Essays in Criticism: Third Series, Volume 10 |
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adequate admirable Æneid age of Pericles age of prose ancient ancient Greece Aristophanes Athens awfully Beatrice beautiful century character charm Dante Dante's deliverance diary Dryden dysentery Ekowe Element in Literature endeavour England English epoch Essays in Criticism Eton fact fault feel Following of Christ Fort Pearson France French future critic Greece hear heart human ideal intellectual interest interpret Johnson laager less letters literary lives lucidity Lucretius Luther marched Matthew Arnold Menander ment miles Milton mind Modern Element moral morning Mynors mythology nation nature ness never night Obermann passed Pearson Peloponnesian War perfect Pericles poem poet poetical poetry point of view possessed race religion Renan Saint Blaise Sainte-Beuve says Senancour sense Sophocles soul spectacle spirit style Tauler Theologia Germanica things thought Thucydides tion to-day true truth Tugela ture words write Zulus
Popular passages
Page 144 - It is an honour for a man to cease from strife : but every fool will be meddling.
Page 213 - Such equivocations are always unskilful ; but here they are indecent, and at least approach to impiety, of which, however, I believe the writer not to have been conscious. Such is the power of reputation justly acquired, that its blaze drives away the eye from nice examination. Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known the author.
Page 46 - Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert ; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates ; the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden.
Page 32 - That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness: but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity.
Page 45 - I add, that it is to the poetical_Jiterature of an age that we must, in general, look for the most perfect, the most adequate interpretation of that age, — for the performance of a work which demands the most energetic and harmonious activity of all the powers of the human mind.
Page 39 - It is perfect when we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension.
Page 143 - ... be absurd to place Sainte-Beuve on a level with Moliere or Milton; is it any longer absurd to place him on a level with Lamartine, or even above him? In other words, excellent work in a lower kind counts in the long run above work which is short of excellence in a higher; first-rate criticism has a permanent value greater than that of any but first-rate works of poetry and art.
Page 155 - You had all these advantages in your ancient states ; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew.
Page 201 - THEY, who to states and governors of the commonwealth direct their speech, high court of parliament! or wanting such access in a private condition, write that which they foresee may advance the public good; I suppose them, as at the beginning of no mean endeavour, not a little altered and moved inwardly in their minds...