United States or Serbia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In fairness, I must also disclaim the flattering side of the portrait. I am no 'young Penthesilea mediis in millibus, but a plain country parson's daughter. "Once more I thank you, and that with a full heart. Immediately after the republication of her sisters' book she went to Miss Martineau's. I never shall forget last autumn!
Works of imagination written with an aim to immediate impression are commonly ephemeral, like Miss Martineau's 'Tales, and Elliott's 'Corn-law Rhymes; but the creative faculty of Mrs. Stowe, like that of Cervantes in 'Don Quixote' and of Fielding in 'Joseph Andrews, overpowered the narrow specialty of her design, and expanded a local and temporary theme with the cosmopolitanism of genius.
They kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr. Martineau's philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their Planet considering its Future, but insensibly they developed the idiosyncrasies of their position.
I find the proposal marvellously to my taste; it is the pleasantest, gentlest, sweetest, temptation possible; but, delectable as it is, its solicitations are by no means to be yielded to without the sanction of reason, and therefore I desire for the present to be silent, and to stand back till I have been to Miss Martineau's, and returned home, and considered well whether it is a scheme as right as agreeable.
I must explain this to you, and this will involve the mention of another of Miss Martineau's mistakes with regard to slave labour, at least in many parts of the Southern States.
Now really I don't know why I should fancy you to be so deeply interested in Dr. Bright, that all this detail should be necessary. What I do want you to be interested in, is in Miss Martineau's mesmeric experience, for a copy of which, in the last 'Athenaeum, I have sent ever since yesterday, in the intention of sending it to you.
The Life of George Stephenson; the Electra of Sophocles; the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Harriet Martineau's British Empire in India; and History of the Thirty Years' Peace; Béranger, Modern Painters, containing some of the finest writing of the age; Overbech on Greek art; Anna Mary Howitt's book on Munich; Carlyle's Life of Frederick the Great; Darwin's Origin of Species; Emerson's Man the Reformer, "which comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning"; Buckle's History of Civilization; Plato and Aristotle.
All morning Mamma and Aunt Lavvy sat in the dining-room, one on each side of the fireplace. Aunt Lavvy read James Martineau's Endeavours After the Christian Life, and Mamma read "The Pulpit in the Family" out of the Sunday At Home. Somehow you couldn't do it with Aunt Lavvy in the room. In the afternoon when she went upstairs to lie down perhaps.
In some of the West Indies, blood-hounds are employed to hunt negroes; and this fact is the foundation of one of the most painfully interesting scenes in Miss Martineau's Demerara. A writer by the name of Dallas has the hardihood to assert that it is mere sophistry to censure the practice of training dogs to devour men. He asks, "Did not the Asiatics employ elephants in war?
If this occurred after 1836 or 1837 it has no disagreement with Harriet Martineau's account, that at the latter date Madame Lalaurie was supposed to be still "skulking about some French province under a false name." The house remained untouched for at least three years, "ornamented with various writings expressive of indignation and just punishment."
Word Of The Day