Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Spence or search for Spence in all documents.

Your search returned 1 result in 1 document section:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A letter to a young contributor. (search)
that To-day is a king in disguise, and that this American literature of ours will be just as classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured. There is a mirage over all literary associations. Keats and Lamb seem to our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet it is not an old man's life since Keats was an awkward boy at the door of Hazlitt's lecture-room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own only admirer. In reading Spence's Anecdotes, Pope and Addison appear no further off; and wherever I open Bacon's Essays, I am sure to end at last with that one magical sentence, annihilating centuries, When I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years. And this imperceptible transformation of the commonplace present into the storied past applies equally to the pursuits of war and to the serenest works of peace. Be not misled by the excitements of the moment Written early in 1862. into overratin