Shelburne Essays, Third Series

Laurence at this time was at school near Halifax, where he got into a characteristic scrape. The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newly whitewashed; the ladder was standing, a...

The justification of scholastic philosophy, as I understand it, was the hope of finding in the dictates of pure reason an immovable resting-place for the human spirit; the recoi...

But he separated himself from the Broad Church in making religion a culture of individual holiness rather than a message for the "unlovely masses of people," in caring more for...

It is this perfectly passive attitude toward the powers that command her heart and her soul--a passivity which by its completeness assumes the misguiding semblance of a delibera...

Yet in this matter, as in everything that touches Browning's psychology, it is well to proceed cautiously. Because he approached the emotions thus obliquely, as it were in a sty...

It is not merely that political interests absorbed the energy which would otherwise have gone to letters; the knowledge of life acquired might have compensated and more than com...

And the Life, too, in an unpretentious way, is decidedly more interesting than might have been expected. The narrative is simply told, and the letters are for the most part quie...

No poem would be thoroughly characteristic of Whittier without some echo of the slavery dispute, and our first introduction to Pastorius is, indeed, as to a baffled forerunner o...

It is no more than fair to confess at the outset that my knowledge of Swinburne's work until recently was of the scantiest. The patent faults of his style were of a kind to warn...

But it must not be supposed from all this that Cowper's letters are morbid in tone or filled with the dejection of melancholia. Their merit, on the contrary, lies primarily in t...

--O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried _Susannah_.--My mother's whole wardrobe followed.--What a procession! her red damask,--her orange tawney,--her white and yell...

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Those were the words with which he had closed his chapters on _Chateaubriand_; yet through all his deviations he had borne steadily toward one point. In after years he could wri...

But if the end of the arts is the same, their methods are various, and this variety extends even to the different genres of literature. The manner of the epic, and in a still hi...

If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his mind, he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open to _Walter Savage Landor_ and find this pass...

This, I repeat, is a strange fact, for it appears that these poets, prophets who spoke in the language of beauty and who have held the world's reverence so long--it appears now...

[2] In a newly published volume of the letters of William Bodham Donne (the friend of Edward FitzGerald and Bernard Barton), the editor, Catharine B. Johnson, throws doubt on th...