A Selection from the Best English Essays Illustrative of the History of English Prose StyleSherwin Cody A.C. McClurg, 1903 - 415 pages |
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A. C. McCLURG action admire beauty better body called character Charles Lamb church conversation critic culture Cyclops darkness disease divine dreams earth English essay expression Faith father feel force Frederic Harrison Friedrich Schlegel genius give hand heard heart heaven ideas intellectual Jacobinism Johnson labour lady less Levana literary literature live look machinery man's manner matter Matthew Arnold means merely mind moral mystery ness never night observe Oxford movement passion perfection person Philistines philosophy pleasure poet poetry present prose prose poetry Protestantism Puritans Pyrrhonism Quincey reader reason religion Ruskin Sainte-Beuve seems sense Sir Roger society soul speak spirit style Suspiria de Profundis sweetness and light things thou thought tion true truth Uncon virtue waves whist whole wholly word writer young
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Page 7 - STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned.
Page 240 - Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
Page 8 - Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.
Page 12 - Magna civitas, magna solitudo ; " because in a great town friends are scattered, so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness...
Page 8 - Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body, may have appropriate exercises.
Page 246 - It is easy' in the world to live after the world's opinion ; it is easy in solitude to live after our own ; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Page 249 - Why drag about this corpse of your memory lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?
Page 247 - The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
Page 13 - ... no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.
Page 284 - Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all.