Studies in New England Transcendentalism

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Columbia University Press, 1908 - 217 pages
Examines the philosophies of transcendentalists such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Parker in the early 1900's. Also factors in the European contribution to transcendentalism.
 

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Page 112 - That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,— Mighty Prophet ! seer blest ! On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find, In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave ; Thou, over whom thy immortality Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave, A presence which is not to be put by...
Page 149 - The good Alcott : with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes ; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age ; he comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving...
Page 163 - Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute, or a subscription of stock, for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry, for a new house or a larger business, for a political party, or the division of an estate, — will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable...
Page 194 - I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.
Page 115 - Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.
Page 118 - No spot on earth has helped to form me so much as that beach. There I lifted up my voice in praise amidst the tempest. There, softened by beauty, I poured out my thanksgiving and contrite confessions. There, in reverential sympathy with the mighty power around me, I became conscious of power within.
Page 62 - Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
Page 88 - I rise a little before five, walk 'an hour, and then practise on the piano, till seven, when we breakfast. Next I read French, — Sismondi's ' Literature of the South of Europe, — till eight, then two ' or three lectures in Brown's Philosophy.

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