Historical Essays, Volume 2

Front Cover
Macmillan and Company, 1873 - 339 pages
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 313 - From the still glassy lake that sleeps Beneath Aricia's trees — Those trees in whose dim shadow The ghastly priest doth reign, The priest who slew the slayer, And shall himself be slain...
Page 207 - LECTURES ON ANCIENT HISTORY, FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE TAKING OF ALEXANDRIA BY OCTAYIANUS, CONTAINING The History of the Asiatic Nations, the Egyptians, Greeks, Macedonians, and Carthaginians, BY BG NIEBUHR.
Page 308 - ... aside. We may correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since Gibbon's time ; we may write again large parts of his story from other and often truer and more wholesome points of view, but the work of Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of 1300 years, as the grandest of historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too.
Page 73 - Jeremiah, does not tend so much to make them eminent among men, as to separate them fmm men. Homer, on the other hand, is emphatically and above all things human : he sings by the spontaneous and the unconscious indwellings of nature; whereas these are as the trumpet of unearthly sounds, and cannot, more than Balaam could, depart from that which is breathed into them, to utter either less or more. But most of all does the Book of Psalms refuse the challenge of philosophical or poetical competition.
Page 206 - ... it, and to crowd so many memorable actions within so short a period: but in the course which his ambition took, in the collateral aims which ennobled and purified it, so that it almost grew into one with the highest of which man is capable, the desire of knowledge, and the love of good.
Page 73 - ... such a degree, indeed, that the rank and quality of the religious frame may in general be tested, at least negatively, by the height of its relish for them. There is the whole music of the human heart, when touched by the hand of the Maker, in all its tones that whisper or that swell, for every hope and fear, for every joy and pang, for every form of strength and languor, of disquietude and rest.
Page 92 - Freeman, though these learned men do not accept all his theories or follow his deductions from the narrative. He has ' done such justice to Homer and his age as Homer has never received out of his own land. He has vindicated the true position of the greatest of poets ; he has cleared his tale and its actors from the misrepresentation of ages.
Page 92 - To pass from the study of Homer to the business of the world is to step out of a palace of enchantment into the cold gray light of a polar day.
Page 92 - Achilleus' oratory, >) iinvi'in iln\'"innr" might alone have made the fortune of a poet or a rhetorician. We thus part from these noble volumes, worthy alike of their author and of their subject, the freshest and most genial tribute to ancient literature which has been paid even by an age rich in such offerings.

Bibliographic information