Essay on Language: And Other Papers

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Phillips, Sampson, 1857 - Essays - 348 pages

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Page 122 - TO him who in the love of nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware.
Page 19 - Such is the aspect of this shore ; 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more ! So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, We start, for soul is wanting there. Hers is the loveliness in death, That parts not quite with parting breath...
Page 165 - Its great tendency and purpose is, to carry the mind beyond and above the beaten, dusty, weary walks of ordinary life; to lift it into a purer element, and to breathe into it more profound and generous emotion.
Page 163 - Christians than that of man's immortality ; but it is not so generally understood, that the germs or principles of his whole future being are now wrapped up in his soul, as the rudiments of the future plant in the seed. As a necessary result of this constitution, the soul, possessed and moved by these mighty though infant energies, is perpetually stretching beyond what is present and visible, struggling against the bounds of its earthly prisonhouse, and seeking relief and joy in imaginings of unseen...
Page 12 - It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.
Page 245 - ... years To push eternity from human thought, And smother souls immortal in the dust ? A soul immortal, spending all her fires, Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness, Thrown into tumult, raptur'd or alarm'd, At aught this scene can threaten or indulge, Resembles ocean into tempest wrought, To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.
Page 18 - HE who hath bent him o'er the dead, • Ere the first day of death is fled — The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress — Before Decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers, And marked the mild, angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there — The fixed, yet tender traits, that streak The languor of the placid cheek...
Page 166 - We are aware that it is objected to poetry, that it gives wrong views and excites false expectations of life, peoples the mind with shadows and illusions, and builds up imagination on the ruins of wisdom. That there is a wisdom, against which poetry wars, the wisdom of the senses, which makes physical comfort and gratification the supreme good, and wealth the chief interest of life...
Page 163 - We agree with Milton in his estimate of poetry. It seems to us the divinest of all arts ; for it is the breathing or expression of that principle or sentiment, which is deepest and sublimest in human nature...
Page 169 - I have yet dwelt, an evidence to be felt rather than described, but not less real because founded on feeling. I refer to that conviction of the divine original of our religion, which springs up and continually gains strength, in those who apply it habitually to their tempers and lives, and who imbibe its spirit and hopes. In such men, there is a consciousness of the adaptation of Christianity to their noblest faculties ; a consciousness of its exalting and consoling influences, of its power to confer...

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