Modern EssaysChristopher Morley Harcourt, Brace, 1921 - 349 páginas IT had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak somewhat lightly of the labors of anthologists: to insinuate that they led lives of bland sedentary ease. I shall not do so again. When the publisher suggested a collection of representative contemporary essays, I thought it would be the most lenient of tasks. But experience is a fine aperitive to the mind. Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has conscience, are burdensome. There are so many considerations to be tenderly weighed; personal taste must sometimes be set aside in view of the general plan; for every item chosen half a dozen will have been affectionately conned and sifted; and perhaps some favorite pieces will be denied because the authors have reasons for withholding permission. It would be enjoyable (for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the things I have lingered over with intent to include them in this little book, but have finally sacrificed for one reason or another. How many times-twenty at least-I have taken down from my shelf Mr. Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature to reconsider whether his ten pages on Dickens, or his glorious summing-up of Decadents and Æsthetes, were not absolutely essential. How many times I have palpitated upon certain passages in The Education of Henry Adams and in Mr. Wells's Outline of History, which, I assured myself, would legitimately stand as essays if shrewdly excerpted. |
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A. A. MILNE A. P. Herbert American literature asked beauty beer born Bret Harte Butler Butlerian called celery charming color comes course dark delight door dragon dream England English Erewhon essay eyes face Falls feel fiction fish Gawaine girl grass H. M. Tomlinson habit head Headmaster heart Henry Heywood Broun human humor imagination James Branch Cabell Joseph Conrad land light literary lived London look Madame Max Beerbohm mind morning mowing never Night Court novel once perhaps Philip Guedalla play poetry poets river Rumplesnitz Samuel Butler scythe seems Sergeant Reilly ship smile Solange sometimes sort soul spirit stand Street student things thought tion told truth ture turn Victorian voice volume walk wonder word worship writing York young
Passagens conhecidas
Página 81 - I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
Página 265 - That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms...
Página 265 - ... the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins...
Página 277 - Brief and powerless is man's life ; on him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way...
Página 84 - I know that a novelist lives in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, among imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only writing about himself.
Página 92 - Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.
Página 25 - ... this year she tasted the first fruits of success by having her pictures accepted by the High School Annual. But the thrill of delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal Annual, asked her to do the cartooning for that book this spring was too beautiful for words. She fell to her work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings were accepted, and her pride — always repressed by a lively sense of the ridiculousness of the figure she was cutting— was a really gorgeous thing to see.
Página 179 - We have no sermons addressed to the passions that are good for any thing; if you mean that kind of eloquence." A CLERGYMAN, (whose name I do not recollect.) " Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the" passions?" JOHNSON. "They were nothing, sir, be they addressed to what they may.
Página 112 - they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid 'em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch? " "Not on your immortality," said I. "I'm only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.
Página 25 - White, but an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five minutes in her life. With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved books. On her table when she left her room were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy, Creative Chemistry by EE Slosson, and a Kipling book.