Great American WritersH.Holt, 1912 - 256 pages |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abroad admiration American literature American poets appeared born Boston Bret Harte Broadway Journal Brook Farm Bryant career character chief civilization Concord Cooper countrymen critical death Deerslayer died early editor effect Emerson England English essays experience fame famous father friends frontier genius greatest Harvard Hawthorne Hawthorne's Herman Melville historian Holmes humor ideals inspiration interest Irving later Leatherstocking lecturing less literary lived Longfellow Lowell Lowell's magazine Margaret Fuller Mark Twain married Massachusetts master moral Nathaniel Parker Willis nature never novel orators Over-Soul Parkman patriotic perhaps period Poe's poems poet poetic poetry political praise prose published readers reputation returned romance Scarlet Letter scene seems sentiment Simms slavery Sophia Peabody soul spirit story Stowe success theme thought tion Tom's Transcendentalist true Uncle Tom's Cabin verse vols volumes Whitman Whittier wife writing wrote York youth
Popular passages
Page 112 - Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.
Page 143 - All else is gone : from those great eyes The soul has fled : When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead! Then, pay the reverence of old days To his dead fame ; Walk backward, with averted gaze, And hide the shame ! fire THE CHRISTIAN TOURISTS.
Page 33 - So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
Page 134 - Yet whenever I cross the river On its bridge with wooden piers, Like the odor of brine from the ocean Comes the thought of other years. And I think how many thousands Of care-encumbered men, Each bearing his burden of sorrow, Have crossed the bridge since then.
Page 92 - It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded step by step to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.
Page 84 - But I am constitutionally sensitive — nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank — God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity.
Page 206 - This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven, And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then? And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.
Page 121 - Thoreau's economy — the notion that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Page 148 - And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree • In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.
Page 64 - Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness ; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified ! Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses ? It is not so.