Platform Monologues

In the first place, we must set about our reading only when we are in the proper mood of receptivity. Poetry is not science, any more than painting is photography, or architectu...

Of the preliminary question what _is_ poetry, we may spare the discussion. If there are those who are misled by words and who will insist that poetry is simply identical with go...

And though I be to these but as a knoll About the feet of the high mountains, scarce Remarked at all, save when a valley cloud Holds the high mountains hidden, and the knoll Aga...

The following monologues were given as public addresses, mostly to semi-academical audiences, and no alteration has been made in their form. Their common object has been to plea...

I suppose thousands upon thousands of persons possessed of what our great-grandfathers used to call "sensibility," have felt at eventide, when alone in certain spots, a kind of...

First, we may lay down the proposition that it is not times of national misery and poverty, not times of insecurity and fear, not times of weak convictions and cynicism, that pr...

But there was another element in his training, which, for the dramatist, was worth all the rest. This was his habit of observation, an observation shrewd but sympathetic, of all...

If from the names of English literature one were asked to choose our most Hebraic poet, the name of Milton would perhaps be the first to offer itself to many minds. Yet this wou...

How can we describe in brief and intelligible terms these two spirits, the Hebraic and the Hellenic? One might use many figures of speech. Matthew Arnold's antithesis of Helleni...

This is not the time to exhaust the Davidsonian philosophy, if there be such. We are treating the writer as a poet, and the examples which I have quoted of his joy in nature and...

There are, of course, self-complacent human beings who cannot realize that past literature has in this domain anything to teach them. They imagine that the world was born when t...

O then what soul was his, when on the top Of the high mountains he beheld the sun Rise up and bathe the world in light! He looked-- Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth, An...

I do not know whether any better definition of imagination can be given than that of Ruskin in his _Modern Painters_. "Imagination is the power of seeing anything we describe as...

"The book contains a mass of information regarding many diseases, and the effect of diet upon them, and emphasizes the importance of doing as much thinking for oneself as one ca...