Essays in criticism

This text includes both the ten essays in the ‘First Series’ and the nine essays of the ‘Second Series’. The Table of Contents numbers them consectively from I. to XIX. However...

It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact something premature; and that fro...

says Goethe; “the little that is done seems nothing when we look forward and see how much we have yet to do.” Clearly this is a better line of reflection for weak humanity, so l...

If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where politics and religion are concerned, it is because, where these burning matters are in question, it is m...

How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose! how much better, in general, do the productions of its spirit show in the qualities of genius than in the qualities of intel...

The provincial spirit, again, exaggerates the value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to try them. Or rather, for want of such a standard, it gives one i...

it is Chateaubriand, with his, “_cîme indéterminée des forêts_;” it is Senancour, with his mountain birch-tree: “_Cette écorce blanche, lisse et crevassée; cette tige agreste; c...

Overpowered by the ascendency of Lamennais, Guérin, in spite of his hesitations, in spite of his confession to himself that, “after a three weeks’ close scrutiny of his soul, in...

Compare, for example, his “Lines Written in the Euganean Hills,” with Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” (_Golden Treasury_, pp. 256, 284). The latter piece _renders_ Nature; the former _t...

And yet, if one analyzes this beautiful and most interesting character quite to the bottom, it is not exactly as a saint that Eugénie de Guérin is remarkable. The ideal saint is...

her “young female teachers belonging to the Sunday-school,” and her “Mr. Thomas Rowe, a venerable class-leader,”—what a dissimilarity! In the ground of the two lives, a likeness...

Heine himself would hardly have admitted this affiliation, though he was far too powerful-minded a man to decry, with some of the vulgar German liberals, Goethe’s genius. “The w...

His direct political action was null, and this is neither to be wondered at nor regretted; direct political action is not the true function of literature, and Heine was a born m...

But, most of all, Heine shows us this side in a strange poem describing a public dispute, before King Pedro and his Court, between a Jewish and a Christian champion, on the meri...

_Gorgo._—Lord, where does the man come from? What is it to you if we _are_ chatterboxes? Order about your own servants! Do you give orders to Syracusan women? If you want to kno...

I have said a great deal of harm of paganism; and, taking paganism to mean a state of things which it is commonly taken to mean, and which did really exist, no more harm than it...

The _tekyas_, or theaters for the drama which calls forth these celebrations, are constantly multiplying. The king, the great functionaries, the towns, wealthy citizens like the...

Hussein presses his own lips to those of Kassem, who, refreshed, again rushes forth, and returns bleeding and stuck with darts, to die at the Imam’s feet in the tent. So ends th...

Joseph Joubert was born (and his date should be remarked) in 1754, at Montignac, a little town in Périgord. His father was a doctor with small means and a large family; and Jose...

“Which is the best, if one wants to be useful and to be really understood, to get one’s words in the world, or to get them in the schools. I maintain that the good plan is to em...

“Voltaire’s wits came to their maturity twenty years sooner than the wits of other men, and remained in full vigor thirty years longer. The charm which our style in general gets...

Whence, then, could the prophets be certain of the truth of a revelation which they received through the imagination, and not by a mental process?—for only an idea can carry the...

The feeling of perplexity thus caused is not diminished by the language of the chapter on miracles. In this chapter Spinoza broadly affirms a miracle to be an impossibility. But...

And therefore, when M. Van Vloten violently presses the parallel with the post-Hegelians, one feels that the parallel with St. Augustine is the far truer one. Compared with the...

Of the outward life and circumstances of Marcus Aurelius, beyond these notices which he has himself supplied, there are few of much interest and importance. There is the fine an...

“When thou hast assumed these names,—good, modest, true, rational, equal-minded, magnanimous,—take care that thou dost not change these names; and, if thou shouldst lose them, q...

The historic estimate is likely in especial to affect our judgment and our language when we are dealing with ancient poets; the personal estimate when we are dealing with poets...

The age of Dryden, together with our whole eighteenth century which followed it, sincerely believed itself to have produced poetical classics of its own, and even to have made a...

But we have met here to-day to witness the unveiling of a gift in Milton’s honor, and a gift bestowed by an American, Mr. Childs of Philadelphia; whose cordial hospitality so ma...

“If the worst be not yet past, you will neglect and pardon me; but if the last struggle be over, if the poor object of your long anxieties be no longer sensible to your kindness...

This sensuous strain Keats had, and a man of his poetic powers could not, whatever his strain, but show his talent in it. But he has something more, and something better. We who...

I cannot think, then, that Wordsworth has, up to this time, at all obtained his deserts. “Glory,” said M. Renan the other day, “glory after all is the thing which has the best c...

No Wordsworthian will doubt this. Nay, the fervent Wordsworthian will add, as Mr. Leslie Stephen does, that Wordsworth’s poetry is precious because his philosophy is sound; that...

Byron, I say, cannot but be a gainer by this, just as Wordsworth is a gainer by a like proceeding. I esteem Wordsworth’s poetry so highly, and the world, in my opinion, has done...

Byron found our nation, after its long and victorious struggle with revolutionary France, fixed in a system of established facts and dominant ideas which revolted him. The menta...

In the spring of 1810 Shelley, now in his eighteenth year, entered University College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner. He had already written novels and poems; a poem on the Wanderi...

I regret, I say once more, that it has been given. It is a sore trial for our love of Shelley. What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an...

For this is the result which, by his extraordinary fineness of perception, and by his sincere fidelity to it, the author achieves; he works in us a sense of the absolute reality...

“Five years ago faith came to me; I believed in the doctrine of Jesus, and all my life suddenly changed. I ceased to desire that which previously I desired, and, on the other ha...

“My path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined to muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in being all night out of doors, I took th...

“In society people are expected to behave as if they lived on ambrosia and concerned themselves with no interests but such as are noble. Care, need, passion, do not exist. All r...