Letters to Dead Authors

SIXTEEN of these Letters, which were written at the suggestion of the Editor of the “St. James’s Gazette,” appeared in that journal, from which they are now reprinted, by the Ed...

Scarce more fortunate, for long, than thy monument was thy memory. Thou hast not encountered, Master, in the Paradise of Poets, Messieurs Malherbe, De Balzac, and Boileau—Boilea...

Thus Time, with sordid Alchemy and dread, Turns half the Glory of your Gold to Lead; Thus Time,—at Ronsard’s wreath that vainly bit,— Has marred the Poet to preserve the Wit, Wh...

You may say that the soul’s travailings are no affair of yours; proving thereby that you have indeed but a lowly conception of the duty of the novelist. I only remember one refe...

This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not altogether mistaken. Yet posterity declines to read a line of yours, and, as we think of you, we are again set f...

So the girls still sing in Greece, for though the Temples have fallen, and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of the god’s house in Selinus, yet these anci...

Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still dispute about the beginnings of those sinful Gods: such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus: and marvel how first they won their dominion o...

In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of their rivals (as each of the laughable Marq...

Hadst _thou_ THE SECRET? Ah, and who may tell? “An Hour we have,” thou saidst; “Ah, waste it well!” An Hour we have, and yet Eternity Looms o’er us, and the Thought of Heaven or...