Essays, Volume 2

Front Cover
Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1888 - American literature

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Contents

II
III
7
IV
43
V
75
VII
101
VIII
121
IX
135
X
147
XVI
227
XVII
231
XVIII
271
XIX
307
XX
335
XXI
29
XXII
39
XXIII
57

XII
157
XIII
175
XIV
185
XV
209

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Page 17 - To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.
Page 19 - Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Page 17 - A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Page 19 - A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.
Page 275 - Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes ; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Page 23 - ... when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.
Page 212 - He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets, — most likely his father's. He gets test, commodity, and reputation ; but he shuts the door of truth.
Page 45 - What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under ! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.
Page 28 - A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height 20 of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout...
Page 165 - There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

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