Essays of William Hazlitt

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Walter Scott publishing Company, 1889 - English essays - 322 pages

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Page 186 - I'll tell you, friend! a wise man and a fool. You'll find, if once the monarch acts the monk Or, cobbler-like, the parson will be drunk, Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow, The rest is all but leather or prunella.
Page 174 - Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : The genius, and the mortal instruments, Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.
Page 294 - The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had its head bit off by its young.
Page 287 - ... for wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas, wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another.
Page 263 - The Devil was sick, the Devil a monk would be : The Devil grew well, the devil a monk was he...
Page 282 - ... the quality we laugh at or despise in a still more contemptible or striking point of view. Wit, as distinguished from poetry, is the imagination or fancy inverted and so applied to given objects, as to make the little look less, the mean more light and worthless; or to divert our admiration or wean our affections from that which is lofty and impressive, instead of producing a more intense admiration and exalted passion, as poetry does.
Page 86 - Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner — and then to thinking ! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.
Page 19 - Styx nine times round them," my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied ; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to ; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.
Page 20 - As he gave out this text, his voice ' rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes;' and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe.
Page 21 - The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause ; and the cold, dank drops of dew that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle had something genial and refreshing in them ; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature that turned everything — into good.

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