The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

When I approached this house the next summer, over the desolate hills between it and the shore, which are worthy to have been the birthplace of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the m...

This "dark side" suggests itself. It is impossible to read the record of Madame Récamier's conquests without thinking of women slighted and neglected for her sake. The greater n...

I was always my father's favorite. He took a delight, to the very last, in recounting the little sagacious tricks and innocent artifices of my childhood. One manifestation there...

We do, indeed, gain an approximate knowledge of things we have never seen. For example, I have an imperfect notion of a banian-tree, though I have never seen one; but it is only...

"To the Signora's health," said he, with a courtesy that sat well on the supple shape and the dark beauty of the boy, whose homely garb, whose poverty, and whose profession seem...

That was a pleasant life on picquet, in the delicious early summer of the South, and among the endless flowery forests of that blossoming isle. In the retrospect, I seem to see...

Finally, there is an effect of words profounder and more creative than any of these. As a brand which burns powerfully may at last ignite even green wood, so divine faiths, aliv...

It was a gay old town in those days, kind to its lads and lasses, and if the streets were grass-grown, it seemed only that so they might give softer footing to the young feet th...

"However, he had no thought of being pounded to pieces by his own firing and ours, and so he bore right down on us. He struck our quarter, just forward of my forward gun,--struc...

But in addition to the fear that was created by our rapid growth in greatness, the rulers of foreign nations regarded us with apprehension because of our political position. We...

It was at a _fête_ given by Lucien that Madame Récamier had her first and only interview with the First Consul. On entering the drawing-room, she mistook him for his brother Jos...

He is clean and neat in his person, not from a vainglorious desire of setting himself forth to advantage in the eyes of the other sex,--with which vanity too many of our young s...

The long and almost unbroken ascendency of the democratic party in this country had much to do with creating the firm impression that our system was democratic in its character,...

That old English gentleman, whom I just remember, when Ingham first went to sea, as the model of mild, kind old men, at Ingham's mother's house,--then he went to sea once himsel...

Madame Récamier's conduct to the Prince, even viewed in the light of her biographer's representations, is scarcely justifiable. Madame Möhl attempts to defend her. She alleges,...

The first consequence of this state of things was a universal rejection of domestic service in all classes of American-born society. For a generation or two, there was, indeed,...

When all the leaves were red or brown, Or golden as the summer sun, And now and then came flickering down Upon the grasses hoar and dun, Through which the first faint breath of...

But interesting as her life is from this point of view, in its social aspect it has a deeper significance. It is the life of a beautiful woman,--and so varied and romantic, so f...

I found myself swimming in shallow and shallower water, and the flats seemed almost bare when I neared the shore, where the great gnarled branches of the live-oaks hung far over...

There was much to make a stay in Italy attractive to Madame Récamier, if she could have forgotten Châteaubriand, Her old admirer, the Duc de Laval, was ambassador at Rome, and p...

We have always deemed it one of the greatest of Tennyson's great and good qualities, that he is unfaltering in the tribute of honor which he pays to the sterling virtues and to...