The English Novel and the Principle of its Development

Let us now go further and say that with this reverence for personality as to the ultimate important fact of human existence, George Eliot wonderfully escapes certain complexitie...

Whereupon the steadfast parson proceeds to assure the company that whatever he may have in his male [wallet] there is none of your light-minded and fictitious verse in it; nothi...

... "Then," continues Socrates, "whoever amongst us prepares, with the greatest caution and accuracy, to reflect upon that particular thing by itself upon which he is inquiring"...

In one direction, for example, we find a large number of timorous souls, who believe that science, in explaining everything as they singularly fancy, will destroy the possibilit...

Indeed, if you should wish to see how recently we are out of the range of Aristotle, you have only to read the chapter on Human Anatomy, which occurs in the early part of dear o...

And here we come upon a farther difference between George Eliot and Dickens of which we shall have many and beautiful examples in the works we have to study. This is a large, po...

"Where is this Death of whom you have spoken?" furiously demand the three young men. The old man replied, "You will find him under an oak tree in yonder grove." The three rush f...

Epimetheus lives. Though here beneath the shadow of the crags. He seems to slumber, head on nerveless knees, His life increases; oldest at his birth, The ages heaped behind him...

"The Dodsons were certainly a handsome family, and Mrs. Glegg was not the least handsome of the sisters. As she sat in Mrs. Tulliver's arm-chair, no impartial observer could hav...

We have seen that Aeschylus had a fit audience for this fable, and was working upon emotions which are as deep as religion; but now, when we come down 2300 years to a time from...

And we reach still another view of that growth when we reflect that even if Shakspeare could have overcome the merely mechanical difficulty of presenting a repentance without ov...

The experiment of Zola is as if a professor of chemistry, knowing something of the properties of given substances desiring to see how a certain molecule would behave itself in t...

When first the gods their fatal strife began, And insurrection raged in heaven, some striving To cast old Kronos from his heavy throne That Jove might reign, and others to crush...

Nor need I dwell upon Scott's novels, which stretch from 1814 to 1831, which we have all known from our childhood as among the most hale and strengthening waters in which the yo...

Here, then, is a great stalwart man, in perfect health, all brawn and rude muscle, set up before us as the ideal of strength. Let us examine this strength a little. For one, I d...

The following chapters were originally delivered as public lectures at Johns Hopkins University, in the winter and spring of 1881. Had Mr. Lanier lived to prepare them for the p...

I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and night with my father in the Wirksworth cottage sleeping with my aunt, I remember. Our interview was less interesting than...

On a certain night in the autumn of 1856, the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_, was seated in an apartment of his own house, reading a manuscript which he had lately received fr...

Now, to put the whole moral effect of this book into a nutshell--Richardson had gravely announced it as a warning to young servant-girls, but why might he not as well have annou...

Maggie looked hurt and discouraged, while her father said, "Why, it's one o' the books I bought at Partridge's sale. They was all bound alike--it's a good binding, you see--and...

Be near me when my faith is dry, And men the flies of latter spring, That lay their eggs, and sting and sing, And weave their petty cells and die.

"Then I said 'I covet truth; Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth,' As I spoke, beneath my feet The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath...

She had been persuaded to this step by Dr. Chapman, who was at that time editor of the _Westminster Review_, and who asked her to come and help him to conduct that publication....

"_As you read of the fair knights and the foul knights--for Froissart tells of both--it cannot but occur to you that somehow it seems harder to be a good knight now-a-days than...