Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments,

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Edward Moxon, 1840 - 360 pages

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Page 50 - These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions ; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe.
Page 7 - ... institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true.
Page 10 - Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thought.
Page 52 - It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
Page 47 - What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship — what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit ; what were our consolations on this side of the grave — and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owlwinged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar 1 Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say,
Page xv - It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.
Page xii - The great secret of morals is love ; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively ; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others ; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Page 12 - All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music.
Page 10 - Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order.
Page 5 - Their language is vitally metaphorical ; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts...

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