English Essays from Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay: With Introductions, Notes and Illustrations

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Charles William Eliot
P.F. Collier & Son, 1910 - English essays - 421 pages
"A collection of essays written by English authors" --provided by cataloger.

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Page 372 - Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Page 354 - The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
Page 12 - Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew - forms such as never were in Nature...
Page 60 - Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech, but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke ; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion.
Page 14 - Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word M'V')<"s, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end — to teach and delight.
Page 60 - ... more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end.
Page 26 - ... he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.
Page 15 - For these third be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be, and should be.
Page 78 - Bridge, said I, standing in the Midst of the Tide. The Bridge thou seest, said he, is human Life, consider it attentively. Upon a more leisurely Survey of it, I found that it consisted of threescore and ten entire Arches, with several broken Arches, which added to those that were entire, made up the Number about an hundred.
Page 350 - Hence the vanity of translation ; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.

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