Outlines of English Literature

Front Cover
Blanchard and Lea, 1863 - American literature - 465 pages

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 243 - Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike...
Page 157 - With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light. There let the pealing organ blow, To the full-voiced quire below, In service high and anthems clear, As may with sweetness, through mine ear, Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all Heaven before mine eyes.
Page 236 - I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives, to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Page 246 - Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
Page 168 - Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model: or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be...
Page 191 - Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind ; The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.
Page 243 - Like Cato, give his little senate laws, And sit attentive to his own applause ; While wits and templars every sentence raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise ; Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? Who would not weep if Atticus were he? What though my name stood rubric on the walls, Or plaster'd posts, with claps, in capitals ? Or smoking forth, a hundred hawkers...
Page 123 - You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry 'Hold, hold!
Page 114 - Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo's laurel bough, That sometime grew within this learned man. Faustus is gone : regard his hellish fall, Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise Only to wonder at unlawful things, Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practise more than heavenly power permits.
Page 268 - The successors of Charles V. may disdain their brethren of England: but the romance of 'Tom Jones,' that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of Austria.

Bibliographic information