Exercises on Words: Designed as a Course of Practice on the Rudiments of Grammar and Rhetoric

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Whittemore, Niles & Hall, 1856 - 225 páginas

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Página 149 - Methinks this single consideration of the progress of a finite spirit to perfection, will be sufficient to extinguish all envy in inferior natures, and all contempt in superior.
Página 130 - And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and...
Página 200 - In its legitimate and highest efforts, it has the same tendency and aim with Christianity ; that is, to spiritualize our nature. True ; poetry has been made the instrument of vice, the pander of bad passions ; but when genius thus stoops, it dims its fires, and...
Página 163 - Of composition there are different methods. Some employ at once memory and invention, and, with little intermediate use of the pen, form and polish large masses by continued meditation, and write their productions only when, in their own opinion, they have completed them.
Página 160 - But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.
Página 202 - ... of our earthly being. The present life is not wholly prosaic, precise, tame, and finite. To the gifted eye it abounds in the poetic. The affections which spread beyond ourselves and stretch far into futurity ; the workings of mighty passions, which seem to arm the soul with an almost superhuman energy ; the innocent and irrepressible joy of infancy ; the bloom, and buoyancy, and dazzling hopes of youth ; the tbrobbings of the heart, when it first wakes to love...
Página 164 - He professed to have learned his poetry from Dryden, whom, whenever an opportunity was presented, he praised through his whole life with unvaried liberality; and perhaps his character may receive some illustration if he be compared with his master.
Página 201 - It reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the spring-time of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature by vivid delineations of its tenderest and loftiest feelings, spreads our sympathies over all classes of society, knits us by new ties with universal being, and, through, the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold...
Página 201 - It delights in the beauty and sublimity of the outward creation and of the soul. It indeed portrays with terrible energy the excesses of the passions ; but they are passions which show a mighty nature, which are full of power, which command awe, and excite a deep though shuddering sympathy.
Página 131 - It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea ; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below : but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of Truth, (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene,) and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below ; so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride.

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