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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book 20 0 Browse Search
Laura E. Richards, Maud Howe, Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, in two volumes, with portraits and other illustrations: volume 1 18 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book. You can also browse the collection for Alighieri Dante or search for Alighieri Dante in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, V (search)
a proper humility, because we forget that the invention of printing has in a manner placed all nations on a level. Literature is the only art whose choicest works are easily transportable. Once secure a public library in every town—a condition now in process of fulfilment in our older American States —and every bright boy or girl has a literary Louvre and Vatican at command. Given a taste for literature and there are at hand all the masters of the art—Plato and Homer, Cicero and Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Travel is still needed, but not for books—only for other forms of art, for variety of acquaintanceship, and for the habit of dealing with men and women of many nationalities. The most fastidious American in Europe should not look with shame, but with pride and hope, upon those throngs of his fellow-countrymen whom he sees crowding the art-galleries of Europe, looking about them as ignorantly, if you please, as the German barbarians when they entered Rome. It is
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, XIII (search)
write history or philosophy or criticism, he feels the need of something besides creative power, something which may be called a literary background. His readers, at any rate, demand for him, if he does not perceive the need of it for himself, that there shall be something which suggests a wide and flexible training, with large vistas of knowledge. They like to see in him that full man who is made, as Lord Bacon says, by reading. One main reason why Homer and Plato and Horace and even Dante seem to supply more of this kind of fulness than can be got from an equivalent study of Balzac and Ruskin, is doubtless because the older authors are remoter, and so make the vista look more wide. The vaster the better; but there must be enough of it, at least, to convey a distinct sensation of background. Of course, when this background obtrudes itself into the foreground, it becomes intolerable; and such books as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy are tiresome, because they are all made up o
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, XXII (search)
alogue gives fifty-eight folio pages —with double columns and small type—to its Dante entries, the forthcoming catalogue of the Dante collection in the Harvard Colle expected to treat rather deferentially those for whom Italian literature means Dante only. Yet Voltaire wrote of Dante, only a century and a half ago, that althougDante, only a century and a half ago, that although occasionally, under favorable circumstances, he wrote lines not unworthy of Tasso or Ariosto, yet his work was, as a whole, stupidly extravagant and barbarous. Thedantic poem, The Botanic Garden, as showing the wild and terrible sublimity of Dante. A hundred years from this have ended in Ruskin's characterization of Dante asDante as the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest. When we consider thrials of the time, to drain its best intellects, to reflect its best impulses. Dante, of all great writers, is the least explainable in this way; but in the case of
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, XXIII (search)
d renders constant watchfulness needful lest we revert into brutality. In this respect modern Germany can teach us little, save through the Franco-German Heine. A young American usually comes home from a German university with more knowledge than when he went there, but with less power of felicitous expression. But Greece and Rome have still unexhausted lessons, and so have Persia and Arabia; these last, indeed, wreathe their weapons with too many roses, but they carry true nevertheless. Dante not only created his own conceptions, but almost the very language in which he wrote; and what was his power of expression we can judge best by seeing in how few lines he can put vividly before us some theme which Tennyson or Browning afterward hammers out into a long poem. In English literature there seemed to be developing, in the time of Addison, something of that steady, even, felicitous power which makes French prose so remarkable; but it has passed, since his day, possibly from exces
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, Index (search)
H., 29, 57. Cleveland, Grover, 110. Cobb, Sylvanus, 199, 200. Coleridge, S. T., 197, 215, 217. College education, value of, 113. Comte, Auguste, 32. Contemporaneous posterity, a, 51. Conway, M. D., 31. Cooper, J. F., 58, 62, 155. Corneille, Pierre, 92. Cosmopolitan standard, a, 43. Coster, John, 6. Court of England not sought by literary men, 74. Cousin, Victor, 216. Creighton, Dr., 34. Cruger, Mrs. Julie (Julien Gordon), 11. Crusoe, Robinson, 17. D. Dante, Alighieri, 48,114, 185, 186, 187, 189, 196. Darwin, C. R., 29, 49, 124,125,137, 176, 187. Dead level, the fear of the, 70. Declaration of independence, applied to literature, 4. Delphic oracle, answer of, to Cicero, 4. Demosthenes, 69. Descartes, Rene, 71. Dickens, Charles, 12, 93, 183, 184, 206. Dickinson, Emily, 16. Digby, K. H., 116. Donnelly, Ignatius, 175. Dime novel, the test of the, 198. Disraeli, Benj., see Beaconsfield. Drake, Nathan, 187. Dryden, John, 195. Du