Talks on writing English

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Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896 - 259 páginas

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Página 8 - Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
Página 302 - The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town.
Página 25 - I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words ; when...
Página 175 - The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding him springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been proved unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no form of words...
Página 80 - Yet one tombstone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings ; and on this simple slab of slate — as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport — there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend ; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow : —...
Página 98 - Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, Like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season.
Página 40 - Every thing in him is in unmeasured abundance and unequalled perfection; but every thing so balanced and kept in subordination, as not to jostle or disturb, or take the place of another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions, are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn, without loading the sense they accompany.
Página 114 - The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Página 54 - A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson ; you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense. It is a linked strain throughout. In your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag ; they touch without adhering.
Página 302 - I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor, who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace, a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known.

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