Critical Essays of the Early Nineteenth Century

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Raymond Macdonald Alden
C. Scribner's Sons, 1921 - Criticism - 410 pages

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Page 216 - I have lived long enough : my way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf ; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have ; but, in their stead, Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
Page 212 - tis later, sir. Ban. Hold, take my sword. There's husbandry in heaven, Their candles are all out. Take thee that too. A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers, Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature Gives way to in repose!
Page 229 - Ingratitude ! thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child Than the sea-monster ! Alb.
Page 13 - Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing : it is so : its object is truth^ not individual and local, but general, and operative ; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion...
Page 384 - The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.
Page 222 - The Lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic. Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
Page 3 - ... a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.
Page 104 - DURING the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.
Page 162 - Made for our searching : yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep ; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in...
Page 233 - Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : The genius, and the mortal instruments, Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

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