Appreciations, with an Essay on Style

Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Ed...

And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other accidental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of specific ornament only, but of all that la...

In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one indispensable beauty is, after all, truth:--truth to bare fact in the latter, as to some personal sense of fact, dive...

And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnised in proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into companionship with permanent natural objects,...

Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the "relative" spirit in place of the "absolute." Ancient philosophy sought to arrest every object in an etern...

Coleridge's prose writings on philosophy, politics, religion, and criticism, were, in truth, but one element in a whole lifetime of endeavours to present the then recent metaphy...

and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which, according to the scepticism, latent at least, in so much of our modern philosophy, the so-called real thing...

There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress, surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so vividly into The Rake's Progress, or Marriage a...

Browne himself dwells, in connexion with the first publication (extorted by circumstance) of the Religio Medici, on the natural "inactivity of his disposition"; and he does, as...

Of this long, leisurely existence the chief events were Browne's rare literary publications; some of his writings indeed having been left unprinted till after his death; while i...

What a fund of open-air cheerfulness, there! in turning to sleep. Still, even when we are dealing with a writer in whom mere style counts for so much as with Browne, it is impos...

Not less precious for this relief in the general structure of the piece, than for its own peculiar graces is the episode of Mariana, a creature wholly of Shakespeare's invention...

It is as if the lax, soft beauty of the king took effect, at least by contrast, on everything beside. One gracious prerogative, certainly, Shakespeare's [194] English kings poss...

With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common things--dawn, [211] noon, night--are full of human or personal expression, full of sentiment. The lovely li...

She interrupted me: "Ah!" she said, with entire simplicity, "I understand you. I have not read all you see here. But I have read enough of it to know that my friends in that pas...

May 10.--She died believing me guilty! The thought is terrible to me. I know not what to do. A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet. "Yes!" she said to herself, "my husband...

Stendhal, a writer whom I have already quoted, and of whom English readers might well know much more than they do, stands between the earlier and later growths of the romantic s...