse-witness the Tales of a Wayside Inn-Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his trilogy now published under the title of Christus, made up of The divine tragedy, the golden legend, and New England tragedies, added little to a reputation won in other fields. His sonnets, particularly those upon Chaucer, Milton, the Divina Commedia, a Nameless grave, Felton, Sumner, nature, My books, are among the imperishable treasures of the English language. In descriptive pieces like Keramos and The Hanging of the Crane, in such
Gottingen (Lower Saxony, Germany) (search for this): chapter 7
filled his great canvases. They need retouching, perhaps, but the younger historians are incompetent for the task. Prescott died in 1859, in the same year as Irving, and he already seems quite as remote from the present hour. His young friend Motley, of Dutch Republic fame, was another Boston Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from college. IHe attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in due course, where he knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Gottingen became a warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named Bismarck. Young Motley wrote a couple of unsuccessful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, and review-writing, and finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down upon Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, after five years, scored an immense triumph with his Rise of the Dutch Republic. He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists, and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirab
Oregon (Oregon, United States) (search for this): chapter 7
ears after graduation, he made the epoch-making journey described in his first book, The Oregon Trail. The Conspiracy of Pontiac, a highly-colored narrative in two volumes appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical writing. Then came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years Parkman fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He had had to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the brain, aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by illconsidered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion. His disease took many formsinsomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight, incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says that he never saw a perfectly well day during his entire literary career. Even when aided by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was often the limit of his production. His own Stoic words about the limitations of his eyesight are characteristic: By reading for one mi
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ...