United States or Suriname ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Linked sweetness long drawn out. There are records of risings and fallings again, of alternate cloud and sunshine, throughout the book; earnest and passionate, yet never bitter; humble, yet never abject; with a depth and vehemence of affection "passing the love of woman," yet without a taint of sentimentality; self-restrained and dignified, without ever narrowing into artificial coldness; altogether rivalling the sonnets of Shakespeare; and all knit together into one spiritual unity by the proem at the opening of the volume in our eyes, the noblest English Christian poem which several centuries have seen.
These he translated with the view of defending, by the example of the Greek orators, his own style of eloquence, which, as we shall afterwards find, the critics of the day censured as too Asiatic in its character; and hence the proem, which still survives, is on the subject of the Attic style of oratory.
Never was any book so full of erudition and ideas so easy to read, a fascinating opus, written by a true sceptic. Following the Baedeker system, adopted so amusingly by Henry T. Finck in his "Songs and Song Writers," this book should be triple-starred. "Tales before Supper, from Théophile Gautier and Prosper Mérimée, told in English by Myndart Verelst and delayed with a proem by Edgar Saltus."
And it is to be observed that in this Proem I promise, firstly, to treat of the Truth, and then to confute the False; and in the treatise the opposite is done, for, in the first place, I confute the False, and then treat of the Truth, which does not appear rightly according to the promise.
A COACHMAN and two FOOTMEN. GRAND DUCHESS OF NOUMARIA, a capable woman. BARONESS VON ALTENBURG, a coquette. The Palace Gardens at Breschau. PROEM: In Default of the Hornpipe Customary to a Lengthy Interval between Acts
Until some further enlightenment comes to me, then, I confess myself wholly unable to understand the way in which the nebular hypothesis is to be converted into an ally of the "Mosaic writer." But Mr. Gladstone informs us that Professor Dana and Professor Guyot are prepared to prove that the "first or cosmogonical portion of the Proem not only accords with, but teaches, the nebular hypothesis."
The story is unmistakably high art, for from the opening lines of the proem you hear the slow, measured wing of death; and after you have read the volume, forever, for you, will the smoke of martyr-fires hover about the Piazza Signoria, and from the gates of San Marco you will see emerge that little man in black robe and cowl that homely, repulsive man with the curved nose, the protruding lower lip, the dark, leathery skin that man who lured and fascinated by his poise and power, whose words were whips of scorpions that stung his enemies until they had to silence him with a rope; and as a warning to those whom he had hypnotized, they burned his swart, shrunken body in the public square, just as he had burned their books and pictures.
But men of real learning also attacked me: Rondeletius, and Julius Scaliger; and Fuchsius, in the proem of his book, says that my work Medicinæ Contradictiones should be avoided like deadly poison. There is a passage from De Thou's History of his Own Times, affixed to all editions of the De Vita Propria, in which is given a contemporary sketch of Cardan during his residence at Rome.
Here was a revolution, we cannot doubt. The French Revolution was in a manner a complement to it, as Mr. History of Frederick the Great, iv. 328. See also vol. i., Proem. Frederick the Great, i. 9. As to the other great factor in the dissolution of the old state, the decay of ancient spiritual forms, Mr. Carlyle gives no uncertain sound.
As I may, without vanity, presume that the name and official description prefixed to this Proem will secure it, from the sedate and reflecting part of mankind, to whom only I would be understood to address myself, such attention as is due to the sedulous instructor of youth, and the careful performer of my Sabbath duties, I will forbear to hold up a candle to the daylight, or to point out to the judicious those recommendations of my labours which they must necessarily anticipate from the perusal of the title-page.
Word Of The Day