Winterslow: Essays and Characters Written There

It is impossible to have things done without doing them. This seems a truism; and yet what is more common than to suppose that we shall find things done, merely by wishing it? T...

It is an axiom in modern philosophy (among many other false ones) that belief is absolutely involuntary, since we draw our inferences from the premises laid before us, and canno...

Party spirit is one of the _profoundnesses of Satan_, or, in modern language, one of the dexterous _equivoques_ and contrivances of our self-love, to prove that we, and those wh...

And as I sat, the bird_de_s harkening thus, Me thought_e_ that I heard_e_ voices sodainly, The most sweetest and most delicious That ever any wight, I trow truly, Heard in _here...

They are not, then, so properly the works of an author by profession, as the thoughts of a metaphysician expressed by a painter. They are subtle and difficult problems translate...

FIRST, AS TO THE RIGHTS OF PERSONS. My intention is to show that the right of society to make laws to coerce the will of others, is founded on the necessity of repelling the wan...

3. AS TO THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY. It is of no use a man's being left to enjoy security, or to exercise his freedom of action, unless he has a right to appropriate certain other t...

Some one then inquired of Lamb if we could not see from the window the Temple walk in which Chaucer used to take his exercise; and on his name being put to the vote, I was pleas...

as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall, gleaming in the summer moonlight! He lamented that Wordsworth was not prone enough to believe in the traditiona...

and thinks such a paragon must easily conform to the routine of manners and society which every trifling woman of quality of his acquaintance, from sixteen to sixty, goes throug...

Thus, the reason why a man ought to be attached to his wife and children is not, surely, that they are better than others (for in this case every one else ought to be of the sam...

The character of Mr. Pitt was, perhaps, one of the most singular that ever existed. With few talents, and fewer virtues, he acquired and preserved in one of the most trying situ...

Winterslow is a village of Wiltshire, between Salisbury and Andover, where my father, during a considerable portion of his life, spent several months of each year, latterly, at...

Once asking a friend why he did not bring forward an explanation of a circumstance, in which his conduct had been called in question, he said, 'His friends were satisfied on the...

If to this we add the ardour and natural impetuosity of his mind, his quick sensibility, his eagerness in the defence of truth, and his impatience of everything that looked like...

Mr. Coleridge, indeed, sets down this outrageous want of keeping to an excess of sympathy, and there is, after all, some truth in his suggestion. There is a craving after the ap...

I began with trying to define what a _right_ meant; and this I settled with myself was not simply that which is good or useful in itself, but that which is thought so by the ind...

The love of power or action is another independent principle of the human mind, in the different degrees in which it exists, and which are not by any means in exact proportion t...

So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice. He told me in confidence (going alo...

It was not till I saw the axe laid to the root, that I found the full extent of what I had to lose and suffer. But my conviction of the right was only established by the triumph...