Transcendentalism in New England: A History

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G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1880 - 395 pages
 

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Page 101 - For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity ; Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man...
Page 239 - We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.
Page 243 - We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
Page 91 - ... on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had "inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.
Page 77 - A sublime man ; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood ; escaping from the black materialisms, and revolutionary deluges, with ' God, Freedom, Immortality' still his : a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer : but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this du-sky sublime character ; and sat there as a kind ot Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove...
Page 242 - This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.
Page 100 - But the imagination is conscious of an indestructible dominion ; — the Soul may fall away from it, not being able to sustain its grandeur; but, if once felt and acknowledged, by no act of any other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or diminished. — Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal.
Page 239 - Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.
Page 93 - Besides, it was talk not flowing any-whither like a river, but spreading every-whither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea ; terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay often in logical intelligibility ; what you were to believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost ; swamped near to drowning in this tide of 1 Biography, by Hare, pp. xvi-xxvi. ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless...
Page 90 - A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the gospel was a romance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity, which was not to be resisted. It was in January 1798 that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach.

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