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My former volume of Essays has been so kindly received that I am emboldened to make another and more miscellaneous collection. The papers here gathered have been written at inte...

The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, have succeeded in driving off the blue-jays who used to build in our pines, their gay colors and quaint noisy ways making them we...

“Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is,” says Shelley; and I am apt to think there are a good many other things concerning which their knowledge might be largely increased wit...

I call this a good _human_ bit of writing, imaginative, too,--not so flushed, not so ... highfaluting (let me dare the odious word!) as the modern style since poets have got hol...

And hark! is that the ringing of Titania’s bridle, or the bells of the wee, wee hawk that sits on Oberon’s wrist! This wonder of Frost’s handiwork may be had every winter, but h...

The capacity of indignation makes an essential part of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined to doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself to act upon its fir...

It was something to have advanced even to the dignity of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the relation of the individual American to the individual European was bettered...

We shall have to be content for a good while yet with our provincialism, and must strive to make the best of it. In it lies the germ of nationality, and that is, after all, the...

Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father’s life with the skill and good taste that might have been expected from the author of “Wensley.” Considering natural partialit...

Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy’s life was his old age. What in most men is decay, was in him but beneficent prolongation and adjournment. His interest in affairs...

By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming always more boisterous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as such humor must,...

Mr. Carlyle’s historical compositions are wonderful prose poems, full of picture, incident, humor, and character, where we grow familiar with his conception of certain leading p...

With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to modulate and harmonize and bring parts into their proper relation, he is th...

A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might be drawn between Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking figures in modern history,--Henry IV. of France. The career of t...

Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet convinced of the danger and magnitude of the crisis, was endeavoring to persuade himself of Union majorities at the South, and to c...

The truth was that he suffered rather from over-appreciation; and “when,” says a nameless old Frenchman, “I see a man go up like a rocket, I expect before long to see the stick...

We said that the Transcendental Movement was the protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather than expressed...

Are we really, then, to believe the newspapers for once, and to doff our critical nightcaps, in which we have comfortably overslept many similar rumors and false alarms, to welc...

Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes, as Mr. Landor has done, it attempts truth of detail to ancient scenery and manners, which may be attained either by hard reading an...

There are four principal sources from which Chaucer may be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion or literary culture,--the Latins, the Troubadours, the Trouvères, and t...

We are apt, it is true, to talk rather loosely about our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and to attribute to them in a vague way all the pith of our institutions and the motive power of...

But a fairer as well as more instructive comparison lies between Chaucer and the author of “Piers Ploughman.” Langland has as much tenderness, as much interest in the varied pic...

If we try Philippe Mouskes, a mechanical rhymer, if ever there was one, and therefore the surer not to let go the leading-strings of rule, the result is the same.

Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most purely original of poets, as much so in respect of the world that is about us as Dante in respect of that which is within us. Th...

Having now run cursorily through the series of Mr. Smith’s reprints, we come to the closer question of _How are they edited?_ Whatever the merit of the original works, the edito...

In “Antonio and Mellida” (Vol. I. pp. 50, 51) occur some Italian verses, and here we hoped to fare better; for Mr. Halliwell (as we learn from the title-page of his Dictionary)...

Mr. Hazlitt’s General Introduction supplies us with no new information, but this was hardly to be expected where Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We wish that he had be...

We come next to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s edition of Lovelace. Three short pieces of Lovelace’s have lived, and deserved to live: “To Lucasta from Prison,” “To Lucasta on going to the...

But authors whose interest for us is mainly bibliographic belong rather in such collections as Mr. Allibone’s. As literature they are oppressive; as items of literary history th...

The emendation [de] is Ritson’s, and is probably right, though it would require, for the metre’s sake, the elision of _that_ at the beginning of the verse. But what is _enuyte_?...

There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses,--none whom so many cannot abide. What...

The school which Boileau founded was critical and not creative. It was limited, not only in its essence, but by the capabilities of the French language and by the natural bent o...

Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set to...

But the supposition is that in the “Essay on Man” Pope did not himself know what he was writing. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke,--a very fitting St....

In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed to the wall, appears positively mean. He vainly endeavors to show that his personalities had all been written in the interest...