The Education of Henry Adams: An AutobiographyPrinted at the Riverside Press for the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918 - 519 pages |
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Adams never Adams's admitted American amusing asked became better Boston Bostonian century chance chaos Charles Charles Francis Adams Charles Sumner charm Christian anarchist Church Civil Clarence King diplomatic doubt eccentric energy England English Europe Evarts father felt force friends German Gladstone Government Grant habit Harvard College Hay's Henry Adams historian House idea ignorance inertia interest John John La Farge Karl Pearson knew learned Legation less lesson London looked Lord Lord Palmerston matter meant ment Milnes mind Minister Adams moral Mount Vernon nature needed one's Palmerston Paris party passed perhaps political President private secretary Pteraspis Quincy reason Russell Russia seemed Senator sense Seward social society sort stood Street student Sumner talk taste taught thought tion took Trent Affair unity universe wanted Washington whole woman young Adams
Popular passages
Page 380 - Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.
Page 379 - Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Page 33 - Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts: The warrior's name would be a name abhorred!
Page 150 - It appears difficult to make out a stronger case of infringement of the foreign enlistment act, which, if not enforced on this occasion, is little better than a dead letter.
Page 115 - England recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn —the sooner the better —that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in England — literally no one —doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston who, according to Mr. Gladstone,...
Page 388 - They felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.
Page 384 - The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of figleaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but...
Page 9 - The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran through life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with growing emphasis to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double.
Page 385 - Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.
Page 385 - Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret Harte, as far as the magazines would let him venture ; and one or two painters, for the flesh-tones.