Selections from the Writings of Walter Savage Landor

Front Cover
Ticknor and Fields, 1856 - 308 pages
 

Selected pages

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 138 - Love is a secondary passion in those who love most; a primary in those who love least.
Page 140 - Jane. I sincerely love the youth who hath espoused me ; I love him with the fondest, the most solicitous affection ; I pray to the Almighty for his goodness and happiness, and do forget at times, unworthy supplicant ! the prayers I should have offered for myself.
Page 246 - Pepino, old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command. Rivers leave their beds, run into cities, and traverse mountains for it; obelisks and arches, palaces and temples, amphitheatres and pyramids, rise up like exhalations at its bidding; even the free spirit of man, the only thing great on earth, crouches and cowers in its presence—it passes away and vanishes before venerable trees. What a sweet odour is there ? Whence comes it ? Sweeter it appears to me and stronger...
Page 70 - How many, who have abandoned for public life the studies of philosophy and poetry, may be compared to brooks and rivers, which in the beginning of their course have assuaged our thirst, and have invited us to tranquillity by their bright resemblance of it, and which afterwards partake the nature of that vast body into which they run, its dreariness, its bitterness, its foams, its storms, its everlasting noise and commotion...
Page 104 - What your father and your grandfather used as an elegance in conversation, is now abandoned to the populace, and every day we miss a little of our own, and collect a little from strangers : this prepares us for a more intimate union with them, in which we merge at last altogether. Every good writer has much idiom ; it is the life and spirit of language ; and none such ever entertained a fear or apprehension that strength and sublimity were to be lowered and weakened by it.
Page 4 - I have performed one action ; I have composed some few things, which posterity, I would fain believe, will not suffer to be quite forgotten. Fame, they tell you, is air : but without air there is no life for any : without fame there is none for the best.
Page 242 - Look at any old mansion-house, and let the sun shine as gloriously as it may on the golden vanes, or the arms recently quartered over the gateway, or the embayed window, and on the happy pair that haply is toying at it; nevertheless...
Page 108 - Averse as I am to everything relating to theology, and especially to the view of it thrown open by this poem, I recur to it incessantly as the noblest specimen in the world of eloquence, harmony, and genius.

Bibliographic information