AmericansCharles Scribner's Sons, 1922 - 336 pages |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Age of Enlightenment American Arthur Dimmesdale Bear Edition beautiful Bret Harte Brooks Adams Byron Carlyle century Charles Francis civilization critic culture declared democratic divine emancipation Emerson emotion energy England English essays fact father feel fighting Franklin friends German glory happy Hawthorne heart Henry Adams Henry James hero human imagination impulse Ina Coolbrith Indian individual intellectual interest Joaquin Joaquin Miller Joaquin Murietta Journal land Leaves of Grass liberal literary literature live look Lord Mark Twain matter Memorie and Rime Mencken ment Miller mind modern Modocs moral nature ness never Nicaragua Oregon passion perhaps period personality philosophical Plato poem poet poetic poetry political popular prose published Puritan radical romantic Roosevelt Sandburg says Scarlet Letter sense Shasta society soul spirit story things thought tion tradition virtue vision Whitman word writing wrote young
Popular passages
Page 91 - Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.
Page 73 - Aurelius is not a great writer, a great philosophymaker; he is the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit.
Page 90 - It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.
Page 167 - Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine Providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men have always done so and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.
Page 129 - But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.
Page 156 - I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs, Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen, I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs...
Page 143 - Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it to my emotions when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it — tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm.
Page 34 - It has ever since been a pleasure to me to see good workmen handle their tools; and it has been useful to me, having...
Page 111 - Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boasts and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Page 111 - We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer ; then in the Middle Age ; then in Calvinism.