Works, Volume 14Houghton, Mifflin, 1896 |
Common terms and phrases
Abiel Holmes amusement Andover Atlantic Autocrat believe Boston Breakfast-Table called Cambridge charming Club course DEAR BARNES DEAR SIR dinner Doctor Elsie Venner England eyes father feel French George Gardner give hand Harvard heard Holmes Holmes's hope human interest James Freeman Clarke James Jackson James Russell Lowell John JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY kind knew lectures less letter literary lived look magazine matter medicine mind Montgomery Place morning mother nature never OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES once Palais Royal paper Paris perhaps persons PHINEAS BARNES Pittsfield pleasant poem poet poetry Porcellian Club pretty Professor reader reason received remember seemed seen sent society story suppose talk tell things thought tion told truth verses week Wendell Woodstock words write written wrote young youth
Popular passages
Page 274 - We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe ; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination ; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains, — " I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless.
Page 20 - I might have been a minister myself, for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an undertaker.
Page 203 - Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things...
Page 149 - Do not dabble in the muddy sewers of politics, nor linger by the enchanted streams of literature, nor dig in far-off fields for the hidden waters of alien sciences. The great practitioners are generally those who concentrate all their powers on their business.
Page 203 - There have been men with deeper insight ; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts : he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for.
Page 197 - He had entered that period which marks the decline of men who have ceased growing in knowledge and strength : from forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.
Page 200 - There are few books that leave more distinctly the impression of a mind teeming with riches of many kinds. It is, in the Yankee phrase, thoroughly wideawake. There is no languor, and it permits none in the reader, who must move along the page warily, lest in the gay profusion of the grove, unwittingly defrauding himself of delight, he miss some flower half hidden, some gem chance-dropped, some darting bird.
Page 264 - I suppose we must punish evil-doers as we extirpate vermin ; but I don't know that we have any more right to judge them than we have to judge rats and mice, which are just as good as cats and weasels, though we think it necessary to treat them as criminals.
Page 156 - ... desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else good should ever come of my life, I had to bear the sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins.
Page 17 - ... its walls, there to remain so long as they hold together. My especial intimate was a fine, rosyfaced boy, not quite so free of speech as myself perhaps, but with qualities that promised a noble manhood, and ripened into it in due season. His name was Phinehas Barnes, and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the State of Maine, something will be heard to his advantage from any honest and intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the question. This was one of two or three...