Essays

There would seem to be little of the visionary here; and yet he confesses to a consciousness of what he calls "Enthusiasm"--which we should almost call madness: he could summon...

But perhaps the most striking characteristic throughout the whole series are the extraordinarily felicitous criticisms, and the soundness of the taste which he brought to bear o...

Quite alone among these--indeed, it can be classed with no other poem in the language--stands the Horatian Ode on Cromwell's return from Ireland. Mr. Lowell said of it that as a...

This is like the direct opening notes of the overture of a dirge. Whatever may be said about such writing we feel at once that it comes from a master's hand. So the poem opens,...

It would of course be idle alike to analyse or deny the charm that many have found in the _Songs of Innocence_. Charles Lamb, perhaps the most surefooted critic we have ever rai...

He was a man of an inveterately companionable disposition. He disliked being alone, except for study--in congenial company a sympathetic talker; once a year for a short time he...

The next morning he understood that he had only a few hours to live. "O praeclarum illum diem!" he said, quoting from Cicero. They were almost his last words. He died as the day...

Those of his epigrams that survive (and there are a considerable number of a first-rate order) will appeal, it must be confessed, chiefly to those whose humour is of the caustic...

It is a curious fact which meets us at the very threshold of her life, that the author of "The Cry of the Children," the passionate partisan of the Abolitionist cause in America...

This kind of writing was a favourite with the age; men were beginning to turn from the solemn impersonalities of chivalry and from the restricted limitations of the drama, to a...

When one speaks of Bradshaw's "work," it is hard to make the uninitiated quite understand either its extent, its importance, or its perfection. He knew more about printed books...

Gray's was in many ways a melancholy life. His vitality was low, and such happiness as he enjoyed was of a languid kind. Physically and emotionally he was unfit to cope with rea...

Keble himself, in his "Praelectiones Academicae," or lectures delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in his review of the "Life of Sir Walter Scott" (_British Critic_,...

"We are safe arrived at our cottage, which is more beautiful than I thought it, and more convenient. It is a perfect model for cottages, and, I think, for palaces of magnificenc...

Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google...

Bourne, in a curious letter to his wife, written shortly before and in anticipation of his death, gives her the reasons which prevented him from taking orders; he says that the...

Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land, When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay. Remember me when no more...

In the first place, he is singularly free from mannerism, and his style has clarified itself every year. It would be difficult for the most ingenious imitator to produce a poem...