United States or Nauru ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
With the revival of Romantic imagination, however, came a new interest in the "irregular" ode, whose strophic arrangement ebbs and flows without apparent restraint, subject only to what Watts-Dunton termed "emotional law." Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" moves in obedience to its own rhythmic impulses only, like Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Emerson's "Bacchus."
A bunk made of rough timbers and mattressed with twigs of fur was covered with some blankets and clothing, tossed into heaps. Under the blankets at the head of the bunk I found a little pile of books a Shakespeare, a volume of Emerson's essays, Thoreau's "Walden," and a well-worn "Iliad," in the Greek text.
But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor, each a wild man in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the nature of the occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the only 'call' in which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved. "In Mr. Emerson's house I said it seemed always morning. But Hawthorne's black-ash trees and scraggy apple boughs shaded
That is what I felt in my inmost brain and heart, when I only answer'd Emerson's vehement arguments with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common.
Other people besides Tony were inclined to score Phil's folly in making a hermit of himself. His sisters attacked him that very night on the subject of Sue Emerson's dance and accused him of being a "Grumpy Grandpa" and a grouch and various other uncomplimentary things when he announced that he wasn't going to attend the function.
Many of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on the English poets. The book has no worthless selections, almost everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet Emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections.
The prizes or fancied prizes of politics seem to have corrupted all the great men of that day Webster, Choate, Foote, Clay, Everett. Their "disgusting obsequiousness" to the South fired Emerson's wrath. The orthodox brethren of his time, and probably of our time also, I fancy, could make very little of Emerson's religion.
I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody knows by whom, or when it was applied." Emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments.
I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I. As if he had said, 'All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy." All of which we see reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."
He had a balanced mind if there ever was one. Carlyle considered the "Conduct of Life" to be Emerson's best book, and there was reason why it should be. It was the subject of all others which he knew most about. Conduct had been the study of his life. Behavior was a fine art with him, cultivated partly from motives of prudence but more for its own sake.
Word Of The Day