Word: useful
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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...general lack of brilliancy. Though this criticism is to a large extent just, there is one matter in which our great metropolitan journals need to look to themselves. It is indeed a fault which is exceedingly prevalent in the highest class of our newspapers. I refer to the continual use of certain words and phrases, perhaps rather expressive originally, but which have been fairly worn out by indiscriminate and excessive use on all possible occasions...
...education and prejudice than from rational understanding and acceptance of doctrine. What choice, therefore, is there between them? The schoolmaster distinguished us from them by saying that while we have the look materialistic, they have the look of "gentlemen rowdies." 'T is a rude expression, and I would not use it myself; but it shows the opinion of our Wesleyan friend to have been the same as mine, that Harvard is not much worse than Yale; while we are deficient in faith, they are deficient in works...
...politic individuals in almost every walk of life, and are often astonished at their success; we see them amongst the mercantile classes, find them in congressional assemblies, note them amongst the aspirants after the chief places in societies and associations, Christian, scientific, or literary, and discover them, without the use of glasses, in our college halls. That which most astonishes us is the fact that those who thus court and attain popularity are not always the best or the most deserving of their fellows, and are apt to meet their own level when Time holds the microscope to their defects...
...paper collar or to a new form of suspender. It was not so very long ago that that particular school arose which almost did away with our preconceived notions of the simplicity and dignity of poetry, and, by its very grotesqueness, made us stand aghast, - a school which, to use Lowell's comprehensive description, makes the mistake of supposing that imagination is common sense turned inside out, instead of common sense sublimed. The writers of this style of poetry have been so well and so often satirized that one can hardly speak of them without trespassing upon ground already occupied...
...people's poet, and, for a time, all went well: but he had climbed too high to keep his position; it began to be thought that Homer was, after all, not likely to be rivalled by Joaquin Miller, and that Shakespeare was a better poet, even if he did use longer words. Socially, too, he was no longer successful; he was hardly conventional enough, even for a poet. But worse than all, he spoke condescendingly of Tennyson, and the great British breast swelled with indignation that the poet laureate should be patronized by a wandering American. Moreover, it was reported...