Historical Essays, Volume 2

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Macmillan and Company, 1873 - Europe - 339 pages
 

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Page 313 - From the still glassy lake that sleeps Beneath Aricia's trees — Those trees in whose dim shadow The ghastly priest doth reign, The priest who slew the slayer, And shall himself be slain...
Page 92 - To pass from the study of Homer to the ordinary business of the world, is to step out of a palace of enchantment into the cold gray light of a polar day. But the spells in which this sorcerer deals have no affinity with that drug from Egypt, which drowns the spirit in effeminate indifference : rather they are like the...
Page 93 - Egypt which drowns the spirit in effeminate indifference ; rather they are like the <f>dp/j,a/cov e<rd\6v, the remedial specific, which, freshening the understanding by contact with the truth and strength of nature, should both improve its vigilance against deceit and danger, and increase its vigour and resolution for the discharge of duty.
Page 308 - ... aside. We may correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since Gibbon's time ; we may write again large parts of his story from other and often truer and more wholesome points of view, but the work of Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of 1300 years, as the grandest of historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too.
Page 53 - What strikes one more than anything else throughout Mr. Gladstone's volumes is the intense earnestness, the loftiness of moral purpose, which breathes in every page. He has not taken up Homer as a plaything, nor even as a mere literary enjoyment. To him the study of the Prince of Poets is clearly a means by which himself and other men may be made wiser and better.
Page 206 - ... it, and to crowd so many memorable actions within so short a period: but in the course which his ambition took, in the collateral aims which ennobled and purified it, so that it almost grew into one with the highest of which man is capable, the desire of knowledge, and the love of good.
Page 73 - ... such a degree, indeed, that the rank and quality of the religious frame may in general be tested, at least negatively, by the height of its relish for them. There is the whole music of the human heart, when touched by the hand of the Maker, in all its tones that whisper or that swell, for every hope and fear, for every joy and pang, for every form of strength and languor, of disquietude and rest.
Page 301 - Sulpitius, tribunus plebis, disertus, acer, opibus, gratia, amicitiis, vigore ingenii atque animiceleberrimus, quum antea rectissima voluntate apud populum maximam quaesisset dignitatem , quasi pigeret eum virtutum suarum, et bene consulta ei male cederent, subito pravus et praeceps, C. Mario post LXX annum omnia imperia et omnes provincias concupiscenti addixit, legemque ad populum tulit, qua Sullae imperium abrogaretur, C.
Page 92 - Freeman, though these learned men do not accept all his theories or follow his deductions from the narrative. He has ' done such justice to Homer and his age as Homer has never received out of his own land. He has vindicated the true position of the greatest of poets ; he has cleared his tale and its actors from the misrepresentation of ages.

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