Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
The ever-flowing tide of time rapidly obliterates the footprints of those whom the world has delighted to honor. While it has caused heroic names, like their possessors, to lapse into oblivion, it has also shrouded many a historical page with the softened veil of distance, lik...
Every thoughtful person must often have realized how close is the natural sympathy between artists in literature and artists of the pencil and brush; between painters and poets....
2. CHAPTER II.Who does not enjoy recalling these silent friends, favorite authors grown dear to us by age and long association? Some one has said that authors, like coins, grow dearer as they...
3. CHAPTER III.As we have already remarked, authors are very much like other people, rarely coming up to the idea formed of them by enthusiastic readers. They are pretty sure to have some idio...
6. CHAPTER VI.Our familiar gossip thus far concerning those whose lives by universal consent, "rising above the deluge of years," bear the impress of genius, has led us to speak of the hardsh...
1. CHAPTER I.The ever-flowing tide of time rapidly obliterates the footprints of those whom the world has delighted to honor. While it has caused heroic names, like their possessors, to laps...
7. CHAPTER VII.In these desultory chapters we have more than once seen that fame appeals to posterity; but in the instance of Byron it was contemporary, for he tells us he "awoke one morning a...
10. CHAPTER X.It is not the author's purpose to treat the names of painters, or indeed those of any other branch of art, especially by themselves. Were any single line to be selected, the pec...
4. CHAPTER IV.It has been said that the first three men in the world were a gardener, a ploughman, and a grazier; while all political economists admit that the real wealth and stamina of a na...
8. CHAPTER VIII.Egotism in eminent characters is often amusing to us, but extremely undignified in them. It is almost always the betrayal of weakness,--the tongue of vanity. He who talks of him...
5. CHAPTER V.Leonardo da Vinci, the inspired painter of the "Last Supper" upon the walls of the time-worn Milan convent,[89] is said to have had a strange inclination for dirt. One biographe...
9. CHAPTER IX.There seems always to have been a natural attraction in literature which draws from other and less captivating professions. Bryant, Longfellow, and Washington Irving started ear...
11. CHAPTER XI.Genius has its hours of sunshine as well as of shadow, and when it finds expression in wit and humor it is undoubtedly most popular. The Emperor Titus thought he had lost a day...