Kavanagh: A Tale

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Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1849 - Literary Criticism - 188 pages
 

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Page 29 - Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance ; knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me.
Page 49 - The every-day cares and duties, which men call drudgery, are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration, and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon the wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move, the clock stands still.
Page 87 - twill be the same story To-morrow — and the next more dilatory ; Then indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days. Are you in earnest? seize this very minute — What you can do, or dream you can, begin it, Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Page 94 - Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, but universality is better. All that is best in the great poets of all countries is, not what is national in them, but what is universal.
Page 108 - WHO is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save.
Page 3 - ... we judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Page 60 - And as the dove to far Palmyra flying From where her native founts of Antioch beam, Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing, Lights sadly at the desert's bitter stream ; So many a soul, o'er life's drear desert faring, Love's pure congenial spring unfound, unquaffed, Suffers — recoils — then thirsty and despairing Of what it would, descends and sips the nearest draught ! * MARIA Go WEN BROOKS (MARIA DEL OCCIDENTE).
Page 54 - ... burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation would there be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change ! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men, only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be.
Page 136 - All white save the river, that marked its course by a winding, black line across the landscape ; and the leafless trees, that against the leaden sky now revealed more fully the wonderful beauty and intricacy of their branches. What silence, too, came with the...
Page 3 - GREAT men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages running deep beneath external nature give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the laborers on the surface do not even dream ! Some such thought as this was floating vaguely through the brain of Mr.

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About the author (1849)

During his lifetime, Longfellow enjoyed a popularity that few poets have ever known. This has made a purely literary assessment of his achievement difficult, since his verse has had an effect on so many levels of American culture and society. Certainly, some of his most popular poems are, when considered merely as artistic compositions, found wanting in serious ways: the confused imagery and sentimentality of "A Psalm of Life" (1839), the excessive didacticism of "Excelsior" (1841), the sentimentality of "The Village Blacksmith" (1839). Yet, when judged in terms of popular culture, these works are probably no worse and, in some respects, much better than their counterparts in our time. Longfellow was very successful in responding to the need felt by Americans of his time for a literature of their own, a retelling in verse of the stories and legends of these United States, especially New England. His three most popular narrative poems are thoroughly rooted in American soil. "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" (1847), an American idyll; "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), the first genuinely native epic in American poetry; and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858), a Puritan romance of Longfellow's own ancestors, John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. "Paul Revere's Ride," the best known of the "Tales of a Wayside Inn"(1863), is also intensely national. Then, there is a handful of intensely personal, melancholy poems that deal in very successful ways with those themes not commonly thought of as Longfellow's: sorrow, death, frustration, the pathetic drift of humanity's existence. Chief among these are "My Lost Youth" (1855), "Mezzo Cammin" (1842), "The Ropewalk" (1854), "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1852), and, most remarkable in its artistic success, "The Cross of Snow," a heartfelt sonnet so personal in its expression of the poet's grief for his dead wife that it remained unpublished until after Longfellow's death. A professor of modern literature at Harvard College, Longfellow did much to educate the general reading public in the literatures of Europe by means of his many anthologies and translations, the most important of which was his masterful rendition in English of Dante's Divine Comedy (1865-67).

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