Variations

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C. Scribner's Sons, 1921 - 279 pages
 

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Page 104 - There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a Single capital, that is not crowded with our children, under the feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and disgust. Almost every great composer, skilled musician, almost every voice that ravishes you with its transporting strains, spring from our tribes.
Page 120 - Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be an unit, not to be reckoned one character — - not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?
Page 33 - Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.
Page 1 - There is some truth in a remark, which I believe was made by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that the greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation, and that the next greatest is he who corrupts it.
Page 103 - ... governed senates by its burning eloquence, has found a medium for its expression, to which, in spite of your prejudices and your evil passions, you have been obliged to bow. The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations, the imagination fervent with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus and which we have preserved unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of...
Page 55 - AH, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you And did you speak to him again ? How strange it seems and new...
Page 46 - He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact.
Page 120 - ... the whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavors. It suggests, in truth, ubiquitous inferiority. Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper. 'Dogs, would you live forever?' shouted Frederick the Great. 'Yes...
Page 193 - I'd give them all for Mephistophilis. By him I'll be great Emperor of the world, And make a bridge thorough the moving air, To pass the ocean with a band of men...
Page 192 - If I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, It is but for a time ; I press God's lamp Close to my breast ; its splendor, soon or late, Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one day.

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