Complete Works

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Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899
 

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Page 79 - The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.
Page 60 - Take, oh take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn ; And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn : But my kisses bring again, , bring again, ' . -' Seals of love, but seal'd in vain.
Page 33 - Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow.
Page 112 - I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic ; what is doing in Italy or Arabia ; what is Greek art, or Proven§al minstrelsy ; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.
Page 78 - The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio.
Page 88 - Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures ; him the past instructs ; him the future invites. Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, "All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.
Page 105 - In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time — happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly.
Page 116 - See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of...
Page 21 - To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, • and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon!
Page 56 - It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect.

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