Word: moderns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1890-1899
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...trampled on the dreams of his youth;" that is, the power of surrendering himself to a purely abstract enthusiasm. The imagination always asserts its place in history, for it is inseparable from the nature of man, and the story of Colonel Goffe at Deerfield is but a modern version of the Dioscuri and of St. James of Compostella. In my walk the other day, I saw a man sitting in the sun in front of a little cottage which commanded a pretty landscape. "You have a charming view here," said I. "Yes," he answered, "I take a great deal...
...their Tacitus, their Horace, where we take up our newspaper or our novel. What an old Gascon prig would Montaigne have been but for the ancients, especially Plutarch. Yet his library did not swamp him, and though his essays are pockmarked all over with quotations, his temper is essentially modern, indeed, he is the first of the properly modern writers. It is not as ladders to the languages in which they are written that I would commend these books, but the languages as ladders to them, where by we may climb to a larger outlook over men and things...
...connection with these lectures, the kindness of Mrs. Mabel Lowell Burnett has made it possible to re-publish some selections from an address, given by James Russell Lowell before the Modern Language Association of America, in which are many sentiments kindred to those expressed in the lectures...
...began by saying that I had no wish to renew the Battle of the Books. I cannot bring myself to look upon the literatures of the ancient and modern worlds as antagonists, but rather as friendly rivals in the effort to tear as many as may be from the barbarizing plutolatry which seems to be so rapidly supplanting the worship of what alone is lovely and enduring. No, they are not antagonists, but by their points of disparity, of likeness, or contrast, they can be best understood, perhaps understood only through each other. The scholar must have them both...
...permitting little real play to diversities of intelectual interest,- has become what it now is through the wise and courageous policy, which assumed great risks in order to widen the field of study on every side, to multiply courses and instructors in every part of the broad domain of modern inquiry, to promote in each department, without regard to traditional rules, the methods of study and teaching found best for that department, and at last to obliterate nearly every relic of a required curriculum, and give to all study in Harvard College the essential characters of a freely chosen pursuit...