"Emerson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Egyptian Archaeology," "A Companion to Greek Studies," Guy de Maupassant's "Fort Comme la Mort," D'Annunzio's "Trionfo della Morte," and Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter." There was also a volume of Emerson's "Essays." In a little basket under the writing-table lay the last number of The Winning Post, carefully destroyed. There were a few pink roses in a vase. In a cage some canary-birds were singing. The furniture had been pulled about by a ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the Divinity of Business. He anticipated Emerson by saying, "Commerce consists in making things for people who need them, and carrying them from where they are plentiful to where ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... first parcel arrived last October: Emily was then beginning to be ill—the opening of the parcel and examination of the books cheered her; their perusal occupied her for many a weary day. The very evening before her last morning dawned I read to her one of Emerson's essays. I read on, till I found she was not listening—I thought to recommence next day. Next day, the first glance at her face told me ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... to Concord during this interval to carry on his studies under the minister of the town. Here he found it pretty dull, though Emerson and Thoreau were there. But he did not then care for either one of them. In one of his letters he said, "I feel like a fool. I must go down and see Emerson and if he doesn't make me feel more like one, it won't be for want of sympathy. He is ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... Alexander Ireland's book—so much drawn upon in this essay—is "The Book-Lover's Enchiridion, a Treasury of Thoughts on the Solace and Companionship of Books, Gathered from the Writings of the Greatest Thinkers, from Cicero, Petrarch, and Montaigne, to Carlyle, Emerson, and Ruskin" ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... for purposes of culture would require the combined efforts of a tribe. For the same reason, dwellings could not be erected; and without dwellings domestic tranquillity, security, culture, and refinement, especially in a rude climate, were all but impossible. Mr. Emerson well observes, that "the effect of a house is immense on human tranquillity, power, and refinement. A man in a cave or a camp—a nomad—dies with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple a labour as a house being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at bay. He ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... rivet and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm." Emerson. The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... devotional elements, and of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side—these and many others—have made most precious additions to our store of religious poetry. The century has been one of great perturbations in religious thought; the advent of the evolutionary philosophy threatened all the theological ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... from the Punjab, the carnelians and agates from Tibet, the corals from Arabia, the sapphires and other precious stones from Ceylon, and the genius that combined them all came from Heaven. Madame de Stael never saw this gem of India, and yet she said that architecture was frozen music. Emerson would have called it ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... him for being a bootblack.' All Americans should have their chance. And both my grandfathers were in the Confederate Army."[13-80] Symington had successfully combined efficiency and humanitarianism before. (p. 339) As president of the Emerson Electric Manufacturing Company of St. Louis, he had racially integrated a major industry carrying out vital war work in a border state, thereby increasing productivity. When he became secretary, Symington was immediately involved ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... was born and bred in Westford. Edna Knight was her name—the daughter of Justin Knight, the local attorney, half-lawyer and half-dreamer. His parents were followers of Emerson, and there have been plain living and high thinking in that family for three generations. Look at her," I added, as she breasted a giant wave and jubilantly threw herself into its embrace, "she takes to the water like a duck. I never saw a girl so ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... matter of vital concern that the freight on spruce boards from Bangor to New York has increased to five dollars a thousand feet. Many of these craft belong to grandfatherly skippers who dared not venture past Cape Cod in December, lest the venerable Matilda Emerson or the valetudinarian Joshua R. Coggswell should open up and founder in a blow. During the winter storms these skippers used to hug the kitchen stove in bleak farmhouses until spring came and they could put to sea again. The rigor of circumstances, however, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... The Conduct of Life gives fairly enough the leading thought of Emerson's life. The unending warfare between the individual and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a musician who exalts and deifies the individual, and leads us back again to the only object which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Carlyle at present, as we had an essay on "The influence of individuals on great movements of religion, politics, and thought," for which I read especially Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," and Emerson's "Representative Men," and for which, I am glad to say, I not only got full marks, but the highest maximum possible. Have read Tennyson's "Queen Mary." Am reading "Harold." I liked the first very much, but the latter ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... amongst the working classes is surely evidence that the Marxian doctrine "the emancipation of the working classes must be brought about by the working classes themselves"[795] has so far led to no great results. Emerson truly observed: "So far as a man thinks, he is free." The working classes can never be free until they learn to think for themselves instead of allowing their thinking to be done for them by the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... when the plant's goal is reached, it is not a finality. "There is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning. Every ultimate fact is only the beginning of a new series."[Footnote*:Emerson] "While the earth remaineth seed-time and harvest . . . shall not cease." Life leads on to new death, and new death back to life again. Over and over when we think we know our lesson, we find ourselves beginning another round of God's Divine spiral: "in deaths oft" is the measure ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... his quiet travelling-dress, the soft modulation and refined tone of his voice on the one occasion when she heard him reply to some importunity of the train-boy with his endless round of equally questionable figs and fiction, the book he was reading,—a volume of Emerson,—all combined to speak of a culture and position equal to her own. She had been over the trans-continental railways often enough to know that it was permissible for gentlemen to render their fellow-passengers some slight attention which would lead to mutual ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... reminds me of an incident which occurred on the road between Saratoga Springs and Dunham's Basin. As the public coach stopped at a place called Emerson, our attention was attracted by a wagon-load of persons who had stopped at the inn, and were just resuming their journey. The father was a robust, healthy-looking man of some forty years of age; ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... often the one who acquires notoriety and a bank account, but he is likely to have candid friends who admit, though not always in his presence, that, aside from this one professional gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emotionally or spiritually superior to his brothers and sisters. Waldo Emerson thought himself the intellectual inferior of his brother Charles; and good observers loved to maintain that John Holmes was wittier than Oliver Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... and had been inherited by him, just as rank and station are inherited in this country.[40] And that caste can exist without religion, and alongside of a religion as opposite to Brahminism as Christianity is, we have the most indisputable evidence supplied by the late Sir Emerson Tennent, in his "History ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... one kind of stuff. Now there are two kinds, and only two kinds. These two kinds are not prose and poetry, nor are they divided the one from the other by any differences of form or of subject. They are the inspiring kind and the informing kind. No other genuine division exists in literature. Emerson, I think, first clearly stated it. His terms were the literature of "power" and the literature of "knowledge." In nearly all great literature the two qualities are to be found in company, but one usually ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... Nature's limitations only are the bounds of your success. So far as your success is concerned, no man, no set of men, no society, not even all the world of humanity, is your master; but Nature is. "We cannot," says Emerson, "bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... writers in literature and criticism, of whom George Ripley (1802-1880) was a representative. The "transcendentalists," as they were popularly styled, with whom these were often at the outset affiliated, were much influenced by contemporary French and German authors and speculations. Emerson, was the most prominent writer in this vaguely defined class. A periodical called "The Dial" ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... with Burke and Burns and Wordsworth. Shelley and Byron, Tennyson and Carlyle are here of course, but with them are John Stuart Mill and John Bright and John Morley. There are passages from Webster and Emerson, from Lowell and Walt Whitman and Lincoln, and finally, from the eloquent lips of living men—from Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour and Viscount Grey and President Wilson—there are pleas for international honor and international ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... put Miss Murdock into Porter Emerson Browne's play "A Girl of To-day," which had its first presentation in Washington. Frohman, Miss Murdock, and her mother were riding from the station in Washington to the Shoreham Hotel. As they passed the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... address for Emerson's Hand Book of Saws (free). Over 100 illustrations and pages of valuable information. How to straighten saws, etc. Emerson, Smith & Co., ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... been promised the coming of the perfect man—the "man-god," as Emerson said. This means the God in Man consciously active, and awake. This God-nature of Man's has been asleep, submerged under the domination of the animal nature ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... the Potomac to the Rio Grande; whose soldiers numbered a million men on each side. The labor, the thought, the responsibility, the strain of mind and anguish of soul that he gave to his great task, who can measure? "Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair-weather sailor," as Emerson justly said of him. "The new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four years—four years of battle days—his endurance, his fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting." "By his courage, his justice, his ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... colored man, the slave of Mr. Emerson; of Portsmouth, Virginia, being under deep conviction for sin, went into the back part of his master's garden to pour out his soul in prayer to God. For this offence he was whipped ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... said. "I've got immense accumulations of the wealth of the ages—ingots of Emerson and Whitman, for example, gems of Voltaire, and I can't tell what other superfluous coinage!" (And I waved my hand in the most grandiloquent manner.) "I've also quite a store of knowledge of corn and calves and cucumbers, and ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... I think you can reach it a good deal through literature. I do not see how anybody can read Mr. Hawthorne or Mr. Emerson, and not long to be a gentleman, and feel as if he would like to be worthy to kiss the hem of the garment of those literary gentlemen. You can read history. You can make history a dreary chronicle. ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... that hospitality was again occasionally had by our parents; who had originally had it to such a happy end that on January 9th, 1842, my elder brother had come into the world there. It remained a tradition with him that our father's friend from an early time, R. W. Emerson, then happening to be in New York and under that convenient roof, was proudly and pressingly "taken upstairs" to admire and give his blessing to the lately-born babe who was to become the second American William James. The blessing was to be renewed, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... lovely clothes, with soft colors and—and graceful lines, any more. I'm going to take care of our lovely old mahogany furniture and try to make the cottage an attractive place for people with brains. After all, the real thinkers of the country were poor—Emerson and his circle, how simply they lived! You see, Billy, if I clutter up my mind with furniture and clothes, I won't have time ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... is very pretty and romantic in novels, but love in a cottage actually thriving on "bread and water," was a sweet reality in the home of the young couple in Roxbury. "All the world loves a lover," says Emerson, but alas! there are exceptions to all rules, and all the world loved not Garrison in his newly found felicity ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... to secure a well-salaried position, or even if he be so wedded to his specialty as to fail to be sensitive to the relations of it to the body of truth in general. And the same holds good of the narrow-minded reformer, of whom Emerson has said that his virtue so painfully resembles vice; the man who puts a moral idol in the place of the moral ideal, who erects into the object toward which all his enthusiasm goes some particular reform, such as the single tax, or socialism, or public ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... congregate, and where one was always sure to meet someone worth knowing. Their hospitality was generous to an extreme, and so boundless that they were, at last, fairly eaten out of house and home. Here, too, for the first time, I met Theodore Parker, John Pierpont, John G. Whittier, Emerson, Alcott, Lowell, Hawthorne, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel E. Sewall, Sidney Howard Gay, Pillsbury, Foster, Frederick Douglass, and last though not least, those noble men, Charles Hovey and Francis Jackson, the only men who ever left any money to the cause of woman suffrage. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... sunrise; the sunbeams focused on a thread burned it through, allowing the bed machinery to put me on my feet. When I wished to arise at any given time after sunrise, I had only to turn the pivoted frame that held the lens the requisite number of degrees or minutes. Thus I took Emerson's advice and hitched my dumping-wagon ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... sun. Yet his crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind. But I have this advantage over him—I might make literature out of his haymaking, or might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest he never dreamed of. What does Emerson say? ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... colors, clouds Grass-buds, and caterpillar shrouds Boughs on which the wild bees settle, Tints that spot the violet's petal." EMERSON'S WOOD-NOTES. ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... the shade of Emerson, which had strolled in while Shakespeare was talking, "that isn't ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... with pen pictures of the participants. The story finally reaches the crisis when Garrison stood as a central figure. The work contains a retrospect and a prospect, an excellent account of the man in action, the Rynders Mob, Garrison and Emerson, and foreign influence. The story closes with a summary and an impressive epilogue. Although not a scientific treatise it certainly furnishes stimulus to further study, and when a student thus interested has read it, he will desire to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... least heard her stirring Chanukkah recitations, "The Feast of Lights," and "The Banner of the Jew." Her poems had always been very beautiful, winning the praises of such a high critic as Ralph Waldo Emerson, but now they glowed with a new beauty, her love and new found kinship with ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... calamity are made apparent after long intervals of time. The sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all fact. —EMERSON. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... the great George Romney as being equipped to produce a work "worthy of the greatest of Americans." His success is attested by the praise of Washington's adopted son, who declared the Sharples portraits to be "the truest likenesses ever made," and by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw the pictures later in England and wrote: "I would willingly have crossed the Atlantic, if only ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... on the great lack of dissimilarity in tastes. Nearly every one preferred spring to any other season, with a very few exceptions in favor of autumn. The women loved Mrs. Browning and Longfellow; the men showed decided preferences after Emerson and Macauley. Conceit stuck out when the majority wanted to be themselves and none other, and only two did not want to live in the 19th century. But in one place, in answer to the question, "Whom would you rather be, if not ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... how much greater would each one of us be if, in a simple straightforward manner, we frankly said and did the best that we knew, without fear or favor? Soon would be found gifts that none had dreamed of, powers that none had imagined, and heroism that was thought impossible. As Emerson well says, "He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles, just as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... moment! Let me tell you something. This letter holds the key to the secret. Trying to interest people in our work, I've been writing right and left trying to raise more capital on terms that would be fair to us. Now, here's a letter from Broughton Emerson, a man worth millions. He admits that my letter has interested him. He'll come here, soon, and he states that, if we can show him a good enough chance to make money he will put in the needed capital, taking satisfactory security, and yet leave the business under ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... essential in making any selection either of verse or prose which shall possess broader and more enduring qualities than that of being a mere exhibition of the editor's personal taste. To illustrate my meaning: Emerson's "Parnassus" is extremely interesting as an exposition of the tastes and preferences of a remarkable man of great and original genius. As an anthology it is a failure, for it is of awkward size, is ill arranged and contains selections made without system, and which ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... the most fascinating of our literary guides have been philosophical egotists. Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Pater, Stendhal, Maurice Barres (in his earlier work), de Gourmont, D'Annunzio, Oscar Wilde—are all, in their widely different ways, masters of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... collection of materia medica samples.[15] Also in 1941, Eli Lilly and Company donated an exhibit on the medical treatment of various types of anemia. In the same year, a diorama including a hypochlorinator for purification of water on a farm was installed in the gallery. In 1942, the first Emerson iron lung (developed in 1931 by John Haven Emerson) for artificial respiration was acquired by the Division. The Division acquired, in 1944, the first portable x-ray machine known to have been operated successfully on the battlefield, as ...
— History of the Division of Medical Sciences • Sami Khalaf Hamarneh
... for so little, in this wonderful world of mind! For eight cents he picked up a paper volume of Emerson's "Essays"; and in this shrewd and practical nobility was so much that he was seeking in life! And then he stumbled upon a fifteen-cent edition of "Sartor Resartus", and took that home and read it. It was like the clash of trumpets and cymbals to him; it made ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... evidence furnished by the Puranas and Mahavansa, which he also finds hopelessly entangled and contradictory (though the perfect accuracy of that Sinhalese history is most warmly acknowledged by Sir Emerson Tennant, the historian), he opposes the Greek classics and their chronology. With him, it is always "Alexander's invasion" and "Conquest," and "the ambassador of Seleucus Nicator-Megasthenes," while even ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... adore. It is, as a matter of fact, largely the influence of the personality of the president filtering down through the ranks which has made possible the phenomenal success which the institution has enjoyed during the past few years, another proof of the fact that every institution—and Emerson was speaking of great institutions when he said it—"is the ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... Twins?" suggested Arline. "They would be good material, and they are both splendid on committees. Julia Emerson nearly worked her head off for the sophomore reception ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing children into the world. When evolving persons have reached individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them, they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of name. The race that produced Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red Indian westward off the face ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... we separately are, why that, and that only, can be the light by which you or I may hope to read the Universal: that, and that only, deserves the name of 'What Is.' Nay, I can convince you in a moment. Let me recall a passage of Emerson quoted by me on the morning I first had the honour to address ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... school -boy careers can not meet social as well as intellectual recognition while at West Point, let them study on and acquit themselves like men, for they will meet, out in the world, a worthy reception among men of worth, who have put by the prejudices of race and the shackles of ignorance. Emerson says somewhere that "Solitude, the nurse of Genius, is the foe of mediocrity." If our young men of ability have the stuff in them to make men out of, they need not fear "to be let alone" for a while; they will ultimately come to the ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... like Swift, nor declaim and sap faith, like Bolingbroke, nor rhyme and glitter like Pope, nor discourse on medals and write comical "Pilgrims' Progresses" like Arbuthnot, nor pour out floods of learning like Prior in "Alma," could do things which they in their turn never equalled, (even as in Emerson's poem, "The Mountain and the Squirrel," the latter wisely ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... like a letter," said Emerson; "it has intent, personality, secrecy." Flimsy and frail as it is, so easily torn or destroyed, the love-letter many times outlasts the love. Even the Father of his Country, though he has been dead this hundred ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... use," she said in a whisper to Wee Watts, who occupied a seat with her, "I can't get my brain in working order to-day to save me. Have you a glimmer of an idea about Emerson's essay on 'Compensation?' I've ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... goose-quest." I replied, "You have always a phrase for everything, Tom, but always the wrong one." He covered his face, and presently, peering at me through his gnarled fingers, said "Mon, ye're recht." I discussed the problem with Renan, with Emerson, with Disraeli, also with Cetewayo—poor Cetewayo, best and bravest of men, but intellectually a Professor, like the rest of them. It was borne in on me that if I were to win to the heart of the mystery ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... to ascend it, step by step, dimension by dimension. Then he will learn to trust Emerson's dictum, "Nature geometrizes," even in regions where the senses fail him, and the mind alone leads on. Much profitable amusement is to be gained by such exercises as follow. They are in the nature of a running ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... for the use of the poems and stanzas here found from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Rowland Sill, Celia Thaxter, Caroline Atherton Mason, Edna Dean Proctor, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Burroughs, John Hay, William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucy Larcom, Margaret E. Sangster, Francis Bret Harte, James ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... transition and change—a happy American home. The people of this western Athens pride themselves upon the intellectual society and the number of eminent men which they possess, among whom may be named Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Dana, and Summer. One of these at least is of the transcendental school. I very much regretted that I had not more time to devote to a city so rich in various objects of interest; but the northern winter had already begun, and howling winds and angry seas warned ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists, and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where they ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... good, enjoy it; if evil, endure. Let us, in any case, keep our eyes and senses open, and not lose their impressions in dreaming of an irretrievable past or of an impenetrable future. "Write it on your heart," says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), "that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, poor dupe! will you never learn that as soon ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... faint rumblings also in Congress, but like so many of its feelings they were confined largely to the cloak rooms. Representative Emerson of Ohio did demand from the floor of the House that the "suffrage guard be withdrawn, as it is an insult to the President," but his protest met with no response whatever from the other members. His oratory fell on indifferent ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... Adventures in the Far South West.* By Emerson Bennett, author of "Prairie Flower," "Viola," etc. This has been appearing in the columns of the Saturday Evening Post for the last twelve weeks, where it has proved to be one of the most popular ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... under Lieutenant Emerson marched to Rawal Pindi, a distance of fifty-four miles, in two days, and ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... a high counsel which I once heard given to a young person: 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'"—EMERSON. ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... never courted notoriety; indeed, his life has been more or less secluded. However, let a man do remarkable work in any line and, as Emerson has observed, "the world will make a beaten path to ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... in the habit of reaching his ends by the nearest ways, he took his place at the bar with a promise of success rarely exceeded. From his widowed mother, who died before he reached his majority, Hartley Emerson inherited a moderate fortune with which to begin the world. Few young men started forward on their life-journey with so small a number of vices, or with so spotless a moral character. The fine intellectual cast of his mind, and his devotion to study, lifted ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... lived on 'The Idler' and 'The Rambler' and tried to imitate their ponderous prose. His first contributions to literature, modeled on these essays, were promptly returned. By chance he picked up a volume of Emerson, the master who was to revolutionize his whole manner of thinking; and as he had fed on Dr. Johnson he fed on the 'Essays and Miscellanies,' until a paper he wrote at nineteen on 'Expressions' was accepted by the editor of the Atlantic, with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... to design a lunatic asylum on that basis, but I didn't dare say so, as Mr. Copley seemed to think it all right. Their conversation is absolutely sublimated when they get to talking of architecture. I have just copied two quotations from Emerson, and am studying them every night for fifteen minutes before I go to sleep. I'm going to quote them some time offhand, just after morning service, when we are wandering about the cathedral grounds. The first is this: "The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sword; its voice calls no longer to strife, but to peace; it now inspires and uplifts, and Greek literature ends with Socrates and Plato, Rome with Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, England with Carlyle and Ruskin, America with Emerson, and Germany with Goethe. Letters indeed go on in England, in America, and in Germany, but the cycle is completed; and higher than Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin, the soul need not seek to ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... removed, Kester hobbled in willingly to dust the books, and Audrey and Mollie arranged them on the shelves. There were not so very many, but they were all well and carefully chosen—Greek and Latin authors, all Carlyle's and Emerson's works, a few books of history and philosophy, the principal poets, and some standard works of fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, and Sir Walter Scott—the latter bound very handsomely. Audrey felt sure, as she placed the books on the shelves, that this little library was collected by a great ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... entirely. Here and there experiments continued to be carried out, and certain valuable conclusions were arrived at. Many advanced thinkers and writers of half a century ago set forth their opinions on the possibilities of human flight. Some of them, like Emerson, not only believed that flight would come, but also stated why it had not arrived. Thus Emerson, when writing on the subject of air navigation about fifty years ago, remarked: "We think the population is not yet quite fit for them, and therefore there will be none. Our friend ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... secured. Maurice had no funds at his command; but Mr. Lorrillard suggested that the viscount could easily procure the ten thousand dollars needful by a mortgage upon his Maryland estate, and even offered to give him a letter to Mr. Emerson,—a personal friend residing in Washington,—who, as the estate was wholly unembarrassed, would willingly loan the money upon this security. It was hardly possible for Maurice to have resided so long in America without being slightly bitten by the national ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... says Emerson in The Problem, a poem, which seems particularly addressed to architects, and which every one of them would do well ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Alice B. Emerson which are bound to make this writer more popular than ever with her ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... compare a story about a great American author, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson loved all the forms of Nature. He wrote of the bee, of the wild flowers, of the storm, of the snowbird, and of running waters. And in talking of the magic of a river he reminds ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... Sir Emerson Tennent, in his popular and excellent work on Ceylon, gives an account of "snake stones" apparently similar to the one at Corfu, except that they are "intensely black and highly polished," and which are applied, in much the same manner, to the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the evening,—a paper read by Mrs. Potts; subject, "The Message of Emerson." With an agreeable public manner the lady erected herself at one corner of a square piano, placed her manuscripts under the shaded lamp, and began. The subject, aforetime made known among us, had been talked about and perhaps ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... are more exterior to their work; they are less personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker. It does not change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most mystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. They submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does not justify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and able a writer as Longfellow illustrates fully the truth of these suggestions. Mr. Charles F. Johnson, in a well-written essay on Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, says: ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... a shabby little village but a few miles from Florence. In another village near by was born Leonardo. "Great men never come singly," says Emerson. And yet Angelo and Leonardo exercised no influence upon each other that we can trace. The younger man never came under the spell of the older one, but moved straight on to his destiny, showing not the slightest arc ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, American writer who inspired his readers to conquer the world. Several have failed. Also advised the practical theory of hitching your wagon to the stars. Lived before the ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... experience and reflection. Having as yet only wandered around the edges of the sacred groves of wisdom where these pitiless teachers break the sweet shackles of their pupils, he still thought the thoughts of childhood and instinctively obeyed the injunction of Emerson, to "reverence the dreams of our youth," and the admonition of Richter, that "when we cease to do so, then dies the man in us." Whatever might have been the real nature of these emotional experiences, no one doubted ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... joined by Charles A. Dana, now of the New York Sun. Hawthorne's residence at the Farm, commemorated in the Blithedale Romance, had terminated before Mr. Dana's began. The Curtis brothers, Burrill and George William, were there when Isaac Hecker came. Emerson was an occasional visitor; so was Margaret Fuller. Bronson Alcott, then cogitating his own ephemeral experiment at Fruitlands, sometimes descended on the gay community and was doubtless "Orphic" at his leisure. The association ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... as close as your paper comes to the truth?" asked Ernestine, piling up Emerson that he might ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... Hill was born in Mason, Nov. 25, 1796, and was graduated at Harvard College in 1821. Among his classmates were Governor Kent of Maine, Charles W. Upham of Salem, Senator Barnwell of South Carolina, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science Scholastic and Bedside Teaching The Medical Profession in Massachusetts The Young Practitioner Medical Libraries Some of My Early Teachers A Memoir of John Lothrop Motley A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson Our Hundred ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... habits, and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics, in his ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dominated and absorbed all else. For some time, beside his scientific books, there lay others from a class not hitherto very congenial to him, that which contains the great examples in our day, outside the poets, of the poetical or imaginative treatment of ethics—Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin. At an age when most young minds of intelligence amongst us are first seized by these English masters, he had been wandering in French paths. 'Sartor Resartus,' Emerson's 'Essays,' 'The Seven Lamps,' ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... against the universe; operations had begun. Jostling Shakespeare, Emerson's Essays, and the penny Life of Confucius, there were battered and defaced school books, a number of the excellent manuals of the Universal Correspondence Association, exercise books, ink (red and black) in penny bottles, and an india-rubber stamp ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... residence in this down-trodden country, he went on to say, "The only way ye could cure the discontent is to make no attempt at it. Then the agitation would stop. The people are the biggest fules I ever saw. Instead of returning a sound, advanced Radical like Emerson T. Herdman, a man who pays them thirty or forty thousand a year, and who spends all his money in their midst, the fules go and vote for a thing like Arthur O'Connor, who never was here but once, and who never did them the compliment of issuing an address. When Mr. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the tendency now in all departments of industry and professional service is toward a specialization which often defeats its own end and lessens rather than increases the usefulness of its own department. "We want not workers," says Emerson, "but men working." We want not specialists in the extreme sense but all-round students devoting themselves to one sphere of research or activity with a constant sense of its relation to all other spheres of thought and action. Particularly in social ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... Specifications for a Husband. Neither was there any Man who had any time for Her. So she led a lonely Life, dreaming of the One—the Ideal. He was a big and pensive Literary Man, wearing a Prince Albert coat, a neat Derby Hat and godlike Whiskers. When He came he would enfold Her in his Arms and whisper Emerson's Essays to her. ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... became human—like schoolfellows. And one little spectacled mistress, who wore art dresses and adorned her class-room with flowers, took a great fancy to her, talked to her with much vagueness and emotion of High Aims, and lent her with an impressive furtiveness the works of Emerson and Shelley and a pamphlet by Bernard Shaw. It was a little difficult to understand what these writers were driving at, they were so dreadfully clever, but it was clear they reflected criticism upon the silences of her mother and the rigidities ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... W. Emerson's Concord Hymn, sung at the completion of the Battle Monument near Concord North Bridge, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... asperse the intelligence of the flock," deprecated the reformer quickly. "I've been thought to idealize The People; perhaps I do, but it is good for a man to keep sweet his faith in humanity. There's a saying of Emerson's that fits the case if I could remember it." He scoured his memory absently for an interval. "Well, no matter. It occurs to me that we'll need an emblem for our ticket. The law requires us to select some device. The eagles, ballot-boxes, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... the poets made much of the cow, but have rather dwelt upon the steer, or the ox yoked to the plough. I recall this touch from Emerson: ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... becomes, the more precarious its worth. I do not mean that the essayist may not generalize, but his generalizations should be limited to the scope of his experience of life. I do not mean that he should not philosophize, but his philosophy should be, like Goethe's or Emerson's, an expression of intuition and faith. Properly, the literary essay is a distinct artistic genre—the expression of a concrete thinking personality, and its value consists in the living wisdom it contains. Such essays ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... greatest privileges of my visit to America that Mrs. Garrison introduced me to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and by appointment I had an hour and a half's chat with him in the last year of his long life. He was the only survivor of a famous band of New England writers, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorn, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, and Whitman were dead. His memory was failing, and he forgot some of his own characters; but Elsie Venner he remembered perfectly and he woke to full animation ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... profiteers, seized at once the attitude of champions of the South. It was easy enough to enlist the negative force in a shocked and outraged denunciation of everything Northern. And the Northern extremists did all that was in their power to add fuel to the flame. Emerson called Brown "this new saint who had made the gallows glorious as the cross." The Southerners, hearing that, thought of the conspiracy to parcel out the white women of Charleston. Early in 1860 it seemed as if the whole South had but one idea-to ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... like other nice girls, old man. They are well educated, refined and all that, but they are not always quoting Emerson and Browning, they do not all wear glasses, they are not all cold and freezing and they ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was pessimist? It is like asking if this corn is as yellow as that hill is steep. No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill and down; they may be ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the better. An editor will pass by an old writer, any day, for an unknown and gifted new one, with power to say a good thing in a fresh way. Make your calling and election sure. Do not flirt with your pen. Emerson's phrase was, "toiling terribly." Nothing less will hint at the grinding drudgery of a life spent in ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... new case of a well-dressed woman thieving in a shop reaches our ears. The poor feeble-minded creature is not to blame. She is but the reflexion of the minds around her and is probably like the lady Emerson tells of, who confessed to him "that the sense of being perfectly well- dressed had given her a feeling of inward tranquillity which ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... It was Emerson who wrote a volume devoted to the Representatives of Humanity. Here we have still another collection of "Representative Men." This collection of profoundly interesting studies is entrusted to the care ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... California. I have camped and tramped in Maine and in Canada, and have spent part of a winter in Bermuda and in Jamaica. This is an outline of my travels. I have known but few great men. I met Carlyle in the company of Moncure Conway in London in November, 1871. I met Emerson three times—in 1863 at West Point; in 1871 in Baltimore and Washington, where I heard him lecture; and at the Holmes birthday breakfast in Boston in 1879. I knew Walt Whitman intimately from 1863 until his death in 1892. I have met Lowell and Whittier, but not Longfellow or Bryant; I ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... a Mountain Daisy. In speaking of his songs, one might mention first, Scots Wha Hae,—composed in the midst of tempests, while the poet was riding over a wild Galloway moor,—and next, Highland Mary and A Man's a Man for a' That; but there is no need of enumerating the songs of Burns. As Emerson has said, "The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them. . . . They are the property and ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... writing, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, and Nathaniel Hawthorne are alone in pure and isolated splendour. We speak of grace, and not here of power of mind or informative force. How greatly Froude and Emerson would be enhanced gifted with graciousness. Goldsmith, even in his own day, was acknowledged the best of the essay writers. This is the realm in which he was, and is to this day, king. From his love of poetry and happiness ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... Sequoias, and then to travel down into the Yosemite, with John Muir. Of course of all people in the world he was the one with whom it was best worth while thus to see the Yosemite. He told me that when Emerson came to California he tried to get him to come out and camp with him, for that was the only way in which to see at their best the majesty and charm of the Sierras. But at the time Emerson was getting old and could not go. John Muir met me with ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Emerson wrote: "He is the rich man who can avail himself of other men's faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men—of men in distant countries and past times." Those who wish to be healthy and efficient are compelled to advance by taking ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... made to historical writings of various sorts, composed by prophets and seers, and thus apparently accredited by the biblical writers as authoritative utterances of divine truth. Why were they suffered to perish? Has not Emerson certified us that ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... to Emerson and Whitman, yet The best they have to say, their sons forget. But who can dodge this genius of the stream, The Mississippi Valley's laughing dream? He is the artery that finds the sea In this the land of slaves, and boys still free. He is the river, and they one ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... useless to deny that the brightest, biggest minds are outside the Church—indifferentists or downright opponents of it. I am not willing to believe that God meant men like these to perish—I don't like to think of Emerson being lost, or Huxley, or Spencer, or even Darwin—Question: has the Church power ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... and mental, has had opportunity for development. Washington was a farmer's boy; so were Adams, Jefferson, Putnam, Jackson, Webster, Clay, Douglas, Lincoln, and Raymond, of the past; and Grant, Sherman, Trumbull, Emerson, Bryant, Buckingham, and Greeley, of the present; while nine out of every ten of successful lives in any department of labor have come from the ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... to the larger section of the public, to whom the series of Great Writers is addressed, no record of Emerson's life and work could be more desirable, both in breadth of treatment and lucidity of style, than ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... devotees of mental superiority there turn upon it and rend it, when they are heartily tired of the whole literary business. There is always this danger when anything is passionately pursued as a fashion, that it will one day cease to be the fashion. Plato and Buddha and even Emerson become in time like a last season's fashion plate. Even a "friend of the spirit" will have to go. Culture is certain to mock ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... disparity of culture between high and low which existed in past centuries. The son of the artisan, if he cares to read, may become almost as fully master of the wisdom of Plato or Aristotle as if he had been at a university. Emerson will speak to him of his divinity; Whitman, drunken with the sun, will chant to him of his inheritance of the earth. He is elevated by the poets and instructed by the economists. But there are not thrones enough for all who are made wise in our social order, and failing even to serve ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... Millet's Pictures—Last Items Birds—and a Caution Samples of my Common-Place Book My Native Sand and Salt Once More Hot Weather New York "Ouster's Last Rally" Some Old Acquaintances—Memories A Discovery of Old Age A Visit, at the Last, to R. W. Emerson Other Concord Notations Boston Common—More of Emerson An Ossianic Night—Dearest Friends Only a New Ferry Boat Death of Longfellow Starting Newspapers The Great Unrest of which We are Part By Emerson's Grave At Present Writing—Personal After ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... who have climbed to reason, and are content to be guided by it. It is a philosophy which may well be contrasted with the transcendental theories of one with whom Meredith may otherwise be compared, Emerson. Both, in different ways, have tried to make poetry out of the brain, forgetting that poetry draws nourishment from other soil, and dies in the brain as in a vacuum. Both have taken the abstract, not the concrete, for their province; both have tortured words in the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... visible. Five nights of the week all the year round I take the last bus that goes northward from the City, and from the back seat on the top I watch the great procession of the stars. It is the most astonishing spectacle offered to men. Emerson said that if we only saw it once in a hundred years we should spend years in preparing for the vision. It is hung out for us every night, and we hardly give it a glance. And yet it is well worth ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... that the toleration of abuses seems amiable merely from its passivity; the mass of men contract a bias against advanced views, and in favour of stationary ones, from intercourse with their respective adherents. "Conservatism," as Emerson says, "is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious." And this remains true, however vicious the system conserved, however righteous the reform to be effected. Nay, the indignation of the purists is usually extreme in proportion as the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Sir James Emerson Tennent, in his work on Ceylon, has given a curious account of the compliance of the Jesuit missionaries with the customs and external rites of the people they sought to convert, as opposed to the rigid discipline ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... the talk of the Immortals. To have done so would have been to provoke the amazement and censure that was the lot of Mark Twain many years after, when, at a dinner in the Hub, he sought to jest irreverently with the sacred names of Holmes, Emerson, and Longfellow. Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid intellectuality. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... lost the old faith, and shows the soul victorious over all by its own energy, constancy, and joy. In Whittier, the dogmatic system of Christianity is transformed into a spirit of fidelity, brotherhood, and tender trust. Emerson gives that direct vision of divine reality, seen in nature, in humanity, in the heart's innermost recesses, which is possible to a soul purified by moral fidelity, reverent of natural law, and ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... expressions of "entire concurrence" in his speech by 800 representative men, including George Ticknor, William H. Prescott, Rufus Choate, Josiah Quincy, President Sparks and Professor Felton of Harvard, Professors Woods, Stuart, and Emerson of Andover, and other leading professional, literary, and business men. Similar addresses were sent to him from about the same number of men in New York, from supporters in Newburyport, Medford, Kennebeck River, Philadelphia, the Detroit Common Council, Manchester, ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... think it concerned them not to be apart. Immediately I set my wits to discover where was her estate, and 't was not long ere I knew 't was Marlay Abbey, near Celbridge; but the lady would reside in Dublin while making her dispositions, being Mrs Emerson's guest, and was like to be at a rout at her house. 'Twas long since I attended a rout, but I intrigued to be bidden as courtiers intrigue for an inch of blue ribbon; and in such a fever and anguish as I think I had died of ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... Keats, who brooded over phrases like a lover; Newman, of pure and melodious style; Stevenson, forever in quest of the scrupulously precise word; Tennyson, graceful and exquisite as the limpid stream; Emerson, of trenchant and epigrammatic style; Webster, whose virile words sometimes weighed a pound; and Lincoln, of simple, Saxon speech,—all these illustrious men were assiduous in their study ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... as a lawyer and a statesman, it is proper to add, that he has never been excelled as a writer of state papers among the public men of the United States. Mr. Emerson has a phrase which is exactly applicable to these efforts of Webster's mind. That phrase is, "superb propriety." Throughout his despatches, he always seems to feel that he impersonates his country; and the gravity and weight of his style are as admirable as its simplicity and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Mr. Emerson, in one of his poems, called the "Problem," describes this universal inspiration. He describes Phidias as being inspired to make his Jupiter, as well as the prophets to write their burdens. He says the architect that ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the year 1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had all done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was a school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories, which have done honor to our literature, had appeared. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... great family traditions to uphold. He upholds them with great humor. Not only is he full of old war and family lore, but he has been mixed up with things literary. He has known men such as Lowell and tells yarns about Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... the enterprise; but I believe that it was no idle circumstance that called me to it; I believe in a Divine government of the world, which chooses sometimes to use unlikely instruments to accomplish its will. The little I can do may inspire worthier deeds by more powerful hands. Emerson found simple words for a ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... occasion of my first visit to America, in 1873, I for the first time succeeded in obtaining a copy of this curious pamphlet. It had been mentioned to me (by Emerson, I think) as an amusing piece of trickery played off by a scientific man on his brethren; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, who was present, remarked that he had a copy in his possession. This he was good enough to lend me. Soon after, a valued friend ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... become nuns. On leaving India, she took with her a branch of the sacred Bo tree at Buddha Gaya, under which Sakyamuni had become Buddha. Of how the tree has grown and still lives we have an account in Davids' "Buddhism." He quotes the words of Sir Emerson Tennent, that it is "the oldest historical tree in the world;" but this must be denied if it be true, as Eitel says, that the tree at Buddha Gaya, from which the slip that grew to be this tree was taken more than 2000 years ago, is itself still living ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... precisely this attitude is not met with. It would be absurd, of course, to deny that one finds convincingly sincere expressions of modesty among poets of genuine merit. Many of them have taken pains to express themselves in their verse as humbled by the genius above their grasp. [Footnote: See Emerson, In a Dull Uncertain Brain; Whittier, To my Namesake; Sidney Lanier, Ark of the Future; Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Last Reader; Bayard Taylor, L'Envoi; Robert Louis Stevenson, To Dr. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of those relatively early years was great. Boston had been the home of a loveless Christianity; its insurrection in the War of Independence had been soiled by shifty dealing and mere acidity; but Boston from the days of Emerson to those of Phillips Brooks radiated a temper and a mental force that was manly, tender, and clean. The man among these writers about whose exact rank, neither low nor very high among poets, there can be least dispute was Longfellow. He might seem from his favourite ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... perhaps, be better called Compound Metaphor, that enables us to retain the brevity of the metaphorical form even where the analogy is intricate. This is done by indicating the application of the figure at the outset, and then leaving the mind to continue the parallel.' Emerson has employed it with great effect in the first of his I Lectures on the Times':—"The main interest which any aspects of the Times can have for us is the great spirit which gazes through them, the light which they can shed on the wonderful questions, What are we, and Whither we tend? ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer |
