Literary Values and Other Papers |
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Common terms and phrases
æsthetic analogy aristocratic Arnold artist beauty better birds Brunetière Carlyle character charm cism common conscious criticism democracy democratic disinterested doubt elements eloquence Emerson emotions excellence experience fact fancy feel Ferdinand Brunetière flavor Frederic Harrison French fresh genius George Eliot GILBERT WHITE give Goethe happiness Henry James human ideal ideas imagination intellectual interest Jane Austen judgment kind language less literary value literature live Madame de Staël man's matter Matthew Arnold mind moral nature never one's past phrase pleasure poem poet poetic poetry probably prose Protestantism pure re-read reader reason religion religious Sainte-Beuve says Schopenhauer seek seems sense sentences Shakespeare soul speak spirit style suggestive taste Tennyson things thought tion touch trees true truth ture Victor Hugo vital Whitman whole words Wordsworth writer youth
Popular passages
Page 66 - I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is.
Page 67 - Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Page 194 - Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Page 6 - But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.
Page 175 - I saw it distinctly, more than once, put out its short leg while on the wing, and, by a bend of the head, deliver somewhat into its mouth. If it takes any part of its prey with its foot, as I have now the greatest reason to suppose it does these chafers, I no longer wonder at the use of its middle toe, which is curiously furnished with a serrated claw.
Page 164 - The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed, — shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics.
Page 162 - It is rapid harmony, exactly adjusted to the sense : It is vehement reasoning, without any appearance of art: It is disdain, anger, boldness, freedom, involved in a continued stream of argument : And, of all human productions, the orations of DEMOSTHENES present to us the models which, approach the nearest to perfection.
Page 204 - Poetic style, when address'd to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints.
Page 201 - Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.
Page 202 - I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.